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Public schools have been a primary battleground between the despisers and defenders of religion. The forces of secularity have pounded steadily forward on the prayer front, pushing into a tiny meditative corner those who want schools to reflect and teach spiritual, and even specifically Christian, values. They have succeeded in their aggressive tactics because it …
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Do strongly held religious convictions inevitably conflict with our system of public education? A visitor from another planet might well conclude that they do, given the heated attacks on public schools from the “religious right,” and the equally heated warnings by “strict separationists” that there is a plot by “zealots” to impose religious uniformity on …
Continue reading “Curriculum in the Public Schools: Can Compromise Be Reached?”
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Beginning with his 1967 book Death at an Early Age, Jonathan Kozol has been a sharp critic of American education. In Amazing Grace (1995), Kozol described the residents of Mott Haven in the South Bronx, the poorest congressional district in the U. S. In his most recent book, Ordinary Resurrections, Kozol continues his account of …
Continue reading “Falling Behind: An Interview with Jonathan Kozol”
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Raymond Abbott is a high school dropout from Camden, New Jersey, one of the poorest cities in America with over 60 percent of its residents on welfare. The schools Raymond attended — indeed, virtually all the schools in Camden — were and are a disaster. During Raymond’s academic years, Camden’s schools spent about one-half as …
Continue reading “Making Schools Work For The Rich And The Poor”
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In the current culture wars, religious liberals tend to ally themselves with the educational establishment against those on the Religious Right who are attacking the public schools. In politics and they, I line up with the left. Nonetheless, I believe with the right that public education is hostile to religion — not least to liberal …
Continue reading “Religion-free Texts: Getting An Illiberal Education”
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Chances are you have never heard of the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools or its textbook, The Bible in History and Literature. But if you are a member of a school board, you may be hearing about it soon. Over 1,000 schools in 308 school districts in 36 states from Alaska to …
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No doubt about it, religion is “in” today. Millions of bumper stickers exhort drivers to read their Bibles or to honk if they know Jesus. Students flaunt Jesus buttons and Jesus T-shirts. Televised specials and magazine photo-articles feature “Jesus freaks” and Pentecostal groups. Young people meet to discuss the Bible in homes, church basements, classrooms, …
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April 10. A sunny afternoon, but cool. The kids are in the big room at St. Ann’s, an Episcopal church in New York’s South Bronx. They are finishing their homework during the after-school program. Pineapple is struggling with the electric pencil sharpener next to the closet on the left side of the room. Eight years …
Continue reading “The Hopeful Years: Children of the South Bronx”
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In an independent school in Tennessee, a class on world religions gets sidetracked when a tenth grader mentions the controversial movie The Last Temptation of Christ. Two Southern Baptist students insist that they would never go to see the movie because of how the screenplay may have distorted the New Testament portrayal of Jesus. Their …
Continue reading “Transmitting a Vision: Religion in Independent Schools”
