Air Dirt & Ink-05 newsletter header

Introduction: Over five years passed between Air, Dirt & Ink issues 4 and 5. When issue 4 was published I was still working on my B.A. in Journalism and hadn’t graduated yet. By Issue 5 I had switched career paths and was getting my teaching certification at Chapman University. For one of my classes at Chapman University, EDUC533: Teaching in the Multicultural Classroom, I wrote a short essay, “A Personal Reflection on the Demands of Religion in the Classroom,” as part of a group assignment that became one section of a pamphlet called, “The Multicultural Classroom: A Handbook.” I also produced a documentary-style video version of the essay. I don’t remember how I shared the video, it being half a decade before I’d begin posting my work online and 10-years before YouTube, except maybe by showing it via VCR during one of our class sessions. In the essay and video I wanted to explore thenotion of how one might teach religion in the public school classroom. I remember on professor/advisor visibly cringing when I shared my idea. Even in 1993 this was a controversial subject and probably not something one should publish as one was trying to get employment in the public school system. Over the years, whenever I’ve seen stirrings for the Bible or religion to be included in the curriculum, I know that those who are pushing for this would never accept an academic/historical approach, such as what I was suggesting with this essay. I understand why they’d object. There’s a saying that the first step in making someone into an Atheist is to teach them the complete history of the faith they were born into. It worked out that way for me. Enjoy. The video version is posted below the essay. 2024-03-18.

The ADI Editor’s Wild Hair: Religion in the Classroom

December 1993-January 1994 ADI Vol. 1, Issue 5. 

There’s a call to us all
To love all humanity
Every race on the face of earth, come to unity
“Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
These, the Master’s words, would do us well
But man’s belief, religious creeds, can make him blind
The narrow way is not a narrow mind.
A Call to Us All by Teri Desario

Maybe Marx was right when he said that religion is the opiate of the masses. But then one man’s drug might be another man’s reality. 

My fundamentalist father and I had a boisterous discussion the other day about “the state of education.” In the past my father’s general arguments (true to his conservative roots) have centered around a need to return to the basics—reading, writing, arithmetic. But this time he wanted to know how my teacher training was going to address the moral needs and foundations of my students. Ouch, I wasn’t ready for that one I should have been—we’ve been having religious tussles since I was fifteen.

Some say that religion has no place in public education. That, however, would just confirm his belief that today’s alleged moral decay is a direct result from God getting kicked out of school. The thing is I’ve been there before, I understand my father’s concerns. 

Some folks say that people are predominantly evil, prone to do whatever you tell them not to do. That was why God’s first big mistake, they say, was telling Adam and Eve not to eat that apple in the garden. Chances are that if he would have said nothing we’d still be in the garden. Such is fate. So Religion comes along and promises to straighten out something that it probably screwed up in the first place. Well, actually it probably isn’t that simple. Bust they never tell you that when you sign on the dotted line. It’s just a matter of faith, they say. 

In Bad Faith by Joe Bustillos (unpublished novel excerpt)

As much my father and others would like to return to the days when the “Our Father” was as big a part of the morning ritual in every elementary classroom as the “Pledge of Allegiance,” those days are gone. That practice was based on the assumptions of the American Macro-culture: “we’re all White, Euro-centric, English-speaking, Protestant Christians in here, aren’t we?” The assumption was that America’s Elementary classrooms were predominantly populated by children who believed in the words of the prayer. A cursory look at any current student population would show that that assumption is thoroughly out of step with reality.

But to say that we are not “White, Euro-centric, English-speaking, Protestant Christians,” is not the same as saying that we’re all Atheists either Thus, although the more common policy of refraining from “Religious Discussions” in the classroom is born out of a desire to avoid controversy (and those pesky legal entanglements), it is just as much out of step with Reality as the older policy of assuming we were all Protestants. In fact, if we were to revert to some sort of “Community Consensus” to determine acceptable “religious observances” I have to wonder how my Calvary Chapel brothers in Utah would feel if such a standard where used to justify daily reading of the Book of Mormon in the class room. Or how would they feel, given the substantial Asian population in some parts of Orange County, if the daily reading came from Taoist literature? I would venture to guess that this would not be acceptable. Nonetheless, teaching Social Studies and History and Government and Philosophy and the Arts without discussions about Religion is a bit like teaching To Kill a Mockingbird without talking about racial prejudice. So what do we do? 

The current policy is more a legal one than an educational one. Oh sure, there’s a school of thought that says that you can break down Human Behavior to its component parts and work with the data a piece at a time. Understandably, this philosophy came from the Physical Sciences. Unfortunately (or fortunately). Humans do not grow in a vacuum like crystals. Every nuance, every experience, every element, whether biological, emotional or environmental contributes to the whole, acting and reacting with every other nuance, experience or element to make what we call Personality and Person. This is why discussions about “Nature” or “Nurture” are moot—you cannot have one without the other. Thus, removing Religion from the educational discussion is a bit like removing the proverbial loose thread from the Tapestry of Human Experience—if the tapestry doesn’t completely unravel than it is left with unexplained holes and gaps. 

I guess in some ways my father was right, in that this policy has contributed in making us a generation disconnected Religiously from ourselves. Is it any wonder then that we fail to understand why the Catholics and Protestant in Ireland have been at each other’s throats for decades, or the Christians and Muslims in Bosnia or the Jews and the Arabs in the Middle East.1 A century ago, Kierkegaard criticized his generation because they went to the theater expecting to be educated and enlightened and went to church expecting to be entertained. One can only imagine the venom he would have for us with our years in front of the boob-tube and the unwillingness or inability of parents to talk with their own children. He might conclude that the religious consciousness has sucked from our collective skulls. Given such a picture, it makes perfect sense that our government’s solution for a David Koresh would be an armed assault (besides, it made for great TV).2

So then, how does one teach Morals or Ethics or Religion? What does the teacher do? 

Rule Number One: Begin from the prospective of the students in the classroom and community where the school is located. Teaching about the first Thanksgiving to a classroom predominantly populated by first generation Asian students might be meaningless without talking about the concept of Thanksgiving in the Asian cultures. Prior generations of educators made the mistake of assuming that we all grew up in the same neighborhood. The error of the current policy tends to be the assumption that whatever happens outside of the classroom is unimportant to the educational process. Or, if it is taken into consideration it is spoken in terms of the unfortunate student’s “disadvantage” to have family traditions outside of the assumed mainstream. Which is, of course, bullshit. “Advantage” or “disadvantage” tends to be a matter of modern American marketing. Students and teachers can ill-afford these illusionary values. The baseline is to take into account the students’ lived-experiences, to begin from there and move forward. 

Rule Number Two: Be inclusive. Religion (like SES, Gender, Exceptionality, Culture, and Race) is a normal part of the human experience. Any observation should reveal that humans are religious creatures. After 70 years of official Atheism the Soviets weren’t able to erase it. In the West, television and its attendant shallow pop-culture defamed it and trivialized it but did not eliminated it in 50 years. And those who say that they don’t believe in any religion are in fact practicing the religion of “no- religion.” That is, in the end we believe or not believe, not because of “objective scientific inquiry” but because of a gut-level personal decision. We like to think that we’re being rational but when push comes to shove the tenor becomes very emotional.3

At the same time, it is not the role of the teacher to validate or invalidate a student’s religious background (that should be left to the students’ parents, ministers and community). But when studying the culture of a given area, the religion of that area should be evenly dealt with as an on going expression of the beliefs of those people. Things need to be kept in context. Beliefs: religious, cultural, racial, gender; were not developed in a vacuum. Thus, they cannot be taught in a vacuum nor can the background that generated these beliefs be adequately taught without including the beliefs. Truthfully, Religion and Culture are incestuous siblings. You cannot appropriate one without the other. To toss them into their own separate Kantian boxes lessens their viability and results in an incomplete picture of that Reality.

Rule Number Three: Don’t water down the content because “we’re dealing with children here” (or minorities, or, God forbid, children of minorities). Context, complexity, connections and enthusiasm on the part of the teacher goes a long way toward making a potentially controversial subject approachable and appreciated. The students themselves will weed out what they can grasp and appropriate. We rob them of that process when we try to make things “palatable.” The only thing that would come from making things more “palatable” are boring disconnected lessons that do no justice to the subject being taught. To bad Marx can’t put that in his pipe and smoke it. [ADI]4

Religion in the Classroom: A Video Reflection
[Chapman University EDC533 Teaching in the Multicultural Classroom]

This video was produced without computers, using two video tape players and one recorder and audio mixer to edit and record the video in one take. Sorry about the audio analog hiss. Enjoy.

Sources:

Tags: 1990s, air dirt & ink, chapman university, religion in the classroom, satire, education

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  1. 2024 Observation: This was more than a little naive on my part, and made it sound like these conflicts had anything to do with difference in religious practice, when the issues were primarily good ol’ human tribalism and centuries of unresolved grievances. Ugh.[↩]
  2. 2024 Observation: Again, that last comment was horribly tacky. But, the government, operating with traditional “Protestant” values, completely underestimated what fundamentalists, like Koresh, would resort to when confronted, just as no one understood that fundamentalist Muslims would strap explosives to themselves or fly airliners into skyscrapers, until it was too late. And we’re still making assumptions about what radicalizes them. Sad.[↩]
  3. 2024 Observation: I know more than a few Atheists who would argue that their disbelief is a rational choice that they made after a long de-conversion. I think I was voicing a lot of my own struggles with my own de-conversion experience and was projecting that on others. In the end, one’s personal beliefs are personal, so however one comes upon them is part of the human experience.[↩]
  4. 2024 Observation: I have no idea why I decided to end the essay that way. I think I just ran out of gas. After 28-years in the classroom I haven’t really had to deal with how to teach history and include religion. When I taught 6th grade social studies, I fortunately didn’t have to deal with questions about religion except for that one time, when I’d mapped out a timeline of human evolution from Australopithecine to modern humans that stretched around my room, one student asked where Adam and Eve would be on the timeline. I told him that that was something he would need to discuss with his priest. Whenever I’ve seen stirrings for the Bible or religion to be included in the curriculum, I know that those who are pushing for this would never accept an academic/historical approach, such as what I was suggesting with this essay. I understand why they’d object. There’s a saying that the first step in making someone into an Atheist is to teach them the complete history of the faith they were born into. It worked out that way for me.[↩]