By John Murawski, UnHerd
Teaching about religion in public schools is back in vogue in the United States. In June, Texas mandated adding Bible verses to the K-12 curriculum. Now, new legislation in Connecticut requires the state’s Department of Education to create resource materials for teachers who want to include lessons on Islam and Arab studies.
This trend is justifiable on a theoretical level. The dissemination of foundational knowledge about human civilisations is arguably indispensable for informed citizenship. Yet attempts to introduce religious content in secular schools have a tendency to go off the rails, triggering conflicts at local school boards and litigation at the state level. In Texas, the problem is that the Bible verses — all 13 of them — are mandatory in the curriculum, opening the door to accusations that the state is favouring one religion. In Connecticut, the state-sanctioned lessons — which have yet to be created — are not obligatory, but there is no equivalent mandate to create resources for teachers who want to teach about the role of Christianity in Western civilisation.
One local newspaper has demanded the unequal treatment be corrected. “Skeptics of the new law should use the existence of a state-sanctioned Islamic studies curriculum as a clear precedent for a near-identical law pushing classes in Christian studies,” wrote the editorial board of the Republican-American last week. “Unlike the study of Islam, the study of Christianity is fundamental to students’ understanding of the society in which they live.”
Beyond constitutional questions, teaching religious content requires a certain deftness and equipoise that not all teachers possess. Public schools have included history lessons about Islam and Arab civilisation for at least a decade, leading to periodic conflicts in at least 10 states.