Education Leadership and Religious Institutions

Part I: Schools, Religion, and Controversy

School is Controversial

We could talk all day about the reasons schooling is such a lightning rod for controversy in the United States. It begins with the fact that in the US, schooling is compulsory and publicly funded. These two ingredients situate schooling at the heart of American political questions because when it comes to schooling, the government can exercise coercive force both to make folks do it and to make folks pay for it. Other uncomfortable realities include the enormous amount of money involved and the fact that parents don’t really have much say in what their children are being exposed to at school.

Anything that people are forced to do is likely to attract dissent. In fact, if something is compulsory, dissent is implied. You don’t have to force people to do things they already want to do. Add to the compulsion to participate in schooling against your (or your parents’ will) the compulsion to pay for it even if you don’t directly participate in it and you have a situation likely to be controversial.

Religious schooling in the United States exists alongside public schooling in an uneasy relationship of imitation, admiration, and alienation. As far as the alienation goes, many of the efforts to mandate compulsory public schooling in the early twentieth century were rooted in fear of religious education forming its participants in a culturally and socially distinct manner and thereby threatening the polity. It’s important to recognize the difference here between schooling and education. Schooling implies an institutional effort (undertaken by a group of families, a religious order, or the state) to provide education in a formal, organized setting. Education, on the other hand, is the process of becoming who you are to be. Understood this way, education might involve a classroom or it might not.

I don’t think you would be wrong to hear foreshadowing of the ideological purity test “our democracy” rhetoric in these early efforts to homogenize the school experience in the US. There are fascinating stories as late as the 1960s about Amish men being jailed for refusing to send their children to government schools. The Amish eventually found relief at the Supreme Court level. Their case involved Amish fathers uncomfortable with their daughters having to wear gym attire for PE classes and having to change clothes and shower in school locker rooms. The public school district fought tooth and nail for many reasons, but one they emphasized that will be familiar to us all is because of all the revenue they would lose if the Amish children were exempted.

While not the case with Amish education, many contemporary religious schools do their best to imitate their secular counterparts. This is the imitation and admiration approach in which religious schools implicitly prioritize whatever is popular in public schools regardless of whether it contributes to their unique religious perspective on the role of education in the lives of their students.

The role of religion in religious education

There are two points on which religious organizations might make distinctive claims that set them at odds with secular schools. The first is their religiously informed anthropology—their sense of what a human being is and is for—and the second, derived from the first, is their moral code.

Secular schools have some generally agreed upon anthropology even if it is not explicit, and it rarely is explicit. Ideally this will be a common denominator understanding of what a human being is that is generally acceptable given the cultural conditions in the polity at the time. Educational efforts in secular schools are oriented toward those developmental ends on which we all agree…generally, things like: it is good for humans to be able to read, write, and do arithmetic. The moral code enforced at secular schools, or the moral license tolerated, will reflect this common cultural denominator.

Religious schools on the other hand, have a particular understanding of what a human is and what he is for on the level of destiny. Reading, writing, and arithmetic might be important to a religious school, but the whole education will be oriented toward achieving your purpose as defined within your religion. For Catholics this might mean something like the following:

1. Each one of our students is made by God to know, love, and serve Him and to be with Him in heaven.

2. Therefore, anything we do in a Catholic school should be oriented toward this end.

You can see how this model might include reading, writing, and arithmetic, but it radically reorients the hierarchy of educational ends. The moral code in this kind of a school will contain particular nuances likely to be more exclusive than those in a secular school. Serious religious schools will cultivate an active conversation, perhaps even debate, regarding the anthropological underpinnings of their educational approach and engage in a process of continual adjustment of their means to that end.

Considering what we might expect to be the differences between secular and religious schools on account of their anthropological and moral commitments does necessarily reflect the reality within schools today. As I mentioned earlier, many religious schools are virtually indistinguishable from their secular counterparts. School technology use, athletics, dress code, and curriculum are some of the main areas. In cases where there are discernible differences, these often have to do with social class, financial signalling, and early-stage career networking.

While curriculum seems to be one of the most obvious areas in which a religious school might cultivate some distinctive elements, surprisingly, many of the largest religious school programs in the US adopt the secular curricular programming wholesale. It is not uncommon for Catholic diocese to run the Common Core in all diocesan schools, excluding any material from the Catholic historical, philosophical, and theological tradition. Given the long history of Catholicism in the western world, excluding it actually takes a concerted effort at secularism.

Amidst all the controversy surrounding schools and education there are always parents who love their children and have to make practical decisions regarding their education. Schools are supposed to help with this, but as we’ve seen, that’s complicated in both secular and religious settings. Many of these parents feel abandoned or betrayed by the authorities who are supposed to be experts, whether in the state departments of education or in the diocesan education offices.

In the next essay we’ll review some of the significant influences on the rise of compulsory schooling in the US and how religious institutions and their efforts at education relate to a secular polity.

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