Should religions be able to run private schools in the US, where the students exclusively participat

[Yellow]

Opening Statement

Yes.

Private religious schools are nothing new. In fact, by comparison, public schools are a recent development. As far as the quality of education is concerned, private schools are considered academically superior to public schools (MSN Encarta, 2009). However, the topic at hand is whether private religious schools have the right to teach their religions exclusively or whether they ought to be forced to teach all major religions with equal fervor.

“Among the most inestimable of our blessings, also, is that... of liberty to worship our Creator in the way we think most agreeable to His will; a liberty deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet proved by our experience to” -Thomas Jefferson

Every American has the right to practice his or her own religion. Freedom of religion has long been esteemed and protected as a virtue of the US government. Of the many religions represented in the US, 82% of citizens claim Christianity, 1% Judaism, and 1% Islam (Kohut & Rogers 2002). All three of these religions are isolationist in principle: meaning the religion discourages conversion to, or the acceptance of, other religions. Because of the nature of these religions, in their pursuit, many practitioners will feel compelled to educate their children in the ways of their religion and even limit their children’s exposure to other religions.

It would be inappropriate for the public school system to directly provide any form of nonobjective religious education. Therefore, the followers of various religions have a need for private education that can fulfill their own religious requirements and the state-mandated educational standards for their children.

Amendment 1 Ratified 12/15/1791. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...” (U.S. Constitution Online, 2009).

It would be a constitutional violation for any state to impose rules regarding the religious education conducted at private religious schools. It is the duty of the state to ensure that all children are provided with an education that meets the state standards, and nothing more.

Of course, a majority of private, religious schools far exceed the state standards for education. Approximately 50% of private schools in the United States are run by the Catholic Church (MSN Encarta, 2009). One needs to look no further than a local Jesuit High School to see that the religious studies in no way interfere with the education of the students. Often, private schools, religious and nonsectarian, provide an excellent opportunity for students who wish to attend Ivy League universities as well as other universities of high esteem.

Most importantly, one must seek out private education. While some parents might force their children to attend, poor behavior is usually enough to be expelled to the ranks of public education. The majority of students in private, religious schools wish to be there. They worked hard to be accepted and are more than happy with their religious education. Students are there by choice. Their families pay tuitions in order to ensure an education that adheres to their religious preferences. To interfere for any reason other than educational standards would be a violation of the first amendment rights of millions of Americans.

References

Kohut, A. and Rogers, M. (2005). Largest Religious Groups in the United States of America

. Retrieved from,

http://www.adherents.com/rel_USA.html .

MSN Encarta. (2009). Private Education in the United States. Retrieved from, http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_1741500929/private_education_in_the_united_states.html . U.S. Constitution Online . (2009). The United States Constitution. Retrieved from, http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html#Am1 .

 

[Agent Intellect]

Re: Should religions be able to run private schools in the US, where the students exculsively participate in their religion?

Sorry it looks like crap, I wrote it in notepad on a school computer and e-mailed it to myself.

Edit: cleaned it up a little, but I forgot to e-mail some of the source links to put into it.

Anyway:

Where does parenting end and indoctrination begin? I think this is the question that it comes down to.
At what point can we tell a parent what they are allowed to have their children learn? When I think of education as defined by the dictionary:
1 a : the action or process of educating or of being educated; also : a stage of such a process b : the knowledge and development resulting from
an educational process <a person of little education>
2 : the field of study that deals mainly with methods of teaching and learning in schools. I think of a broad range of knowledge, not a narrow view of all available facts. I don't take this as meaning that children should only be taught in secular schools by secular teachers with only secular lesson plans. On the contrary, I think religious education is very important - so important, in fact, that it should not be limited to just one religion. That would be tantamount to teaching a child only one subject in school. Imagine the limited scope of a child that took only arithmetic all throughout their school career?

“With experience of diverse people you will find you have much empathy for people, more understanding of the basic way that people work. An understanding of how to avoid unnecessary and unproductive conflict between people from different cultures (due to simple things like body language and language) is a skill that will also enable you to control and understand people who are not like yourself.” "The Benefits of Multiculturalism" by Vexen Crabtree (2001)

When we reduce the education of a child to only one single point of view, we are not only imposing limitations on their knowledge, but we are also breeding ignorance of other peoples and other cultures - people that children will have to interact with and be effected by throughout their adult lives. By not exposing them to these differing views, we are not educating them properly on how the world works. The horizons are much broader then the single cultural influences we receive from our home. While it's the parents job to raise them within their own culture, it's our schools job to educate them on the world at large. It's a shame that even our politicians don't know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite Muslim, we should not let some this same staggering oversight happen to our children.

“Religious schools, however, tend to divide society because, as a result of them, pupils become segregated by denomination or religion. The sectarianism, perhaps unwittingly accepted or encouraged at home, and reinforced at school often leads children to develop a circle of friends predominantly-even if subconsciously-chosen on religious grounds. This sets a pattern which can carry on throughout life and be transmitted to offspring, perpetuating the problem.”
National Secular Society (2002)

Religious schools are there because people want to expand the already existing religious segregation by minimizing children's access to alternative points of view, making them an effect, not a cause.



But it's wrong for me to say that religious schools do not teach about other religions in their curriculum. The difference is, we are still not giving a choice to the child. They are taught other major religions in the way of a mythology, much like ancient Greek mythology, but the religion of their school is taught as truth.

“Amartya Sen [is] a Nobel laureate, a former master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard. [...] In his recent book Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, Sen argues that we are doing something terrible to our children by letting them attend faith schools. He writes: "[...] Under this system, young children are placed in the domain of singular affiliations well before they have the ability to reason about different systems of identification that may compete for their attention." It's a dismal image (isn't it?) of small children thus having destinies foisted upon them before they can think. Sen argues that this classification is not just disastrous for the child's development, but for community solidarity too. We saw something similar in Northern Ireland, he contends, where state-run denominational schools "fed the political distancing of Catholics and Protestants".” The Guardian (2006)

Most people are not even prepared to understand why they believe in their own religion much less understand why other people believe theirs. Children should have the right to choose their own beliefs, but by limiting what they understand about other faiths is purposefully creating a niche for them. Children at a young age are unable to discern fact from fiction http://books.google.com/books?id=N6RtrzRvhh8C&pg=PA76&lpg=PA76&dq=Religion+and+cognitive+development&source=bl&ots=VcuHgPHv8H&sig=ByTySfB7qeybFxRhEOywiksCzMM&hl=en&ei=rEzCSv-FOsvf8Qaw2NWTBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=Religion%20and%20cognitive%20development&f=false

""Sometimes dumb sounds cute: Sixty percent of Americans can't name five of the Ten Commandments, and 50% of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were married. Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University, isn't laughing. Americans' deep ignorance of world religions - their own, their neighbors' or the combatants in Iraq, Darfur or Kashmir - is dangerous, he says." The most recent studies show these casually churched Christians cannot even name the gospel writers. They are in church for cultural reasons or social support, or because someone at one point in their life probably forced them into Sunday school and they could not veto the plan."
Unknown (forgot to take source and now can't find it)

Children do not have the capacity to use critical thinking to assess religious concepts that are presented as indisputable, absolute truth during the preoperational stage, having them reinforced by authorities like parents and teachers.

they take anything their parents and teachers say to be the undeniable truth. People worry about this when it comes to raising their children as racists, or two homosexuals turning their children gay, it seems strange that what a person will believe to be the truth about how the world works is not scrutinized in the same fashion. Just as with religion, all children should be educated about racism and homosexuality, but not have their world view shaped by their parents views on these things.

The argument is often that, once a child turns 18, they become adults and can choose what they want to believe, but by limiting the tools they can utilize to make and educated decision, they have already been pigeon holed into a belief. Parents can raise their child the way they like, but our schools are where they should have equal and balanced time spent on other world views.

It's also a problem when the schools themselves discriminate against people, not just of other religions, but other socioeconomic backgrounds, thereby reducing the purview of it's students even further.

“A recent study by the Institute for Research in Integrated Strategies, a think-tank, found that religious primary schools take fewer children from low-income families than nearby local-authority schools. And the London School of Economics discovered this year that religious schools give lower priority to children in care than their secular counterparts do. Though they achieve better results than ordinary state schools [...], critics claim they do so through selecting by stealth.”
The Economist (2006)

“Keith Porteous Wood, Executive Director of the National Secular Society, said: "This is no surprise at all. While over 20% of pupils take free school meals in community schools, only 12.2% do so in CofE schools. Similarly, the number of children with Special Educational Needs with statements is well over 2% in community schools it is only 1.5% in Faith schools".”
National Secular Society (2003)

The problem also arises from making baseless claims. Take, for example, the ancient Greek mythology. We teach this as stories that ancient people used to believe because now we know that their mythologies are not based on evidence. Teaching ideas with no evidence to back them up as if they are truth has no place in our education. While religions should be taught in a theological and historical context, they should not be taught as truth, and no one religion should be taught
exclusively over any other.



Questions:

1. Does putting children into religious schools give them the tools to choose their own religion? Or are they being pigeon holed with their parents religion?
2. Should children be taught what to believe or should they be taught what beliefs there are so they can choose their own?
3. Do religious schools foster ignorance, intolerance, or at it's worst, hatred, for people of other faiths?
4. How would teaching all religions equally as opposed to one exclusively harm a child, as far as bringing it up to be ignorant or intolerant of other faiths?
5. Should children be allowed the right to choose their own religion, or is it the parents responsibility to instill it into them?
6. If a child should be able to choose their own religion, should they not be given all of the facts - namely through education - in order to make an educated decision?
7. At what point could religious indoctrination be said to be psychological or emotional abuse?
8. What benefits do religious schools have that secular or multi faith schools do not have?

 

[Yellow]

Re: Should religions be able to run private schools in the US, where the students exculsively participate in their religion?

Round 1 Responses
It seems that what you are proposing is a set of ideals for what you hope would be a better world. You feel that religions are standing in the way of some kind of world peace, or at the very least, the end of cultural intolerance.

"Religious schools, however, tend to divide society because, as a result of them, pupils become segregated by denomination or religion. The sectarianism, perhaps unwittingly accepted or encouraged at home, and reinforced at school often lends children to develop a circle of friends predominantly-even if subconsciously-chosen on religious grounds. This sets a pattern which can carry on throughout life and be transmitted to offspring, perpetuating the problem" National Secular Society (2002)

But are you sure it is religion that creates this? I argue that it is a phenomenon that can be seen in the absence of religious differences as well, making it an independent event. I live in a very small town. An isolated monoculture. They have an intolerance of outsiders, but that isn’t enough to fill their time. They hate each other with equal energy and for less distinct reasons than religion and race. There are family feuds over things like the shrubbery of their great grandfathers (a real example, by the way). What I’m trying to say is, people will find ways to hate each other without the help of religion. Gangs 'go to war' with one another with the same or more convictions than do countries and with a similar ignorance of one another. This is not religiously motivated. It is something entirely different. Something in which the need for religious schools may be an effect, but certainly not the cause.

So why should religious beliefs be forcibly altered? Why should cultures be imposed upon? Forgetting all legal rights (and one must, to entertain the idea) what is so important about religious education to risk so much damage? Will the hatred end? Will wars end? Will ignorance end? While some may dote upon the virtues of a free, open, and equal religious education, I fear they are hoping that people will abandon their religions.

The problem also arises from making baseless claims. Take, for example, the ancient Greek mythology. We teach this as stories that ancient people used to believe because now we know that their mythologies are not based on evidence. Teaching ideas with no evidence to back them up as if they are truth has no place in our education. While religions should be taught in a theological and historical context, they should not be taught as truth, and no one religion should be taught exclusively over any other.

While as an atheist, I can see the allure of not being part of such a vast minority, it is wrong. It is morally and legally wrong to take actions that have the potential to decimate several large religious cultures. Because that is what religion is to many people, it is an integration of cultural beliefs and traditions. For many, the religious schools to which they send their children are ensuring that their culture can live on and survive the ever-changing society around them.

I would also point out the bias used in the quote above. There is an assumption that religious teachings have no basis in truth. For the practitioners of many religions, their teachings hold more truth than arithmatic. While it may dwell largely outside the realm of tangible truths, I am sure you are able to find many who hold their religion in higher esteem, and find more truth in it, than in anything they can see or touch. However, I fear I have allowed myself to become slightly off-topic.

The bottom line is, eliminating or altering religious schools has the potential to cause serious harm to cultural stability, is incredibly violating in principle, and may have little to no impact on cultural tolerance.

 

[Agent Intellect]

Re: Should religions be able to run private schools in the US, where the students exculsively participate in their religion?

Opening Statement

Yes.

Private religious schools are nothing new. In fact, by comparison, public schools are a recent development. As far as the quality of education is concerned, private schools are considered academically superior to public schools (MSN Encarta, 2009). However, the topic at hand is whether private religious schools have the right to teach their religions exclusively or whether they ought to be forced to teach all major religions with equal fervor.

The antiquity of religious schools isn't a very good argument to keep them around. Whether religious schools are academically superior to public schools or not is debatable.

“Among the most inestimable of our blessings, also, is that... of liberty to worship our Creator in the way we think most agreeable to His will; a liberty deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet proved by our experience to” -Thomas Jefferson

If we are being spoon fed our beliefs by our schools, is it truly what we think?

Also, as Thomas Jefferson said:
"All persons shall have full and free liberty of religious opinion; nor shall any be compelled to frequent or maintain any religious institution" (Thomas Jefferson, 1776, from Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986.)

To me, it seems like forcing a child to go to a religious school is forcing them to frequent a religious institution.

Every American has the right to practice his or her own religion. Freedom of religion has long been esteemed and protected as a virtue of the US government. Of the many religions represented in the US, 82% of citizens claim Christianity, 1% Judaism, and 1% Islam (Kohut & Rogers 2002). All three of these religions are isolationist in principle: meaning the religion discourages conversion to, or the acceptance of, other religions. Because of the nature of these religions, in their pursuit, many practitioners will feel compelled to educate their children in the ways of their religion and even limit their children’s exposure to other religions.

It seems, under this logic, a parent should be allowed to choose what their children are allowed to learn? If one doesn't 'believe' in math, they can opt not to have their child learn mathematics?

I'm arguing that, while parents are allowed to raise their children how they want at home, a school is a place of education and should teach a broad curriculum - one that will allow that child to grow up with the knowledge and capabilities to make decisions for themselves. If we didn't make children learn simple things like mathematics, grammar, history etc so that they can grow up and perform in whichever career they choose - we don't send a child to a school run by republicans so they can grow up to be republican, or to a school run by construction workers so they can grow up to be construction workers. The teaching of religion is a world view even more encompassing and pervasive then political affiliation and career, yet we allow parents the permission to pigeon hole the type of education their child receives on something so fundamental.

It would be inappropriate for the public school system to directly provide any form of nonobjective religious education. Therefore, the followers of various religions have a need for private education that can fulfill their own religious requirements and the state-mandated educational standards for their children.

This is what Sunday School is for. School is for acquiring knowledge about the world, and other religions are a salient part of the world. I don't see this as increasing a childs understanding of their own culture, which can be done outside of an academic environment, but instead it's reducing the scope of their knowledge about all other cultures.

Other religions are an enormous part of history, current events, and even our everyday culture. Shutting this out of someones world view is intellectual dishonesty, and a failure of the education system.

Amendment 1 Ratified 12/15/1791. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...” (U.S. Constitution Online, 2009).

It would be a constitutional violation for any state to impose rules regarding the religious education conducted at private religious schools. It is the duty of the state to ensure that all children are provided with an education that meets the state standards, and nothing more.

I hardly see a child forced to go to a religious school as a 'free exercise' of a religion. I'm not against parents bringing up their children however they want, but it shouldn't be a schools job to enforce views on people, but to bestow knowledge onto them. As I said, other religions play a major part in history and world affairs, and it's limiting education not to teach them.

Of course, a majority of private, religious schools far exceed the state standards for education. Approximately 50% of private schools in the United States are run by the Catholic Church (MSN Encarta, 2009). One needs to look no further than a local Jesuit High School to see that the religious studies in no way interfere with the education of the students. Often, private schools, religious and nonsectarian, provide an excellent opportunity for students who wish to attend Ivy League universities as well as other universities of high esteem.

I have no doubt that private schools have higher educational standards, but what is the correlation with religion? I'm not against private schools, merely the teaching of one single religion, and even moreso the exclusion of the teaching of other religions.

Most importantly, one must seek out private education. While some parents might force their children to attend, poor behavior is usually enough to be expelled to the ranks of public education. The majority of students in private, religious schools wish to be there. They worked hard to be accepted and are more than happy with their religious education.

I suppose this is more of a philosophical question, but how does one know that the child is happy with their religious education if they had never had any other kind of education?

Students are there by choice. Their families pay tuitions in order to ensure an education that adheres to their religious preferences. To interfere for any reason other than educational standards would be a violation of the first amendment rights of millions of Americans.

Education based on the preferences of a parent can be sort of a slippery slope - which I suppose go's back to my into statement about where we draw the line; what about racism or homophobia?

I would agree that it would be unconstitutional to tell a parent they cannot raise their child to whichever religion they hold as truth, but school is for acquiring knowledge, and suspending education about other religions, or giving an imbalanced amount of time to a single religion, is an academic shortcoming.

 

[Claverhouse]

Some posts from enthusiasts have been moved to a separate commentary thread: Only the antagonists may argue in a formal debate.



Claverhouse

Moderating mode

 

[Silent_Rebel]

I have not read the whole thing but yes they should. The students choose (or at least their parents) to go to whatever school it is. That may have already been said.

 

[EditorOne]

Schools attempting to perpetuate superstitious cults would seem to have little place in a peaceful, rational world. Yet, there they are.

Footnote: Sometimes what appears to be a private religious school is just a good school in odd garments. These days, for instance, the average Roman Catholic high school seems to do a very good job preparing its students to reject its own teachings. The kids coming out appear to be politer, perhaps, than the population average, and better able to focus and perhaps even possessing more facts than the average public high school. But they don't move on to a life where the church dictates the limits of their thoughts or actions.

 

[Zensunni]

Private schools do better than public on most tests because they have more pro-active parents for the most part. If you are going to pay your school taxes and then shell out thousands more for a different school, you usually care enough to make sure your kid studies when they get home. Children from schools on military bases test better and are more polite too.