Should Religion Be Taught in Our Schools?

The question whether or not religion should be taught in our schools is one of those thorny issues where, far to often, emotion over rules reason, ideology trumps independence, and intolerance conquers acceptance. And in most cases these are the sins of both sides of the debate.

Therefore, anyone attempting to discuss the role of religion in schools would be well advised to step carefully. I intend to heed my own advice.

Before we can begin any discussion we must first define religion for the purposes of our debate. Are we simply talking about Christianity? ( Undoubtedly that would be the goal of many who have been at the forefront of the issue in recent years.) Are we talking about the three main western religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam? Or are we talking about all religions, no matter how large or small, significant or obscure?

Secondly, what is the educational goal of introducing religion into the curriculum? Are we seeking to educate, develop critical thinking skills or simply trying to indoctrinate?

I suggest that how we address these questions will influence, in large part, what side of the issue we ultimately adopt.

So let us begin by first agreeing that any attempt to inject religion into the schools ought not to be restricted solely to Christianity. If our goal is truly to educate and not merely indoctrinate we cannot exclude competing viewpoints. Which leads us to the next question; which religions should we include in the discussion.

Here I suspect that a majority of our citizens would be content to restrict the study to the three main western religions: Islam, Judaism and Christianity Undoubtedly their argument will include the point that our culture is the product of developments in western thought so all we need to do is discuss the development of these three. But that raises an interesting problem. There are over a half billion Hindus, hundreds of millions of Buddhists and tens of millions of Daoists in the world. Would any discussion of religion that excludes almost half of the worlds believers be of any significant educational value? Clearly the answer to this question must be no.

Now let us turn our attention to the discussion of exactly what our goals would be if we were to allow a discussion of religion in schools. As stated earlier, there are three possibilities: we wish to educate, indoctrinate or develop critical thinking

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