TCA Srinivasa-Raghavan: Should religion be taught in schools?

OKONOMOS

Religion needs to be separated from liberal public education, and yet is essential to its aims.

Secularists everywhere detest religion and religious people detest secularism. Caught in the middle are the liberals who hold less extreme views. The battle is fought continuously, and on every possible platform you can imagine.

But nowhere does this have a more damaging impact than on the question of how to impart values to children. Should religious instruction become a part of school teaching or not? Most importantly, what is the constitutional position on it?

Marc O DeGirolami, Associate-in-Law at the Columbia Law School, has written superb paper* on the subject. Being a lawyer, he relies mostly on an analysis of US Supreme Court judgments. Perhaps someone will attempt something similar for India as well.

He poses the question thus: "The constitutional paradox of religious learning is the problem of knowing that religion "" including the teaching about religion "" must be separated from liberal public education, and yet that religion cannot be entirely separated if the aims of liberal public education are to be realised."

In other words, it is a bit like having a weapon which can fire in both directions and you don't know which direction it will fire when you press the trigger. Whence the problem: if religion is seen as containing the seeds of both liberalism and illiberalism, what do you do with it as far as teaching liberal values in schools is concerned?

The paradox itself, though, is not really a paradox in the true sense of the term. It is more of a dilemma. Indeed, it is not unlike what economists call market failure, namely, the problem that even though markets are good do you lay the stress, as the Left does, on market failure or its successes? Should the tail wag the dog? Indeed, the same argument can be made about the role of the state in the economy "" do you focus on the failures or the successes?

DeGirolami says that Americans have not examined this paradox. Nor, I daresay, has anyone else. Partly, this has been because opinions about religion are so polarised. "As a result," says DeGirolami, "discussion about religion's place in public schools often exhibits a haphazard and under-theorised quality."

He has attempted to make up for this shortcoming here. His method is to develop a theory around which other things can be built. The purpose is to describe the "relationship between religious learning and the cultivation of the civic and moral ideals of liberal democracies."

These, one must assume, begin in schools where children are confronted with situations that require them to exhibit a high degree of moral and civic understanding. How do you equip them with the necessary values if religion is excluded, and values are taught without an anchoring context?

This is the great challenge, says the author, before the US Supreme Court "" and others as well, one must add. The effect of the opposing pulls of a secular Constitution and the social need to teach liberal values have to be tackled by the Courts, he says. "It is perplexing that at a time when public schools are seemingly most vulnerable, more is being asked of them than perhaps ever before. Ideological, socio-economic, pedagogical, and political stresses... constantly threaten their viability."

A major part of the problem lies in what he calls the "binary approach "" promotion or non-promotion; the "secular" or the "sectarian"; and so on. This is a false dichotomy, according to him, and is, therefore, "conceptually inadequate to account for the broad and often subtle effect that religious learning has on the cultivation of civic and moral ideals."