Maintaining the separation of church and state in public schools

From military bloodbaths in the Holy Land to Buddhist monks tending mountain-top temples, religion has been around for almost as long as human civilization. Today, it still holds a massive significance in the lives of billions, as it has throughout history.

It’s a seemingly logical idea to educate all students on such an influential topic. For instance, a religious study class based on the Bible or Torah would appear to be a good idea on the surface. A school is, after all, a place for people to learn about different ideas and the world around them.

But public schools are here to teach facts, not subjective faith. They’re here to educate the masses, not lead the pliable minds of young children to believe certain unprovable things.

In January of this year, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a successful lawsuit against a Bible Belt school in Louisiana for imposing Christian beliefs on students and harassing a Buddhist child. According to New York Daily News, a science teacher not only taught that God created the Earth and that evolution is “a stupid theory made up by stupid people,” but belittled the Buddhist student and said that “Buddhism is stupid.”

When the child’s parents complained to the school officials, the superintendent replied that “this is the Bible Belt” and recommended that the student change his faith. In this particular region and many others across America, Christians are a majority; however, this statistical fact doesn’t matter because a public school is for both the majority and minority.

Theoretically, learning institutions such as public high schools could objectively teach the ideologies of all religions and even atheism; as an effect, students would be exposed to different cultures and grow to be tolerant of different beliefs.

This would be an ideal situation, but it is nearly impossible to establish a curriculum that equally emphasizes every single religion in this ethnically and culturally diverse world. Nor can such a curriculum only teach certain religions that have had “a larger impact,” for that would imply that certain beliefs are “more important” than others.

In public schools, it’s better to neglect teaching religious ideology, which could easily become preaching, than to teach what is essentially bigotry. It would be highly difficult to keep a religion course objective and dispassionate, for the teacher would be of a particular religious or non-religious background.

In accordance with the First Amendment’s endorsement of religious freedom, the ruling of McCollum v. Board of Education in 1948 prohibited “devotional” religious instruction in public schools. Former president Ulysses S. Grant said in the President’s Speech at Des Moines of 1875, “Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate.”

If religion is important to people religion, they can attend a private school that preaches the faith they believe. A private institution has its own rights and those who enroll in that school choose to accept whatever it is that the school practices. For example, Archbishop Mitty High School requires that students take four years of Catholic studies and complete a total of 80 hours of Christian Service to graduate.

On the other hand, a public school like Saratoga High serves everyone and is publically funded. Religion is not the same for every member of a diverse community, so it should be invariably excluded from public school teaching.