Call a Truce, Restore Values to Classrooms

I winced more than once while reading of U.S. District Judge W. Brevard Hand’s ruling that banned several dozen Alabama textbooks as promoting “the religion of secular humanism.”

First, secular humanism is not a religion. To the extent that it represents a definable collection of beliefs, which in itself is problematic, it is more properly labeled an ideology. The term religion is best reserved for expressions of ultimate meaning and value that include a community of believers and a system of ritual practice. If secular humanism is a religion, then we must count Marxism, or Freudian theory, as religions. These ideologies may on occasion have cultic dimensions, especially among fanatical adherents, but they lack any appeal to the sacred, or some experience of “the holy,” which traditionally has been the central defining property of most substantive definitions of religion.

Second, my liberal instincts were offended by the notion of censorship. The schools should be a marketplace of ideas, and to the extent that secular humanism represents a competing intellectual perspective, it has a rightful place as something to be read and discussed.

But, on deeper reflection, I have found myself more sympathetic to Hand’s ruling.

Textbooks, especially social-studies texts, are appropriately propagandistic expressions of a nation’s self-understanding. The task of the public schools is to produce good citizens skilled in critical analysis as well as reading, writing and arithmetic. The fear of many conservatives, including the plaintiffs in the case--who incidentally were aided by the National Legal Foundation, which was founded by Pat Robertson--is that our schools have lost sight of their character-creating task.

The current flap over secular humanism is an indirect product of earlier paranoia over religious indoctrination in the schools, which resulted in textbook publishers deleting many references to religion. The attitude of the plaintiffs, and rightly so, is that if religion is excised from textbooks the schools have no right to substitute the beliefs of secular humanists just because they don’t fly the flag of a historic religion.

Hand, who once upheld prayer in public schools and was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, was sensitive to the plaintiffs’ charge that a lot of philosophizing was still going on in textbooks. His response was ingenuous: Label secular humanism a religion and then ban it on the constitutional ground of separation of church and state.

Surely Hand’s textbook decision will be appealed, but it appears that he has brought us full circle. This may be the occasion for all parties to acknowledge that religious and philosophical values--moral values--undergird every aspect of our national history, and that therefore the discussion of those values should be the centerpiece of any good curriculum.

The worst consequence of Hand’s ruling is that textbook publishers might make social studies even more antiseptic and uninteresting by further deleting “controversial” material. In the aftermath of the paranoia over religion in textbooks, it was often possible for students to read an entire chapter on Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil-rights movement and never know that Dr. King was a clergyman or that the church was a key player in supporting desegregation. Such a sanitized reading of history is not only misleading, it is also dangerously deficient.

It is unquestionably time for a truce to be called. The task at hand is to figure out how to re-introduce ethical concerns into the curriculum.

In the most general sense we need greatly heightened public debate about the values that we want to communicate to young Americans. For starters, I suggest that we need to seek creative ways in which legislators and educators and representatives of the religious and political right and left can get together and constructively talk about the moral content that is necessary in the education of good citizens. Wherever we stand in the contest between ideologies, our children’s welfare demands that all of us work toward a constructive middle ground--one that asserts the primacy of values if we are to understand who we are as Americans, and why.