Introduction

Symposium and Report Credits

The Education Group In public education, at least, the educators who participated in the symposium agreed that religion is deeply hidden if not invisible. As an example, one described the absurdity of trying to teach about the Civil Rights Movement without referring to religion - at best a terrible distortion of history, but a compromise teachers feel they must make. Schools must strike a new balance, they agreed, and teach about religion's influence on history, literature, and other disciplines. At the same time, they also agreed that public schools and teachers must scrupulously avoid endorsing any particular religious creed. Educators saw this as an exceedingly delicate issue; where schools have tried to teach about religion, it has proved to be quite controversial. In framing the questions they brought to the larger assembly, educators touched upon a variety of other topics:

• Artificially excluding religion from education damages integrity because schools do not teach students the whole truth.
• Educators saw public schools as a vitally important public space, one of a very few where people of all backgrounds and walks of life meet and converse. They saw an urgent need to reclaim this public space as as an acceptable place to discuss religion.
• Excluding religion from public schools allows zealots to dominate public discussion. We have, in effect, abdicated public discussion of one part of our lives to those who would speak loudest. Bringing religion out of the shadows might take away their power and their ability to use religion as negative force.
• Because it imparts our culture's values, stories, and history to the next generation, education is inherently religious.