Teaching Religion

Boston University Professor Stephen Prothero's new book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn't, argues that, despite high levels of religiousity, Americans on average are shockingly ignorant about both the religions they profess to believe and world religions. Prothero further argues that this ignorance is dangerous at a time when religion is playing an increasing role in both domestic politics and in conflicts around the world, and recommends that schools begin teaching religion as history and culture to counteract this ignorance. (Sound familiar, eduwonk readers?)

Prothero has a good point: you only have to look at the debate among political pundits over whether or not Mitt Romney is a Christian, or the inability of many of our nation's political and foreign policy leaders to differentiate Shiite from Sunni Muslims to understand the seriousness of this ignorance. Prothero explains American's lack of religious literacy largely in terms of American protestant revivalism's historical emphasis on a personal relationship with God over theology. Susan Jacoby, writing in The Washington Post, suggests it's actually a reflection of a broader deficit in Americans' civic and cultural knowledge. I'll take a step further and suggest its part of a general lack of knowledge, period, among even many educated Americans, because, as E.D. Hirsch has written, our schools do not focus on inculcating cultural knowledge in students and often even disdain teaching of a defined body of core knowledge in literature, history, and, yes, religion. It's worth noting that Hirsch's Dictionary of Cultural Literacy includes a lot of religious literacy, too.

One could draw an interesting parallel between, on the one hand, progressivist education's emphasis on process, thinking skills, and shaping children's self-esteem and values, over inculcating knowledge, and, on the other hand, American religion's emphasis on personal emotional experience, personal moral behavior, and a relationship with Christ over theology.

I actually think both sides of the equation are important, in both education and religion.

A false choice is often posed in education between Hirsch-style content knowledge and progressivist-style higher-order thinking skills. A Newsweek article about Prothero actually makes an important point about this debate, as well as accountability:

When he began teaching college 17 years ago, Prothero writes, he discovered that few of his students could name the authors of the Christian Gospels. Fewer could name a single Hindu Scripture. Almost no one could name the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. Prothero, who went to Yale in the early 1980s and speaks of his all-night bull sessions on politics and religion with reverence, realized that to re-create that climate in his classroom, his students first had to know something. And so he made it his job to (1) figure out what they didn't know and (2) teach it to them. He began giving religious literacy quizzes to his students, and, subsequently, to everyone he knew. Almost everybody failed.

Note that in this story, content knowledge didn't compete with higher-order thinking, but was a prerequisite to it. Note also Prothero's straightforward approach to making sure his students got that content knowledge: first find out what they don't know, then teach it to 'em. Seems straightforward enough, but it's all too often not what happens for kids. Accountability also plays a key role in this formula: testing (quizzes) is critical to find out what the kids don't know and, presumably, to determine whether or not they've learned it after it's taught. Note nobody's whining about how devastating it was for Prothero's students to take these quizzes they couldn't pass.

All that said, I share Jacoby's skepticism about Prothero's proposal to require high school students to take courses in religious history. She writes "given the failure of so many schools to inculcate the most elementary facts about American history, it is hard to imagine that most teachers would be up to the task of explaining, say, the subtleties of biblical arguments for and against slavery." I have similar concerns, although the obvious answer--in this or any area where schools aren't getting kids content knowledge they need--is not to give up, but to figure out how policies can give schools the resources and support they need to teach kids this knowledge. More important to me, there are limited hours of the day and there are trade-offs in the things we decide to emphasize in our curricular requirements: How should we weigh learning about religious history against American history, against other literature, against math and science? I don't know, but I do agree that we need to do a better job in passing on to our students their cultural patrimony, in history, literature and, yes, religion.