Abstract
This chapter first identifies an emerging international framework for thinking about religion education and human rights. It then describes an approach to teaching about religion in American public schools that is based on the First Amendment to the US Constitution and the “3 Rs” of religious liberty—rights, responsibility, and respect. While acknowledging both strengths and limitations, the chapter argues that this approach promotes respect for basic human rights while providing education about religion that is both constitutionally permissible and academically sound.
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Notes
- 1.
Although the distinction between “public” and “private” schools varies from country to country, in the present discussion “public schools” are those “whose organization, financing and management are primarily the responsibility of, or under the primary oversight of, a public body (state, regional, municipal, etc.). A ‘private school’ is a school in which, irrespective of whether it may receive degrees of support (including financial support) from public sources, matters of organization, financing and management are primarily the responsibility of the school itself, or of a non-public sponsoring body” (OSCE, 2007, p. 20. Major sections of this chapter are drawn from Grelle, 2013, 2015).
- 2.
See also the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Article 18), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Article 13), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (Articles 14 and 28), and the 1981 Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion and Belief.
- 3.
The Madrid “Final Document” is included as Appendix IV in the Toledo Principles, pp. 109–116. An outcome of the Madrid conference was the organization of the Teaching for Tolerance project of the Oslo Coalition on Freedom of Religion or Belief, an international network of representatives from religious and other life-stance communities, NGOs, international organizations and research institutes. See https://www.jus.uio.no/smr/english/about/programmes/oslocoalition/tolerance/index.html, accessed 1/12/15.
- 4.
These objectives are presented as interdependent and common to both the ethics and the religious culture components of the program. In this context, “ethics” is understood as critical reflection on the meaning of conduct and on the values and norms that the members of a given society or group adopt in order to guide or regulate their conduct. Instruction in “religious culture” promotes an understanding of religions that is “built on the exploration of the sociocultural contexts in which they take root and continue to develop”, p. 295.
- 5.
The term “consensus” is not meant to imply that this approach is universal or without controversy. Rather, it suggests that there is an increasingly widespread agreement about the type of religion education that is appropriate in US public schools and that this agreement has emerged through efforts at consensus building involving various stakeholders. See Haynes (2009a, 2009b), pp. 154–159; 449–451. Many of the First Amendment consensus documents can be found in Haynes and Thomas (2007).
- 6.
These definitions are given on the California 3 Rs Project website http://ca3rsproject.org/pages/principle.html. The California 3 Rs Project is a non-profit, non-partisan teacher and community education program sponsored by the Constitutional Rights Foundation, the California County Superintendents Educational Services Association (CCSESA), and the Religious Freedom Education Project at the Newseum Institute.
- 7.
The Williamsburg Charter is reprinted in Haynes and Thomas (2007), pp. 283–308.
- 8.
“Religion in the Public School Curriculum” is reprinted in Haynes and Thomas (2007), pp. 95–110.
- 9.
For slight variation in the wording, see also “A Teachers Guide to Religion in the Public Schools,” another consensus statement reprinted in Haynes and Thomas (2007), pp. 39–56.
- 10.
- 11.
Similar criticisms have been directed toward the Toledo Guiding Principles. See Jensen (2008), pp. 123–150.
- 12.
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Grelle, B. (2016). The First Amendment and the “3 Rs” of Religious Liberty: A U.S. Approach to Religion Education and Human Rights. In: Pirner, M., Lähnemann, J., Bielefeldt, H. (eds) Human Rights and Religion in Educational Contexts. Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Rights, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39351-3_20
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