The Role of Religion in 21st-century Public Schools PDF Download

Author: Steven Paul Jones
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9781433107641
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
The fight over the role of religion in public schools is far from finished, and the last and final words have not been written. This collection of original essays reveals and updates the battlefield. Included are essays on school prayer, the evolution/intelligent design debate, public funding of religious groups on university campuses, religious themes in school-taught literature, and more. With diverse tones and points of view, these essays offer quality scholarship while revealing and honoring the heat these themes generate.

Author: Linda K. Wertheimer
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807086177
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
An intimate cross-country look at the new debate over religion in the public schools A suburban Boston school unwittingly started a firestorm of controversy over a sixth-grade field trip. The class was visiting a mosque to learn about world religions when a handful of boys, unnoticed by their teachers, joined the line of worshippers and acted out the motions of the Muslim call to prayer. A video of the prayer went viral with the title “Wellesley, Massachusetts Public School Students Learn to Pray to Allah.” Charges flew that the school exposed the children to Muslims who intended to convert American schoolchildren. Wellesley school officials defended the course, but also acknowledged the delicate dance teachers must perform when dealing with religion in the classroom. Courts long ago banned public school teachers from preaching of any kind. But the question remains: How much should schools teach about the world’s religions? Answering that question in recent decades has pitted schools against their communities. Veteran education journalist Linda K. Wertheimer spent months with that class, and traveled to other communities around the nation, listening to voices on all sides of the controversy, including those of clergy, teachers, children, and parents who are Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Sikh, or atheist. In Lumberton, Texas, nearly a hundred people filled a school-board meeting to protest a teacher’s dress-up exercise that allowed freshman girls to try on a burka as part of a lesson on Islam. In Wichita, Kansas, a Messianic Jewish family’s opposition to a bulletin-board display about Islam in an elementary school led to such upheaval that the school had to hire extra security. Across the country, parents have requested that their children be excused from lessons on Hinduism and Judaism out of fear they will shy away from their own faiths. But in Modesto, a city in the heart of California’s Bible Belt, teachers have avoided problems since 2000, when the school system began requiring all high school freshmen to take a world religions course. Students receive comprehensive lessons on the three major world religions, as well as on Sikhism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and often Shintoism, Taoism, and Confucianism. One Pentecostal Christian girl, terrified by “idols,” including a six-inch gold Buddha, learned to be comfortable with other students’ beliefs. Wertheimer’s fascinating investigation, which includes a return to her rural Ohio school, which once ran weekly Christian Bible classes, reveals a public education system struggling to find the right path forward and offers a promising roadmap for raising a new generation of religiously literate Americans.

Author: Federico Lorenzo Ramaioli
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303137844X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
This comparative philosophy of law book aims at formulating a new analytical approach to the Islamic legal tradition based on ‘juridical categories’, a concept that facilitates comprehension and understanding of juridical phenomena. Building upon legal comparativism and legal pluralism, this project intends to avoid bias caused by universalizing Western categories when analyzing foreign juridical notions, which inevitably results in the miscomprehension of non-Western ideas and institutions. Unlike existing literature, this project will not focus on substantive comparisons between normative contents, but on the ‘juridical perspectives’ that helped to shape the Islamic and Western legal orders.The book focuses on the most relevant juridical questions regarding the Islamic and Western legal perspectives, such as the different visions regarding juridical spatiality, the role of human reason and the relationship between law, man and the divinity. While contributing to legal philosophy, this work intends also to develop and define a new interdisciplinary approach, aiming to provide a starting point for novel analyses in research fields such as legal comparativism, legal pluralism, and constitutional law. Finally, by formulating a new interdisciplinary approach, it will provide a foundational discussion of a continuously evolving subject that will never be exhaustively explored. As such, it aims at broadening scholarly reflections on the relationship between the West and Islam, eventually placing these concepts within a suitably comprehensive and contextualized framework. "Published in cooperation with gLAWcal - Global Law Initiatives for Sustainable Development, Hornchurch, Essex, United Kingdom".

Author: James A. Banks
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1506320333
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 2601

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Book Description
The diversity education literature, both nationally and internationally, is broad and diffuse. Consequently, there needs to be a systematic and logical way to organize and present the state of research for students and professionals. American citizens need to understand the dynamics of their increasingly diverse communities and institutions and the global world in which we live, work, and lead. With continually evolving information on diversity policies, practices, and programs, it is important to have one place where students, scholars, teachers, and policymakers can examine and explore research, policy, and practice issues and find answers to important questions about how diversity in U.S. education—enriched with theories, research and practices in other nations—are explained and communicated, and how they affect institutional change at both the K-12 and postsecondary levels. With about 700 signed entries with cross-references and recommended readings, the Encyclopedia of Diversity in Education (4 volumes, in both print and electronic formats) will present research and statistics, case studies, and best practices, policies, and programs at pre- and postsecondary levels. Diversity is a worldwide phenomenon, and while most of the entries in the Encyclopedia will focus on the United States, diversity issues and developments in nations around the world, including the United States, are intricately connected. Consequently, to illuminate the many aspects of diversity, this volume will contain entries from different nations in the world in order to illuminate the myriad aspects of diversity. From A-to-Z, this Encyclopedia will cover the full spectrum of diversity issues, including race, class, gender, religion, language, exceptionality, and the global dimensions of diversity as they relate to education. This four-volume reference work will be the definitive reference for diversity issues in education in the United States and the world.

Author: Liam Gearon
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532646917
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
This book explores recent calls to increase instruction of the Bible in American public schools. The work develops a distinctive philosophical and trans-Atlantic assessment of these proposals by critiquing European approaches to religious education and by reviewing the role of religion in contemporary democracies. The work will spark debate among political scientists, policy experts, Religious Education instructors, theologians, and social and educational theorists.

Author: William Jeynes
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119098343
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 698

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Book Description
A comprehensive source that demonstrates how 21st century Christianity can interrelate with current educational trends and aspirations The Wiley Handbook of Christianity and Education provides a resource for students and scholars interested in the most important issues, trends, and developments in the relationship between Christianity and education. It offers a historical understanding of these two intertwined subjects with a view to creating a context for the myriad issues that characterize—and challenge—the relationship between Christianity and education today. Presented in three parts, the book starts with thought-provoking essays covering major issues in Christian education such as the movement away from God in American education; the Christian paradigm based on love and character vs. academic industrial models of American education; why religion is good for society, offenders, and prisons; the resurgence of vocational exploration and its integrative potential for higher education; and more. It then looks at Christianity and education around the globe—faith-based schooling in a pluralistic democracy; religious expectations in the Latino home; church-based and community-centered higher education; etc. The third part examines how humanity is determining the relationship between Christianity and education with chapters covering the use of Christian paradigm of living and learning; enrollment, student demographic, and capacity trends in Christian schools after the introduction of private schools; empirical studies on the perceptions of intellectual diversity at elite universities in the US; and more. Provides the breadth and depth of knowledge necessary to gain a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the complex relationship between Christianity and education and its place in contemporary society A long overdue assessment of the subject, one that takes into account the enormous changes in Christian education Presents a global consideration of the subject Examines Christian education across elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels The Wiley Handbook of Christianity and Education will be of great interest to Christian educators in the academic world, the teaching profession, the ministry, and the college and graduate level student body.

Author: Craig S. Engelhardt
Publisher: IAP
ISBN: 1623963249
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Education Reform proposes and defends an alternate paradigm of public education. It challenges “secular education” as a failed educational model and proposes an alternate model with far-reaching potential. It reveals how secular schools have insufficient resources to support the public’s educational interests while religious schools, within a plural public education system, have the superior capacity to nurture citizens with the moral, intellectual, and civic qualities of good citizenship. The fulcrum upon which Engelhardt’s argument rests is the recognition that beliefs and values of a religious nature not only provide motivating frameworks for individual life, but also, they naturally provide core sources of meaning, understanding, and motivation for education efforts. Whereas secular schools avoid these ideological resources, they potentially suffuse the curriculum, climate, and community of “religious” schools to increase their educational success. Thus, this book argues that the move to a plural public education system, in which families are free to choose either secular or publicly supportive “religious” schools, will advance the educational interests of America. This argument is developed in three parts. The first entails a multi-chapter analysis of education history to discern the relationship between religion and the public’s education goals. By tracing ways in which “religion” is a key resource for curricular meaning, parent buy-in, rational thought, individual morality, public unity, and academic inspiration, it correlates school secularization with many of our current education problems. Part two engages criticisms that may arise from this reform proposal - such as concerns regarding autonomy, deliberative skills, equity, and public cohesion. Part three illumines superior ways in which religious schools can address the public’s educational concerns. The book concludes by proposing ideas and principles to guide the development of an American plural public education system that allow the public to draw from the strengths of religious schools without secularizing them in the process or breaching church/state boundaries.

Author: R. Murray Thomas
Publisher: R & L Education
ISBN: 9781578866991
Category : Religion in the public schools
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Focuses on the seven major types of conflicts over the proper role of religion in schools that have become particularly confrontational during the first decade of the twenty-first century. The cases on which the chapters focus concern issues that currently are being hotly debated in America. Controversies are described in relation to their historical origins and the author shows how the history affects current understanding of the issues. Thomas does not take sides in the arguments; rather, he lays out the arguments, their historical and cultural contexts, and the groups that debate them and their goals. --From publisher description.

Author: Alexis Anja Kallio
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253043743
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Music, Education, and Religion: Intersections and Entanglements explores the critical role that religion can play in formal and informal music education. As in broader educational studies, research in music education has tended to sidestep the religious dimensions of teaching and learning, often reflecting common assumptions of secularity in contemporary schooling in many parts of the world. This book considers the ways in which the forces of religion and belief construct and complicate the values and practices of music education—including teacher education, curriculum texts, and teaching repertoires. The contributors to this volume embrace a range of perspectives from a variety of disciplines, examining religious, agnostic, skeptical, and atheistic points of view. Music, Education, and Religion is a valuable resource for all music teachers and scholars in related fields, interrogating the sociocultural and epistemological underpinnings of music repertoires and global educational practices.

Author: Nathal M. Dessing
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317138376
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
This book offers a new direction for the study of contemporary Islam by focusing on what being Muslim means in people’s everyday lives. It complements existing studies by focusing not on mosque-going, activist Muslims, but on how people live out their faith in schools, workplaces and homes, and in dealing with problems of health, wellbeing and relationships. As well as offering fresh empirical studies of everyday lived Islam, the book offers a new approach which calls for the study of ’official’ religion and everyday ’tactical’ religion in relation to one another. It discusses what this involves, the methods it requires, and how it relates to existing work in Islamic Studies.