Deweyan Democracy and Education About Religion

Abstract

Québec's “Ethics and Religious Culture” curriculum shares many similarities with John Dewey's child-centered approach to education. The curriculum suggests how and why Dewey's approach of encouraging students to think critically and engage in sympathetic imagination can be integral to democratic citizenship and essential to the securing of respect for religious freedom in particular. Still, that a Deweyan education about religion is superior to the alternatives does not mean that it is flawless. If the Québec curriculum for the most part highlights the strength of the Deweyan approach, it also suggests that, at least in the case of religion, an education aimed at developing critical and imaginative skills can sometimes also violate democratic norms of religious respect. The article concludes by briefly considering how Québec's curriculum could be altered and supplemented to make its implementation practically feasible in the United States and consistent with widely shared views in the United States on religious freedom.

KEYWORDS:

• child-centered education
• democratic education
• education about religion
• John Dewey
• religious tolerance

Notes

C. Glenn, The Myth of the Common School (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).

E.D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 42–46.

E.D. Hirsch, “How to Save the Schools,” The New York Review of Books 57(8) (2010).

S. Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn't (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2007), 3.

Ibid., 142.

Ibid., 80.

Prothero argued that the literacy approach would produce important civic benefits as a byproduct even if this is not its main intention.

The degree to which Dewey was a conscious influence for the curriculum's creators is difficult to determine. Both the elementary (Gouvernment du Québec, Québec education program: Elementary education update [Québec: Ministère de l'Éducation, de Loisir, and du Sport, 2008, 380]) and secondary guidelines (Gouvernment du Québec, Québec education program: Secondary education update [Québec: Ministère de l'Éducation, de Loisir, and du Sport, 2008, 540]) cited Dewey's How We Think in their bibliographies. More crucially, I do not mean to imply in this article that the Québec curriculum is exactly what Dewey would have envisioned for the teaching about religion in U.S. public schools today. Dewey argued in a 1908 paper “Religion and Schooling” against the prevailing confessional religious education in public schools but he never advanced a positive alternative vision of how public schools should handle religion. See P. Knight, “John Dewey's ‘Religion and Our Schools’ Ninety Years On,” British Journal of Religious Education 20 (1998), 70–79.

This article's concern is with the spirit rather than the letter of a Deweyan approach on education. The Québec curriculum is Deweyan not in the way it specifically resembles Dewey's own views on how to teach about religion, but in its application of crucial Deweyan educational values to the teaching about religion. For an excellent general discussion on Dewey's views about religion, see S. Rockefeller, John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University, 1991).

Gouvernment du Québec, Establishment of an ethics and religious culture program: Providing future and direction for all Québec youth (Québec, Canada: Ministère de l'Éducation, de Loisir, and du Sport, 2005), 4.

Ibid., 8.

Gouvernment du Québec, Elementary education update, 296 and 320.

J. Dewey, The Middle Works, 1899–1924, 15 vols. ed. J.A. Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 8: 198–199, 2: 93.

J. Dewey, The Early Works, 1882–1898, 5 vols. ed. J.A. Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), 5: 59.

See Pew Forum U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, May 8–August 13, 2007, http://religions.pewforum.org/reports.

R. Wuthnow, “Presidential Address 2003: The Challenge of Diversity,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43 (2003): 159–170.

D. Eck, A New Religious America (San Francisco: Harper, 2002).

E. Lester and P. Roberts, Learning About World Religions in Public Schools: The Impact on Student Attitudes and Community Acceptance in Modesto, California (Arlington, VA: First Amendment Center, 2006).

Gouvernment du Québec, Elementary Education Update, 330.

See also Jay Wexler's compelling defense of this civic approach to teaching about religion and politics: J. Wexler, “Preparing for the Clothed Public Square: Teaching about Religion, Civic Education, and the Constitution,” William and Mary Law Review, 43: 1159–1264.

Dewey, The Middle Works, 8:87.

A. Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1995), 186, 349.

Dewey, The Middle Works, 1: 25, 30, 2: 276.

Several Modesto teachers noted that students were especially attentive when they shared personal stories about their interaction with other religions such as attendance at a Hindu wedding ceremony. See also P. Conover and D. Searing, “A Political Socialization Perspective,” in Rediscovering the Democratic Purposes of Education, ed. L. Mcdonnell (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2000).

Gouvernment du Québec, Secondary education update, 473.

Gouvernment du Québec, Establishment of an ethics and religious culture program, 3.

Gouvernment du Québec, Secondary education update, 503.

E. Nesbitt, “Ethnography, Religion and Intercultural Education: Some Possibilities for Europe,” in Intercultural Education and Religious Plurality, eds. R. Jackson and U. McKenna (Oslo, Norway: Oslo Coalition on Occasional Papers, 2005).

J.D. Hunter and A. Wolfe, Is there a Culture War? (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2006).

Gouvernment du Québec, Secondary education update, 465.

Gouvernment du Québec, Elementary education update, 299.

Gouvernment du Québec, Secondary education update, 465.

N. M. Stolzenberg, “‘He Drew a Circle that Shut me out’: Assimilation, Indoctrination and the Paradox of Liberal Education,” Harvard Law Review 106 (1993): 581–667.

For a more extended discussion of the paradoxes of religious tolerance and how to resolve these paradoxes in educational practice, see: E. Lester and P. Roberts, “The Distinctive Paradox of Religious Tolerance: Active Tolerance as a Mean between Passive Tolerance and Recognition,” Public Affairs Quarterly 20, no. 4 (2006): 347–380.

Gouvernment du Québec, Secondary education update, 472.

Gouvernment du Québec, Establishment of an ethics and religious culture program, 8.

Gouvernment du Québec, Elementary education update, 353.

Gouvernment du Québec, Secondary education update, 512.

Other passages emphasizing individual reflection about religious belief include Gouvernment du Québec, Elementary education update 477, 478, and 481, and Gouvernment du Québec, Secondary education update, 534.

Dewey himself (Ryan, 58) did not hold a warm and fuzzy view of religions in general and would likely have dissented from this element in the curriculum.

Gouvernment du Québec, Elementary education update, 319.

Ibid., 296.

E. Lester, Teaching about Religions: A Democratic Approach for Public Schools (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emile Lester

Emile Lester is an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Mary Washington and the author of “Teaching about Religions: A Democratic Approach for Public Schools” (University of Michigan Press, 2011). His research report, “Learning About World Religions in Modesto, California” co-authored by Dr. Patrick Roberts and published by the First Amendment Center, has been the subject of treatment by the New York Times, USA Today, C-SPAN, and National Public Radio among other media outlets.