Rescuing Education From Religion
BY DANNY STEINBERG
What’s red, white, and blue and below almost twenty other colored pieces of fabric? The American flag at an education convention. As much as we like to tout ourselves as being the greatest nation on earth, the rest of the world is more than happy to provide ample opportunities to show just how wrong we are.
One such yearly reminder is the Human Development Report, a document produced by the United Nations Development Programme that tracks and analyzes global progress in various areas, including education. While the United States’ scores in math, reading, and science are by no means poor (they are all above the mean by about 95 points each), they are noticeably lower than those of many other developed nations. In short, the US is the kid in the Advance Placement classes who should definitely be there, but is struggling to master the material.
Another noteworthy ranking for the United States comes in a Gallup poll from 2012. One of the questions asked was, “is religion important to you?” A whopping 33% of Americans reported “no,” good for the 51st highest percentage for this response out of 159 polled nations. Why is America’s standing amidst its global peers intriguing in this context? Nearly every nation whose average scores on the Human Development report were higher than ours can also be found ranked higher than 51st for this particular response.
This correlation is no coincidence. Always a divisive force, in today’s interconnected world, religion plays an ever-larger role in promoting strife, whether it be in the form of the unavailability of abortions in some Latin American nations, or the shooting of an innocent teenage girl in Pakistan. It comes as no shock, then, that with this diversion, the test scores of these countries, and many similar ones, are middling at best. On a national level, one of the main venues in which this discord rears its head is our education system. However, look at the countries that have higher test scores than us. This issue curses the US much more so than any Western European country. Until we can solve the problem of religion vs. education, America’s scores will continue to lag behind the majority of the developed world, and the quality of the average citizen we can produce will plummet.
Science is the most obvious battlefield on which this conflict is being fought. Recently the public has been paying more attention to the battle that right-wing Christians are waging to have creationism and its bastard offspring, intelligent design, taught in science classes. Aside from the unconstitutionality of such a proposition, allowing non-scientific ideas in classrooms would hamper the development of creative and free-thinking individuals, which are precisely the kind of people that are responsible for innovation and new discoveries. The purpose of learning science is two-fold. Firstly, it builds a foundation for students to understand how the world around them works, and secondly it teaches how to go about further developing the aforementioned understanding. Introducing concepts to students that are neither true nor reasonable undercuts their ability to think critically about the natural world.
As far as constitutionality is concerned, the First Amendment and every subsequent court case make themselves exceedingly clear: any teaching of creationism in schools is unconstitutional. What’s shocking is that far more people may not agree with that than you or I would think. The First Amendment Center annually surveys the American public to see how views on the various parts of freedom of expression shift from year-to-year. This year’s State of the First Amendment report found that more than half of Americans either mildly agree or strongly agree that the Constitution establishes the United States as a Christian nation. Here we find another failure of our education system, one that has been used to the advantage of the religious right to promote an agenda that simply has no basis in fact.
In the end, we return to the struggling student in the higher-level classes who clearly has the aptitude to succeed. What can we do to ensure that student’s success? There’s a long road ahead of us to help that multicultural, multilingual, multiethnic, brilliant kid reach the lofty levels of achievement we know it can, and it starts with one very important step: removing the distraction of religion from the educational experience.