© 1987 by American Academy of Religion
Report |
RELIGION IN THE CURRICULUM
ASSOCIATION FOR SUPERVISION AND CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT
The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development is a broad-based professional organization of 80,000 educators—administrators, teachers, and professors—whose purpose is the development of leadership for quality in education. Among its activities are the National Curriculum Study Institutes, held throughout the United States, and the production of a variety of publications and training materials, including the award-winning magazine Educational Leadership. In July of this year an ASCD Panel on Religion in the Curriculum issued a report that calls for national action to end the curricular silence about religion in public schools.The report sketches the assumptions—political, psychological, legal, and religious—that undergird the current de facto policy against studying religion in schools and offers twelve recommendations for changing that policy. It also constitutes a timely and prudential reminder about the curricular interdependence of all levels of learning. The widespread neglect of the study of religion in public education surely has a negative impact on the development of the field in secular colleges and universities, both public and private.
In its insistence that the study of religion is essential to quality education, in its blunt acknowledgement that public schools in fact pursue an "unstated curriculum" in religion, and in its identification of persistent popular misconceptions of religion and its study, the report is perhaps the most forceful and unequivocal of its genre yet. Nevertheless, readers likely will note the assumptions about objectivity and descriptive teaching that run throughout the report; the justification that religion should be studied in schools largely in terms of its influence on history, art, literature, etc.; and the resort for curricular advice to "religious professionals" and "community leaders", with no mention of other, specifically academic, sources of expertise. These, along with other of the report's suppositions and recommendations, certainly warrant additional critical scrutiny and discussion.
The importance of the report, its pertinence to the professional concerns of the Academy, and the extensive national attention it attracted all justify its reprinting in the Journal A general session to examine and discuss the report with some members of the ASCD panel that drafted it is scheduled for the 1987 Annual Meeting in Boston.