Dewey on Religion in Public Schools

Abstract

FEINBERG’S INTERPRETATION OF DEWEY ON RELIGION AND EDUCATION Feinberg uses two main sources for his interpretation of Dewey’s views on religion and education. First, he cites a Dewey essay from the Hibbert Journal in 1908 entitled “Religion and Our Schools.” Citing one passage from this article, Feinberg concludes that there is evidence that Dewey was “categorical in his rejection of religion education in the public schools.” This source is interesting and problematic in two ways. First, Feinberg correctly recognizes that Dewey’s writings were a response to a particular historical moment and have to be understood in context. There is a well-known body of scholarship on Dewey’s changing perspectives on religion. For example, we know that in 1884 he wrote of the “obligation to know God.” In 1887 he wrote that the “cause of theology and morals is one and that whatever banishes God from the heart of things...excludes the ideal, the ethical, from the life of man.” We also know that by 1903 he had developed an account of religious education in which the particular subject matter is irrelevant. He writes, “it is possible to approach the subject of religious instruction in the reverent spirit of science, making the same sort of study of this problem that is made in any other educational problem.” In later years, Dewey was particularly worried about the role of the Catholic Church as a conservative force in the Polish community. This wrestling with religion never left him. In the autobiographical essay “From Absolutism to Experimentalism”, Dewey writes dramatically and poignantly about the tension experienced his whole life between pious belief and critical reason. He uses powerful religious terms to describe this tension existentially as an “inward laceration” that left a “stigmata.”