Toward Conceptual and Concrete Understanding of the Impossibility of Religiously Neutral Public Schooling

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe public schooling system is supposed to be neutral regarding religion. Constitutional provisions prohibit government from interfering with, or establishing, religion, and ensure equality of all people under the law. This article examines whether public schooling meets these requirements. It first briefly reviews the history of American education and its interactions with religion. Next, it examines the question conceptually and graphically, illustrating from the most encompassing to the most discrete levels how education content and delivery does, and often must, interact with, and have consequences for, religion. It also examines this concretely, drawing on the Cato Institute’s Public Schooling Battle Map—an interactive database of values- and identity-based conflicts in public schools—to gauge the reach of religious or religiously connected conflicts in U.S. public schooling, and to supply examples of interactions with religion identified in the conceptual illustration. The article ends with recommendations for changing education policy to achieve the government neutrality required by the Constitution.