Separation of Church and State Imperative in Public Schools
In the first amendment of the constitution, the separation of church and state is introduced as a key foundation for our nation. As James Madison said, “The civil government … functions with complete success … by the total separation of the Church from the State.” The necessity to keep the two separate can be seen throughout history on many different scales. Often times, when church and state are together, many citizens of the state feel belittled and even oppressed. This feeling is also felt by students in classrooms when religious views are taught as right and wrong. Not only is there little room for religion during science classes in public schools, but furthermore, to exclude the teaching of evolution is a way to disregard the separation of church and state.
According to Julia Layton, “The intelligent design (ID) movement claims that life as we know it could not have developed through random natural processes — that only the guidance of an intelligent power can explain the complexity and diversity that we see today.”
With no testable or defendable hypothesis, this sounds a great deal like a religious view. While supporters of the ID movement claim that this intelligent power isn’t a Christian god but instead a “designer”, I as well as many people in the education community find this to be quite frankly comical. The juxtaposition of these two differing views was displayed in the court case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District.
In 2004, two Dover Area School District employees decided that ID should be presented as a “counter balance” to evolution. After a segment of ID ideas were read aloud to ninth grade biology classes in the district, eleven parents of students sued the school district. One of the biggest arguments the defendants offered was that they did not teach ID, but rather they only made students aware of the idea’s existence as an alternative to evolution.
At the close of the highly controversial trial, Judge John Jones ruled that to read the ID views to students is unconstitutional and he wrote, “We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.”
While many evolution non-believers reason that a fair compromise in our school systems would be to teach neither ID nor evolution, this is just not true. While at first glance this may seem like a good idea to mitigate the turmoil between the two schools of thought, this cannot be done, because not teaching a subject due to the fact that it clashes with a religious view is unconstitutional. While opponents of evolution may say that it is merely a hair-brained theory with holes in its components, according to John Rennie (2002), “the massing evidence from paleontology, genetics, zoology, molecular biology and other fields gradually established evolution’s truth beyond reasonable doubt.”
Greenawalt (2007) agrees with me about the problem with excluding pertinent information from students due to a clash with religious views in a quote by saying, “Educators should not rely on their own religious perspectives, or those of parents, to prevent the teaching of material that standards of a scientific discipline definitely indicate should be included.”
Religion being presented as a fact in public schools is unconstitutional, and no better is the exclusion of heavily researched and factually based theories due to its opposition to religion. While it may seem that I am completely against religion in schools, I do believe that there should be classes available where students learn about the many different religions in the world, but no more and no less credence should be given to one religion over the other. Understandably, this notion that I have just presented is far more difficult to carry out than it would seem to be. Everyone has opinions, including teachers and students, which means they could unknowingly disparage different religions that conflict with their own personal beliefs. While it would be nice to see this done effectively and fairly, for the most part, religion does not and never should have a place being taught alongside scientific theories in our schools.
Works Cited
20 Quotes From the Founding Fathers on the Separation of Church and State that Will Make Conservative Christians’ Lose Their Minds! (2014). Retrieved June 04, 2016, from http://aattp.org/twenty-quotes-from-the-founding-fathers-on-the-separation-of-church-and-state/
Greenawalt, K. (2005). Does God belong in public schools? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. (n.d.). Retrieved June 04, 2016, from http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day6pm.html
Layton, J. (2005). How Intelligent Design Works. Retrieved June 04, 2016, from http://people.howstuffworks.com/intelligent-design.htm
Rennie, J. (n.d.). 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense. Retrieved June 04, 2016, from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/15-answers-to-creationist/
