Fence Sitting: Religious or Spiritual Education?

For every debate, it seems there’s always someone stuck in the middle, someone who just can’t separate the issues into one black and one white side. When it comes to taking sides between Svi Shapiro and James Moffett, that person is yours truly - to a certain degree, anyway. Shapiro, in his essay A Parent’s Dilemma: Public vs. Jewish Education, argues for a religious-based education in a society where he believes the free market has destroyed the public’s values and sense of community, while Moffett, in Censorship and Spiritual Education, discusses a multicultural curriculum for the diverse world in which we live, and the necessity of such understanding in order to feel like part of a community. I have to admit that I agree with them both, although with neither author entirely.

While Shapiro discusses the benefits of a religious education, Moffett suggests a “spiritual” one, while defining spirituality as something wholly different from religion. Moffett asserts that spirituality “is the perception of oneness behind the plurality of things, peoples, and other forms… The supreme identification, of oneself with the One, brings about that reunion toward which religions work at the same time that it makes morality apply beyond the in-group to the world at large.” One must understand this distinction in order to evaluate each author’s argument and to see each argument’s relevance to one’s life.

Moffett advocates teaching children to have a sense of the rest of the world and to feel a part of that “whole,” and his method of preference lies within a multicultural education, rather than a particularly religious education. “However divinely inspired, any religion partakes of a certain civilization, functions through human institutions, and is therefore, culturally biased.” That bias is precisely what makes it so difficult for a religious education to be useful to its recipient in as diverse a society as we have here in America.

Children should be taught about all different cultures, and the inherent values of each in order to make them more understanding of the world in which they live. Moffett argues that stronger morality and community will result from this kind of understanding, “because the more that people identify with others, the better they act toward them.” Isn’t that what parents want for their children anyway, for them to be well acclimated to and accepting of the diversity all around them? Things might not be that simple, according to Moffett, who observed, in his dealings with fundamentalist protesters in West Virginia, that many parents are actually afraid that if their children learn of ways other than those of their families, they will abandon what they were taught at home. Well, granted it is a frightening idea that one’s children could possibly reject the cultural influence of the parent, although it is not as likely as one might like to think. Parents should learn to be more confident in the fact that they have passed on part of themselves, since their culture will be “transmitted” more through everyday life than through the school systems anyway, and realize what benefits lie in teaching their children about the rest of the world’s, or even the rest of the country’s, ways.

In this I agree with Moffett, that one needs to be educated in the ways of the other peoples around them in order to properly and peacefully function within society. However, children have very little basis for this kind of deeper cultural understanding without previous religious or spiritual influence, which is where my partial agreement with Shapiro comes into play. When children are younger, they do need to learn the kind of cultural identity that he advocates, especially in a culture which “continues to foster self-interest and a lack of concern for the common good…where the market place alone is the arbiter of economic investment and social values.”

Because of the impersonality of modern society, Shapiro argues for a religious education for his daughter, wanting to provide her with a certain richness in her everyday activities, which is something all people seem to struggle for today. He points out that denying her the public education and the multicultural curriculum that goes with it could breed a more narrow mind-set, but he feels that the risk of such, when countered by the intensity of a religious education outweighs the “thin” overview of the world which is provided in the public schools.

Public schools do teach too little about too much, it seems, rather than focusing on fewer subjects with more intensity, but the hope is to spark a child’s interest in all fields of study, and all aspects of themselves, while still leaving something left for discovery. Shapiro doesn’t seem to see this widespread education as something his daughter can utilize and decides to continue to send her to a Jewish school where her faith will be nurtured more than her sense of her place within the world, which will become a more crucial issue as she matures.

Children should be given a solid spiritual foundation upon which to stand, but when such focused and potentially biased schooling is continued for too long, the likely result is definitely an ignorance of the rest of the world and possibly a prejudiced outlook toward others. I agree with Shapiro’s wish for the well being of his daughter’s cultural identity, but what Shapiro doesn’t realize is that later in her life, that identity will only have meaning when placed into a more global context. Therefore, Shapiro’s educational views only apply to the education of younger children, who are more in need of a cultural foundation, which can certainly be found via religion, but once that is established, children must be educated on a much broader scope. At that point, the child should be transitioned from learning about himself or herself and his or her background to learning about the many different peoples of the world.

In this way children can begin to locate their place within the whole of society and the world. They can identify with other cultures via some common teachings and/or practices, and establish within their own minds the inherent values of other cultures, as well as begin to define which group they personally fit into. Children may not always decide that they fit into the same niche as their parents, but, as was mentioned before, parents should be secure enough to realize that children will always retain at least one, if not many of the principles they were raised with. Allow them to explore, for the children will be that much more at peace with themselves and the world for the experience.

The methods suggested by Moffett better suit the education of older children than younger children. I would argue for this type of broader education, but not before children obtain some sort of foundation of their own through a more focused, and possibly religious educational program. Without a religious or spiritual upbringing, I don’t feel that children can fully appreciate learning about other cultures. They would have no basis against which to measure what they learn about these other peoples. It is not that children should be enabled to judge the worth of other cultures, but without a standard already in place, they will not be able to see the true value in the practices cherished by other people. In this aspect I agree with Shapiro in the need for a religious education, although only for younger children.

A Parent’s Dilemma: Public vs. Jewish Education

The time had come far too soon for the author to decide between public education and Jewish education for his daughter. There is always the danger of one person’s individuality being lost in the grand scale of “moral, ideological, and political considerations,” but a parent cannot ignore the needs of the child just for the parent’s own concerns. The author lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, a somewhat conservative middle class area where the small Jewish community is “well-established and comfortable.”

Being Jewish in Greensboro is definitely a minority experience, but it is much more accepted than in other areas. The Jewish day school his daughter attends teaches traditional values and she has become very comfortable there. The decision in her school had to do with not only wanting to see her embrace and continue the Jewish tradition, but also for her to have that richness in her daily life. Support for politics that destroy public institutions goes hand in hand with the hostility toward the state’s “impersonality, inefficiency, and waste;” this perception has caused the Right to “gut” nearly everything with public in its name. Part of this assault is what “lionizes” the marketplace and cuts social supports for “the elderly, children, the unemployed, the poor, and the sick.”

The marketplace needs to be toned down because its importance is causing our culture to promote self-interest over the common good. “For all of its flaws, the state embodies some notion of a shared purpose; its ultimate client purports to be the public good, not simply the desirous ego.” Ironically, the conservatives who speak most against the decline of community have also been the ones to pursue the most freedoms in the marketplace. People only react when cuts in benefits hit home; the market has created a world where companies no longer feel any obligation to their “workers, consumers, or community.” But in spite of all of this, people still want a society with a strong sense of the common good. This struggle is most focused around public education, which is essential for a “democratic civil society.”

The “current crisis of democracy” is related to the lack of places for people to have meaningful critical conversation. Unfortunately, public schools are far from being what they were supposed to be and are still riddled with dividing lines of race, class, and resources. Public schools act as mirrors to the divisions within society. While public schools are supposed to level the playing ground for students, they actually tend to magnify the advantages of some and the disadvantages of others. Schooling doesn’t generally mean real learning, but rather regurgitating miscellaneous facts, and the underlying emphasis on success and therefore competition destroys any semblance of community within the school.

The “withdrawal of the middle class from public institutions” is part of the reason those institutions are declining – those provided by the public are seen to represent the poor and the standards of those in the private sector are much higher. In deciding whether to send his daughter to public school, the author must consider his own responsibility in such a withdrawal, and his commitment to those public institutions. How does one “reconcile a commitment to public education with the need to recognize and affirm cultural, religious, or other differences?” People increasingly realize how public education refuses to recognize the contributions of people from outside our cultural definitions. Even so, multicultural awareness has become trivialized, and the differences that make different peoples special is only taught superficially.

A multicultural education is rather “thin,” whereas the type of education received at a Jewish school would color his daughter’s entire life. Only an environment thick with Jewish culture can instill in a person a commitment to “Jewish life and continuity.” This kind of intense experience, however, could foster narrow-mindedness. They teach social responsibility at Jewish day schools, but they are also a very sheltered community. Critics observe postmodern society as one in which all kinds of barriers have collapsed, and that we are in an age of “unfixity, uncertainty, and flux.” This is certainly a good thing, but it comes at a price of “traumatic consequences for the young.” There is a strong desire for discipline in raising the young because of a strong sense of instability in terms of “place, family, and normative communities.”

Talk of discipline, values, and tradition are not just a conservative view anymore as parents struggle to raise their children in a society where suicide, drug abuse, and depression, among others, reign amid “cynical detachment from social institutions.” In the midst of this, Jewish schooling offers a concrete sense of identity in the long Jewish history of “for a world of justice and freedom,” and of being excluded. “Such identification is one of connectedness to and enduring moral and spiritual vision.” Jewish orthodoxy can be rigid but it seeks to make everyday life sacred. “It is in this synthesis of social responsibility and joyful mindfulness that we can find the beginnings of a meaningful response to the rampant cynicism and nihilism of our culture.” The school offers only limited ability to question and be critical, and it is important for people to be critical thinkers, but it is also important for them to be taught that the world can be changed.

Without rootedness and affirmation there is only apathy and cynicism. The Right is correct that people need discipline, only not that “of an obedient drone,” but the structure gained from responsibility and participation. Everyone needs to find a way to commit in an uncertain world of uncertain beliefs and principles such as ours. The author’s concern with his daughter’s Jewish education is not that he wishes her to be able to practice all of the rituals and such, but that she becomes more aware of the “worth and dignity of all the lives that share our world.” Even so, the author worries that such a choice will encourage others to simply become more separatist, rather than concerned with the world at large.

Censorship and a Spiritual Education

Morality and religion, which “function through human institutions,” are inherently culturally biased and focus largely on a particular group of people. Spirituality is a connection to the whole, rather than just to one group, and an education in such can achieve generally the same goals as religious teachings, although with more emphasis on plurality than on any single ideal.

American schools wrestle with this issue in choosing a curriculum; the most significant controversy over something such as textbooks having taken place in Kanawha County, West Virginia in 1974. Protesters kept their children from beginning school that year while they picketed the schools, their actions shadowed by sympathetic workers from various other occupations. Although the school board agreed to pull the books in question for review, protesters became more extremist, firebombing elementary schools and “roughing up” reporters, for example. The board ended up approving all but the most controversial of the books and the protests eventually died out after state troopers were allowed to intervene.

The author interviewed several of these protesters, analyzing their criticisms of the various books and found that what was most important to these people was their religious beliefs. It turned out that the protesters were very much afraid of their children being “kidnapped by voices from other milieus and ideologies,” and felt threatened by multicultural studies, open-ended discussion, et cetera. They objected to course material having anything to do with people outside of their own reference group, differences namely characterized by ethnicity, complaining that their own culture was not being passed on, but one must contemplate whose culture it is that should be passed on to such a diverse nation.

Protesters claimed that the books attacked authoritative figures, namely that of the family. These accusations were simply part of the struggle to determine if it should be the family or the school system that is blamed for “problem” children and the troubles of society. The protesters would not allow modernizations of religious stories, calling them blasphemous, or personal accounts of history, such as the Vietnam War, saying that such selections were only included to make students feel guilty. The real issue here was self-examination, which was resisted via the term “invasion of privacy;” the protesters preferred to continue to point fingers rather than looking in the mirror.

“Know thyself” should be first and foremost the focus of school curricula, for even concepts such as good citizenship and productivity would follow from personal development. Morbidity and negativity in literature were also targeted because the protesters denied the idea of such issues being a part of themselves. The case made by the censors for such exclusions dealt with the idea of focusing only on the positive. Even though literature deals with the “horrors” of self-examination, if works are not read too shallowly, they can still be viewed as “gospel” when the reader manages to put imagination into the reading. Religious education has been gradually replaced by English education, and the fundamentalist protesters are right to want to hold on to the spiritual education, and that society sees spirituality and religion as one in the same while it shies from both, but the fundamentalists cannot bring spirituality back into the classroom by restricting reading.

Spirituality can be restored by withdrawing the control over the students, such as by granting much more freedom in what students choose to read and in how they interact with others. Students should be negotiating reading materials for their own individual curricula, rather than faculty choosing one for a diverse population, which would not only undermine the practice of censorship but would also begin educating students spiritually. Social boundaries also restrict knowledge, understanding and spirituality, while learning on a much broader scope helps to overcome these limitations.

People tend to feel that self-identity depends upon one’s close-knit reference group, and they shut out anything that could potentially alter that identification, censoring themselves in the process. Literacy is feared because it is able to overcome cultural barriers, causing society to fear “transmitting” any more than one culture, anything other than one’s own, via literature. Culture is passed on in our daily lives rather than taught, so putting restrictions on things such as great books does nothing except keep culture from being added to as it is passed along. People are at war with one another because they try so desperately to pass on their ways at the expense of others’ ideas; they are trying to create conformity rather than unity. The perpetuation of culture lies in teaching the next generations to think for themselves so that they can help the culture to evolve, and if such is not allowed, that culture will eventually fall into extinction.