Colleen Coombs of Santa Ana, California, is the kind of parent most teachers welcome in their schools. When her daughter was in kindergarten, Coombs started volunteering at her elementary school. She helped out with art projects, graded papers, and planned class parties. She was there for field trips and PTA fund-raisers.
Coombs is also a Christian, and she meets monthly with a group of moms to pray for their children and their children's teachers and schools. Her group, called Moms In Touch, also bakes cookies for teachers and administrators and sends them notes expressing appreciation for their work.
“There's no agenda, except praying for and encouraging the people who are teaching our children. The teachers know that I'm not here to criticize, I'm here to help,” Coombs says.
Recent Gallup polls show that 94 percent of Americans believe in God and nearly half of us—43 percent—attend church weekly. Other polls have found that 65 percent of Americans feel that religion is an important part of their lives (Barna 1992). Yet, instead of emphasizing our common experience, some groups are conducting a harsh campaign against religious parents who want to work in partnership with educators.
At a national education conference in May 1993, Frosty Troy, a radio commentator who says he tracks the Religious Right, told educators that, “[People within the Religious Right] have a political agenda, and they're using a religious rationale to press it. But what is new about that? Look at what Hitler and Goebbels did in Germany.” Arthur J. Kropp, president of People for the American Way (PAW), has alleged in his fund-raising letters that Religious Right groups “work in the gutter” to “divide us along racial, economic, and gender lines.”
Whom are Kropp and Troy talking about? Just like other parents, religious parents are concerned about whether or not schools are preparing our children to be productive citizens. But they also worry that what children learn in school increasingly undermines their moral belief system.
Shared Concerns
- Multiculturalism. On the surface, multiculturalism sounds good: Teach everyone to live together and make the most of our differences instead of letting them divide us. Religious parents who write us grow concerned when multiculturalism becomes what Jewish scholar Dennis Prager calls “multi-morality”—giving students a choice from among a number of moral systems, some of which conflict with each other on key points (1992).Just as some parents would not want a teacher to lead students in a Christian prayer, many Christian parents do not want teachers to lead their children to believe that homosexuality is normal and acceptable. Homosexuality is condemned by the majority of world religions, and many parents feel that to treat it as morally equivalent to heterosexuality is to fly in the face of hundreds of millions of believers and millennia of moral teachings.
- Sex education. Sexuality, once discussed in homes, is now a topic of small group discussion in health class. Why should religious parents be concerned, especially when the spread of sexually transmitted diseases is epidemic? Education is essential, but the question is, what kind? Many parents want abstinence emphasized, and although some curriculums claim to encourage abstinence, they often stray into explicit descriptions of sexual acts.Some schools go a step further by distributing free condoms to students, sometimes without parental permission or even parental knowledge. These circumstances make many religious parents wonder whether they still have rights and fuel their suspicions of educators.
- Religion. Many religious parents believe that schools, facing threats from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, have overreacted to court interpretations of church-state separation. Even nonreligious parents would be alarmed to hear that a 9th grader in Tennessee was not allowed to write a research paper on the life of Jesus Christ, even though other students wrote on reincarnation, spiritualism, and other historic religious figures (Brittney Settle v. Dickson County School Board).
Parents worry, too, that some educators have completely forgotten the role religious people played in America's heritage—how religious people founded our first institutes of higher learning and our health care systems.
Do these parents resemble Nazi war criminals, as Frosty Troy charges? Is the expression of these concerns “working in the gutter”?
A Community Partnership
Most educators agree that successful education is a partnership between school, home, and the community. Because many religious parents are concerned, they are attending school meetings in larger numbers and becoming more involved with the educational process.
Increasingly, however, the parents who write us say they are being banned from the debate. We hear stories of teachers and principals who will not allow parents to review textbooks. Some parents have been assigned to review committees, only to discover that the important decisions had already been made. Others say cumbersome complaint and review processes tie them up so long that their children have moved on to another school before the issues are resolved.
Yes, some parents on both sides of the social values debate sometimes behave irresponsibly. But the political left is waging a campaign to vilify religious parents in the eyes of school officials.
For 11 years, People for the American Way has produced an annual report listing cases of “attempted censorship” in America's schools. Who are the culprits? This year parents or grandparents represented 244 of PAW's 347 “censorship attempts.” When a citizen complains to a school board member (in most cases an elected politician), PAW calls it “censorship.” Most parents call it democracy.
PAW's attacks poison the atmosphere in America's schools. Educators stop viewing parents as partners and see them as adversaries. Parents get the message that they're not wanted, so many of them stay away out of fear, or they grow suspicious and adversarial.
This “us against them” mentality plays into the hands of extremists who wish to discredit an entire bloc of American parents. When one element of the community is singled out, branded as extreme, and dismissed, the partnership breaks down; the trust between community and school is violated.
Peace in the Neighborhood
Is it possible to disagree and still function as a community? Five years ago political and philosophical adversaries who rarely communicate with one another found the courage to sign the Williamsburg Charter, a kind of peace treaty that affirms the involvement of religious people in public life and calls on all of us to “live with our deepest differences.”
- Religious liberty, or freedom of conscience, is a precious, fundamental, and inalienable right.
- The First Amendment's “No Establishment” clause separates church from state but not religion from politics or public life.
- Exclusion of religion from public life is historically unwarranted, philosophically inconsistent, and profoundly undemocratic.
Although national leaders sometimes fail to hold the peace, perhaps parents and teachers at the local level can do better. Would you, as educators, be willing to sign and honor a Williamsburg Charter of your own with members of your community?
As a nation, we cannot afford to turn our backs on those who provide us a moral and religious conscience. Amitai Etzioni, professor of sociology at George Washington University, recently wrote that “to object to the moral voice of the community, and to the moral encouragement it provides, is to oppose the social glue that helps hold the moral order together” (1993).
Religious parents do not ask for public schools to endorse their faith. They ask for a place at the table and a voice in the process. If they asked for anything less, they would not be worthwhile citizens.
