The reasoning theists, atheists, liberals, libertarians, & conservatives of Secular Bible Study, First Minneapolis Circle of Reason, Circle of Ijtihad, & Winnipeg Circle of Reason join Interbelief Conversation Café for our 316th Plurationalist (Interbelief Reasoning) Dialogue by Zoom, "Should We Have the Right to Religiously Teach Our Kids?"
In the Bible’s Old Testament chapter Deuteronomy 6:6-7, Moses suggests religious teaching should be the role of parents -- and practiced at home, saying, “You must think constantly about these commandments I am giving you today. You must teach them to your children and talk about them when you are at home or out for a walk; at bedtime and the first thing in the morning.” Later, the notion of replacing or supplementing home schooling with both totally controlled-state schools vs. free independent universities had become ingrained in different Grecian city-states -- such as Sparta vs. Athens, with this dichotomy continuing through the Roman Empire until the European Dark Ages. Until its European Renaissance, the Dark Ages in Europe were not the place to learn knowledge – which was instead maintained and flourished in the Middle East, as the Islamic Golden Age. There, schooling transitioned from local mosques’ religious and literacy instruction, to institutionalized universities that freely housed, fed, and taught students both religious doctrine and secular sciences including logic, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine -- because the Quran encouraged not just comprehending and practicing The Prophet’s moral instruction, but also encouraged all studies of the natural world. Christianity thus retained an emphasis on being taught through home schooling and churches, until the rise of Catholic universities became patterned after those in Islamic countries.
In 1781 C.E., Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia likewise supported the primacy of local parents’ control of all schooling, including moral or religious schooling, rather than the primacy of federal schooling, saying, “A question of some doubt might be raised…as to the rights and duties of society towards its members, infant and adult. Is it a right or a duty in society to take care of their infant Members in opposition to the will of the parent? How far does this right and duty extend? To guard the life of the infant, his property, his instruction, his morals? It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible transportation and education of the infant against the will of the father.” Yet Jefferson also founded the University of Virginia, to ensure that a parallel, secular higher education would be imbued within the minds of those pupils he envisioned would follow him as future elected representatives of the new constitutional democratic republic of the United States. (He and his university thereby enrolled only wealthy white men, like him. But UVA later accepted the call to open its doors of higher knowledge and science to everyone else -- in 1970 C.E., when it finally accepted women, Black, and poor students.)
In modern times, since the mid 1800s C.E., racial, religious &/or political nationalism, imperialism, and totalitarianism has resurged in countries within every continent, including Asia, the Middle East, Australia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas -- spurring antagonism between secular universities or public schools, and local religious schools or religious home-schooling. In the U.S., private religious home-schooling and private religious schools are permitted by states and the present federal government, but federal & state legislators are now seeking to re-impose religious education in public state schools (banned since the 1950s by the SCOTUS on 1st Amendment grounds) and in private or public universities – but these latter efforts are to date still being legally thwarted by lower courts that are still upholding the 1st Amendment right of citizens, including students, to be free of any government establishment of religion (regardless of whether that religious doctrine is the Christian Ten Commandments or Muslim Sharia Law). The SCOTUS has been picking away at its earlier 1950s precedent during successive Trump administrations, but has not yet explicitly allowed public or charter schools to mandate Christian, Muslim, or any other religious worship or indoctrination, although after 2022 it now permits parents to spend state “school-choice” tuition vouchers on either secular or religious schools.
In Canada, anachronistic British Empire traditions of separate funding for Catholic vs. Protestant religious schools, and for Quebec’s Catholic-dominated universities’ avoidance of co-ed teaching of women until 1936, ironically delayed the institution and funding of public & private school and university co-education for 1-3 generations relative to the U.S. (which, after its Civil War, adopted a “Republican Motherhood” initiative to ensure that, for its newly-vulnerable democratic republic to survive, all its citizens -- including its mothers needing to know how to properly instruct their children -- must be educated, even though that education would remain racially-segregated and thereby unequally-funded for at least another century).
So the question then arises, if parents now still aren’t free to establish their religion within the minds of other parents’ children, should parents at least still retain the right to establish their religion within the minds of their own children -- if not in public schools, then in private schools or by home-schooling? And, in turn, as Jefferson asked, how far should society’s rights and duties extend in the instruction of each child’s mind and morals? If the child’s parents are abrogating their responsibility to do so, should local, state, or federal governments step in to ensure not only the life and learning of that child, but also that child’s moral instruction?
And what does the state do about those parents who teach (or entrain?) their children to become militant theocrats? Or militant anti-theists? Or militant racists? Or militant misogynists? Or militant homophobes?
Moses and Jefferson had their say, quite a while ago.
But what say you?
At 7-9 pm CDT Mo 10/19/26 by Zoom we'll reasoningly share our diverse or even disparate worldviews on whether parents have a right to teach their own kids their personal favorite moral code, and a right to teach it to others’ kids as well. Meanwhile, our interbelief reasoning dialogue’s agreements of open-mindedness, acceptance, curiosity, discovery, sincerity, brevity, & confidentiality should help us weigh not only the moral codes in question, but also the morality of “teaching” versus “indoctrination.”
