Presenter A (Chair)

• In Event: 54.035 - Religion and Public Education in the United States: An Interdisciplinary Symposium

Abstract

Presenter A (Chair).

1. Objectives or purposes. As chair, my purpose will be to promote the exchange of ideas by identifying and highlighting key points of convergence and divergence in the ideas of the symposium participants.
2. I am a historian by training, and in my recent work on this subject I emphasize the ways in which the relationship between public schools and religion has reflected changing (and disputed) norms of democratic legitimacy. In this way I reject the “multicultural” perspective on religious history as overly simplistic and, with regard to educational history in particular, unhelpful. Such a perspective, I argue, gives us little understanding of the relationship between particular groups and their commitments to democratic life. While my approach does assert a normative stance, however, it is nevertheless sensitive to the great diversity of ways in which different groups have viewed the role for religion within their particular conceptions of democratic education, or their rejection of it. In my role as chair I see my framework as critical to fostering the dialogue in this symposium—acknowledging difference while still seeking common ground centered on the democratic purposes of public education.
3. Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry. This symposium is, by design, multidisciplinary, bringing together scholars rooted in the fields of history, philosophy, and theology. While my own training is historical, I draw on democratic theory and my broad knowledge of past and present school policies in my orientation toward the chairing of this panel.
4. Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials. In my role as chair, my initial presentation will highlight the work of each of the symposium participants, which will serve as my primary evidence and materials both for my initial comments and for my moderation of the event. Our discussion will synthetic in nature, drawing on a wide body of scholarship on various aspects of religion and its relationship to public education, particularly in relation to contemporary school reform policies.
5. Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view. I know you require me to answer this question for a symposium proposal, but I’m at a bit of a loss to say more than I already have. I cannot predict the results or the conclusion. I can promise you that there will be a variety of points of view, and that each, as you will read in the pages that follow, will be grounded in each author’s deep body of scholarship on these questions.
6. Scholarly significance. Most of the work on religion and public education is discipline specific and (often) written in the service of preexisting secular and religious. My own scholarship is significant in that it uses democratic theory as a normative stance on historical analysis. Surely this is an agenda, too, but one that is rarely used explicitly by historians.

Author

• Benjamin J. Justice, Rutgers University