A state college or university, through its administrators and, in some contexts, its faculty and students, is a constitutional actor. This statement surprises many who work in public higher education. Because students, staff, faculty members, and visitors retain their constitutional rights, those who act on behalf of public colleges and universities are constitutional actors, the paramount duty is to obey the Constitution. The constitutional obligations trump other duties under statutes, regulations, guidance documents, union agreements, internal policies, and faculty rules.
Because they are flawed human beings, university administrators are no more or no less virtuous than other governmental actors are. Like other government officials, higher education administrators may pursue their own interests at the expense of the public interests, may reward their friends and punish their enemies, and may subordinate the constitutional rights of others to their own well-intentioned policy objectives. Constitutional conflict and constitutional litigation are inevitable. Like government officials outside of academe, a public college or university’s constitutional actors must ensure their own behavior conforms to the Constitution while striving to ensure their colleagues also comply.
Although constitutional conflicts for public universities arise in many contexts, disputes involving the “first freedom” of religious liberty are quite common. Americans are a religious people and, while they differ on fundamental theological questions, there is a broad consensus around the existence of a higher power. Consequently, their government’s foundational documents explicitly acknowledge the unalienable right of religious liberty. This acknowledgment takes the form of the Establishment Clause, which prevents the government from favoring a particular faith, and the Free Exercise Clause, which prohibits government interference with religious practice.
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Religious Liberty in American Public Higher Education
William E. Thro
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Religion in Schools in the United States
Suzanne Rosenblith
The relationship between religion and public education has been fraught with misunderstanding, confusion, tension, and hostility. Perhaps more so than other forms of identity, for many, religion evokes a strong sense of exclusivity. Unlike other forms of identity, for many, particularly the religiously orthodox, religious identity is based on a belief in absolute truth. And for some of the orthodox, adherence to this truth is central to their salvation. Further, unlike cultural identity, religion is oftentimes exclusive in its fundamental claims and assertions. In short, matters of religious faith are indeed high stakes. Yet its treatment in public schools is, for the most part, relatively scant. Some of this is because of uncertainty among educators as to what the law permits, and for others it is uncertainty of its rightful place in democratic pluralistic schools.
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Jan Amos Comenius
Stephen Tomlinson
Jan Amos Comenius (b. 1592) is widely recognized as a pivotal figure in the history of educational thought. Living during a period of great turmoil he promoted universal schooling as the means to engineer a perfectly harmonious world. His argument turned upon claims to scientific knowledge and a didactic method that could instill truth in all minds. As the ever expanding scholarship on Comenius demonstrates, many still find inspiration in this visionary project. But Comenius’ work must be read in the context of Early Modern thought. Convinced that life was situated in the divinely crafted cosmos pictured in the Book of Genesis, his overarching goal was to restore “the image of God in man” and realize the Golden Age depicted in prophecy. The school was to be a workshop for the reformation of mankind, a place to manufacture of right thinking and right acting individuals. I explore these epistemological and pedagogic arguments and demonstrate their role in his hugely successful Latin primer, Orbis pictus (1658). Comenius, I conclude, was a revolutionary thinker who married subtle observations about the process of learning with sophisticated instructional practices. However, given current views about human nature and the social good, these principles cannot be applied uncritically to contemporary educational problems.
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Spiritual Development and the Preparation of Teachers
Sunil Behari Mohanty
Spirituality is concerned with eternal truth and universality and is essential for sustainable development. Many education systems also view spirituality as a part of religion as religious organizations also consider that their activities promote spiritual development. Such a situation has led many secular nations to avoid spiritual education. However, universities in secular countries have been conducting studies on spiritual intelligence of individuals and also spiritual development in students and teachers reflected in their day to day activities. Certain school systems have been giving stress on spiritual development of students. Many co-curricular activities including prayer classes contribute to the development of spirituality in school students. At the higher education stage, discussions and debates play crucial role in making students realize the limitations of religions and evil effects of religious fanaticism. Spiritual development has its origin in the mother’s womb. The spiritual practices of the mother have much influence on the baby. Later, family members contribute to the spiritual development of the baby. Although the foundation of the spiritual development of an individual is laid by one’s family members, it is nurtured by a formal education system that is steered by teachers. Hence, the preparation of teachers for this role has assumed significance. The teaching about various spiritual leaders and their contributions to education system is utilized by teacher training programs in making their trainees aware of importance of spirituality in the life of an individual. High quality teacher training programs Train their trainees in skills of conducting debates, dialogue sessions, discussions and conducting a plethora of co-curricular activities for developing spirituality in school students.
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Classroom Ethics
Hugh Sockett
Classroom ethics is the responsibility of both the teacher and the learner. The teacher is an autonomous moral agent; and the child-learner is in the process of becoming one, so classroom ethics cannot be seen as managed by the teacher, or salient sources of moral agency will be neglected. Definitions of both “classroom” and “ethics” situate an inquiry focused on American schools. The child’s ethical experience of a classroom can be found in friendship and trustworthiness, or the lack of either, and in children’s ethical transgressions, cheating and bullying. Classrooms are not always benign environments and can be places of fear and loneliness. How teachers respond to these four elements of the child’s classroom experience is central to their moral agency as teachers. The quality of ethics in a classroom is central to, not exclusively determined by, the four elements in moral agency—namely, ethical sensitivity, including race, prejudice, and diverse classrooms; ethical judgment and religious issues; ethical motivation and a plea for altruism, yielding teachers’ ethical actions. Classroom ethics are not acquired by teachers as moral techniques. The basis for classroom quality lies in teachers and student teachers having a strong moral identity, presently being crowded out by testing, management theory such that teachers are unable to grow their moral autonomy as professionals through the onerous and threatening activities of educational systems, their administrators and politicians.
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Religious and Cultural Diversity in Spanish Education
Sergio Andrés Cabello and Joaquín Giró Miranda
Treatment of cultural and religious diversity is one of the most important debates in education, especially in societies in the first decades of the 21st century, in which globalization processes have led to increased migration. Different models exist for addressing religious and cultural diversity in compulsory education, linked to the different ways of approaching the integration of immigrant groups. The treatment of diversity, equality, and respect for fundamental rights are the axes on which most of these proposals revolve, which in the case of the religious issue acquire specific dimensions by generating a wider debate. In the Spanish case, the treatment of cultural diversity and, fundamentally, religious diversity is situated both within the framework of general conceptions and with particular elements.
The contemporary scenario of how the Spanish educational system addresses cultural and religious diversity is determined from the particular features of Spanish education and the immigration “boom” in Spain in much of the first decade of the 21st century. The evolution of legislation on diversity, the fact that education is a subject for ideological debate, and the need to face the challenge of a new social structure because of immigration, together with the importance of the Catholic Church in Spain, determine to a large extent the way this country has addressed religious diversity. The treatment of religious and cultural diversity continues to generate an important discussion in Spain, based on different theories about the topic.
