Reconsidering religion: Towards a broader understanding of multicultural education in U.S. public schools

This dissertation analyzed the legal and policy issues involved with teaching about religion in U.S. public schools as part of a multicultural curriculum. U.S. public schools are government entities, and thus, the people who work within the public education system are bound by U.S. laws, policies, regulations and court rulings relating to schools. This dissertation used federal and lower court rulings dealing with Constitutional demands for the separation of church and state and the resulting public school policies and practices to highlight the difficulties many school teachers and administrators have attempting to sift through dense and often vague or contradictory legal dicta contained therein.;Additionally, this dissertation combined legal, religious and socio-political theories to create a new theoretical framework, Critical Religious Legal Theory, which was then used to analyze the structures that shape educational law and policy in the realm of teaching about religion in public schools. The analysis focused on critically analyzing the laws and policies dealing with religion and public schools as social phenomena and as tools of control, and the education law and policy makers in the context of the social and political atmosphere at the time that the laws/policies were created. This dissertation also critically analyzed the generally accepted Christian norms in public education and America's reliance upon ceremonial deism, as it relates to public schools. And this research explained how religion has been used as a tool of control and how and why religion can and should be demystified through the use of multicultural curricula that are inclusive of religion to (amongst other things) promote secular "moral truths" in character education like goodness, justice, love, truth while dispelling the religious stereotypes and prejudices that have been promulgated. The research generated by this dissertation, along with the pre-existing body of research on the intersection of religion and public schools, can be used by researchers, administrators and educators to expand the curricula in public schools to include courses where religion is discussed, in a constitutionally permissible manner, to inoculate against the ignorance behind many religiously motivated hate crimes.