Democracy, Religion, and American Education

Author(s):  
Emile Lester

The debate over religion in public schools in the United States since the 1960s has pitted two forces of democracy celebrated in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract against each other. The Supreme Court’s exclusion of sectarian prayer and Bible reading reflected democracy’s commitment to respect the rights of all. The politically engaged response of evangelical and conservative Christians has drawn upon democracy’s need for robust participation by ordinary citizens. While Rousseau believed that only an agreement upon a civil religion could reconcile these democratic forces, the results of a required world religions course in Modesto, California, suggests otherwise. The course enhanced students’ respect for religious liberty while allowing them to maintain their sectarian beliefs. Modesto’s course did not resolve all the dilemmas of democracy, however. The aversion to open-ended class discussions neglects the value of democratic deliberation that notable democratic theorists like Jurgen Habermas and Amy Gutmann celebrate.

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 88 (5) ◽  
pp. 1047-1051
Author(s):  
James M. Perrin ◽  
Ruth E. K. Stein

On February 20, 1990, in Sullivan v Zebley, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down the Social Security Administration's criteria for determining eligibility of children with disabilities for Supplemental Security Income (SSI). This dramatic decision held that the existing regulations for the program discriminated against children, because children were required to meet a stricter standard than adults who applied for SSI. This decision overturned the current rules and procedures for the determination of access to a major federal benefits program and, in most states, to additional benefits through assured Medicaid eligibility. The Court also mandated that the Social Security Administration make changes that will significantly alter and liberalize access for children. Because many pediatricians may be unaware of the issues and the potential advantages for children in their care, we summarize below some of the pertinent background and implications of this landmark decision. BACKGROUND AND DESCRIPTION The Supplemental Security Income Program of the Social Security Administration, enacted by Congress in 1972, provides an income supplement to lower income disabled Americans, both children and adults. Persons older than 18 years of age who have a health problem that causes major disability and prevents participation in substantial gainful activity may receive cash benefits as part of a social policy effort that began in the Roosevelt era of the 1930s, although specific disability programs did not begin until the 1960s. Children also may receive cash benefits under certain similar conditions. The SSI program was designed primarily as a social benefit program to improve the financial standing of aged, blind, and disabled individuals, but it also brings automatic eligibility for Medicaid for individuals who qualify for SSI in 31 states and the District of Columbia.


Author(s):  
Mark Goodman ◽  
Stephen Brandon ◽  
Melody Fisher

<p>In 1968 social movements sparked rhetorical discourses which occurred in many nations and on hundreds of colleges and in communities across the United States.  These rhetorical discourses ultimately changed the direction of human events.  Sometimes these points of ideological protests shared views on specific issues, especially demonstrations against the Vietnam War, but each conflict was also its own local conflict.  There is no evidence that any specific group organized the protests, or that speakers motivated demonstrations, or that the rhetoric of one protest caused other protests.  Yet, the protests were not just spontaneous fires that happened to occur in the same year. So, how is it that so many protesters shared the desire for change and shared rhetoric, but each protest was sparked by local issues?  Answering that question provides insight into how the rhetoric of social movements occurred in 1968. </p><p>               Many scholars call for the study of the social movements of the 1960s.  Jensen (1996) argues, “The events of the 1960s dramatically increased the interest in studying social movements and forced rhetorical scholars to reconsider their methods for studying public discourse” (p. 28). To Lucas (2006), “Words became weapons in the cultural conflict that divided America” (x). Schippa (2001) wrote, “Many accounts identify the 1960s as a turning point. For better or for worse, there was a confluence of changing rhetorical practices, expanding rhetorical theories, and opportunities for rhetorical criticism. The cultural clashes of the 1960s were felt perhaps most acutely on college campuses. The sufficiency of deliberative argument and public address can be said to have been called into question, whether one was an antiwar activist who hated LBJ's war in Vietnam or a pro-establishment stalwart trying to make sense of the rhetoric of protest and demonstration. Years later, scholars would characterize war itself as rhetorical. What counted as rhetorical practice was up for grabs”(p. 261).</p>               First, this paper will frame the protest movement of 1968.  Then, we will search for the common factors that shaped the protests of 1968, focusing on the role of music. This analysis will provide insight into how music became a rhetorical force in a significant social movement of the 20th Century.


Author(s):  
Crawford Gribben

Since the 1960s, a growing number of American evangelicals have withdrawn their children from “government schools,” seeking alternative provision either in private Christian day schools or in parentally provided education within the home. Over two million American children are being home educated, and in the last few years, the number of children involved in home education has grown at a rate around twelve times that of the number of students entering public schools. Across the United States, but especially in north Idaho, an increasing number of believers are turning to several varieties of Christian education to dispute the minoritarian and subcultural assumptions of those believers who have conceded to liberal expectations, and to educate a generation of the faithful that will work to reclaim and eventually control the cultural mainstream. The influence of conservative religion on the public school system has never been greater, but in home schools, private schools, and liberal arts colleges, education has become a vital weapon in strategies of survival and resistance in evangelical America.


2021 ◽  
pp. 17-30
Author(s):  
Kathleen Wellman

This chapter discusses the three publishers of the textbooks this book treats: Bob Jones University, Abeka Books, and Accelerated Christian Education. It addresses when and why they began to publish and the controversies and legal challenges they subsequently generated. It explores the history of their sponsoring educational institutions and their stated missions. It places them in the context of Christian opposition to public education as it developed in response to the teaching of evolution, the Supreme Court decisions of the 1960s prohibiting prayer and Bible reading in public schools, and, most importantly, desegregation. These three publishers have offered an alternative “Christian” education since the early 1970s.


2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 630-630
Author(s):  
Glenn Perusek

For more than a generation, as the authors rightly point out, the impact of organized labor on electoral politics has been neglected in scholarly literature. Indeed, only a tiny minority of social scientists explicitly focuses on organized labor in the United States. Although the impact of the social movements of the 1960s appeared to heighten awareness of the importance of class, race, and gender, class and its organized expression, the union movement, has received less attention, while studies of race and gender have flourished.


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-301
Author(s):  
Ryan Patrick Murphy

This essay offers a genealogy of lifestyle, a category widely used in the 1960s to mark dissident kinship networks and sexual practices: single parenting, bisexuality, gender nonconformity, polyamory, cohabitation, and communal living, among many others. I argue that the concept of lifestyle emerged in a desire among white mid-twentieth-century suburbanites for the social and sexual worlds that preceded rapid suburbanization, those most visible in the immigrant industrial metropolis at its peak in the decades immediately before the United States drastically restricted immigration in 1924. Even at the apex of suburbanization in the 1960s, many people refused to comply with the demand for suburban domesticity, staying in the city, joining countercultural groups, or adopting what came to be called alternative lifestyles. But in that act of dissent, urban planners, real estate developers, and marketing experts saw an opportunity and began to sell urban lifestyle landscapes that they claimed would reproduce the sexual heterogeneity of the early twentieth-century industrial metropolis. By the 1980s, as ever more people lived outside the nuclear family, a growing lifestyle market drove up prices in central cities that amplified the class and race exclusions that the social movements of the 1960s contested. This article is therefore both a critical and a recuperative reading of lifestyle, one that uses the category to show how dissident sexualities can be both the harbinger of the niche-marketed gentrified city and an incitement to new ways of living and loving that advance the pursuit of economic justice.


1967 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 657-674 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Carroll

The Supreme Court of the United States, whose decisions not only define constitutional law but vitally affect national policy, has long held both an honored and a controversial place in American life. In no area do its decisions bring it more honor or more controversy than in the field of religion; for, as a member of the First Congress under the Constitution said, “the rights of conscience are, in their nature, of peculiar delicacy, and will little bear the gentlest touch of governmental hand. … Thus, the same decision of the Court may be hailed by some as a great landmark in the struggle for religious liberty, and denounced by others as a serious invasion of liberty of conscience. For although it may be pleasant to dream of religion insulated from governmental touch, the dual membership of citizens in the state and in religious bodies insures that conscience and government will touch at some points with inevitable friction, and, to the conscience so touched, it makes little difference whether the governmental hand is that of a local school board, the Congress, or the Supreme Court of the United States.The Court has recently been attacked as antireligious, or at least as callous to our religious heritage, because of its decisions invalidating a state-prescribed prayer and state-prescribed Bible reading in public schools. The first of these decisions prompted the more excited outcry, but the two, at first singly and then together, have precipitated a renewed debate about the proper constitutional relationship between the state and religion.


1983 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Colin Renfrew

The role of the New Archaeology of the 1960s is recognized as decisive in the history of archaeology: an awakening from the “long sleep of archaeological theory” from about 1880 to 1960. But at the same time, limitations in the New Archaeology are responsible for corresponding defects in the present scene. The first of these is the lack of clear policy for the handling and especially the publication of data. It is argued that the outstanding defect of Cultural Resource Management, especially in the United States, is the failure to promote a clear policy that all survey work and all excavations should be adequately published. Accompanying this is the inadequate provision for the effective retrieval, at a national level, of the information which does emerge from CRM projects. The responsibility for this lies at the door of the academic archaeologists.The second defect is the failure to recognize that the New Archaeology primarily offered new and interesting problems, not ready solutions. The widespread misconception that processual archaeology has become “normal science” is partly responsible for the lack of steam in the current theoretical scene in the United States. Some alternative approaches are indicated, and it is suggested that cognitive archaeology may, in the 1980s and 1990s, take its place alongside the social archaeology of the past two decades as a significant growth area.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-53
Author(s):  
Vlada V. Koroleva

The article is dedicated to the problem of the position of women in cities and to creation and formation of “women’s spaces” in the United States in 1960-1980. Following the development of the second wave of feminism, we focused the attention not only on the movement for civil rights itself but also on the activities of organizations and women who were trying to improve the living conditions of female citizens. Prisoners in their homes, women have always been associated more with the suburbs than with the cities themselves. They were never seen as citizens, but rather as rare guests in this urban space. In order to make cities more women-friendly, feminists began to create exclusive women’s spaces that would help women not only get out from their house-arrest but also solve difficult life situations. Shelters, women’s health centers, women’s libraries, book clubs and kindergartens – all of these new spaces helped an American woman move out of the alienation spaces of their houses and gain new opportunities for self-development.


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