The Establishment Clause and Public Schools in the 21st Century

Chapter 1 illuminates the educational and legal contexts in which yoga and meditation entered the U.S. cultural mainstream. Beginning in the seventeenth century, public schools taught Protestant Christianity. Since the mid-twentieth century, public schools have been tasked by courts with providing a secular education and by educational reformers with shaping moral character and ethical behavior. Yoga and meditation appeal to educators because they promise not only to enhance physical, mental, and emotional health but also to instill morality and ethics without promoting religion. The U.S. Supreme Court issued a series of landmark rulings, among them Engel v. Vitale (1962) and School of Abington Township v. Schempp (1963), that prohibited public schools from endorsing religious practices such as prayer and Bible reading. The Court developed constitutional tests, the Lemon test, endorsement test, and coercion test, for identifying violations of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, based on principles of religious voluntarism, equality, and nondiscrimination. Through the federal cases Malnak v. Yogi (1979) and United States v. Meyers (1996), courts developed the Malnak-Meyers indicia of religion. In 2008, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) identified the imposition of yoga and meditation as reverse religious discrimination.

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K-20 Technology Partnerships in a Rural Community

Handbook of Research on New Media Literacy at the K-12 Level ◽

10.4018/978-1-60566-120-9.ch039 ◽

2009 ◽

pp. 620-632

Author(s):

Linda R. Lisowski ◽

Claudia C. Twiford ◽

Joseph A. Lisowski ◽

Quintin Q. Davis ◽

Rebecca F. Kirtley

Keyword(s):

Public Schools ◽

Rural Community ◽

21St Century ◽

21St Century Learning ◽

Lessons Learned ◽

Roles And Responsibilities ◽

Use Of Technology ◽

Technology Partnerships ◽

And Mathematics ◽

K 12

Public schools need to address issues of 21st century literacy, which go beyond reading and mathematics to include teamwork and technological proficiency. The authors have worked collaboratively to develop K-20 technology partnerships that provide 21st century learning to benefit all stakeholders. In this chapter, the authors discuss three of these partnerships and the benefits and barriers associated with them. Lessons learned included the need for: 1) immediately available technological and pedagogical support; 2) formalized roles and responsibilities between K-12 and university partners; 3) personnel who can take over a role or responsibility in emergencies; and 4) opportunities to plan ahead together. The authors hope that their lessons learned can inform other K-20 collaborations as they develop innovative 21st century partnerships through the use of technology.

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Yoga Spirituality in the Context of US Institutions

10.1093/oso/9780197565001.003.0014 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 262-277

Author(s):

Candy Gunther Brown

Keyword(s):

Public Schools ◽

First Amendment ◽

Social Practice ◽

Social Institutions ◽

Social Contexts ◽

Establishment Clause ◽

Legal Context ◽

Legal Precedent ◽

Institutional Contexts

This chapter examines yoga as a spiritual and a social practice. It considers three institutional contexts for interpreting yoga spirituality: religion, law, and education. Social institutions such as public schools and courts of law must arbitrate interpretive contests by formulating and applying definitions for the purposes of educational policy and legal precedent. In making such determinations, it would be naive to accept all assertions of identity and meaning as full disclosures. Sometimes the same people describe the same practice as “spiritual” or “secular,” depending upon whether the legal context is First Amendment religious free exercise clause protection or establishment clause restriction. Decisions about how to categorize practices rest in large part on pragmatic concerns. This case study invites scholars of spirituality to pay closer attention to how legal and social contexts shape how people think and talk about practices in relation to the interpretive categories of “spirituality,” “religion,” and “secularity.”

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Empire and ethnocentric education

Education and Race from Empire to Brexit ◽

10.1332/policypress/9781447345824.003.0002 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 23-46

Author(s):

Sally Tomlinson

Keyword(s):

Public Schools ◽

Working Class ◽

British Empire ◽

21St Century ◽

White People ◽

Historical Events ◽

School Teaching ◽

Invented Traditions ◽

Trade Wars

Chapter I notes that while necessarily selective of historical events, explanations for the 2016 Brexit vote, trade wars, race and migrant antagonisms and hatreds must start with the British Empire, especially in the later 19th century when power and wealth were concentrated in a white world. Racial ignorance and assumptions of national superiority have continued into the 21st century. The chapter discusses the emergence of mass education from around 1870 which was influenced by events associated with imperialism and its ideologies. It records that British values and invented traditions, imbued with nationalism, militarism and racial arrogance, were filtered down from public schools to state secondary and elementary school. Teaching, textbooks and youth literature reflected and entrenched beliefs in the superiority of white people and distrust of foreigners. There were some signs that the white working class recognised a connection between imperial rule and their own class position.

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