Tag Archives: teaching religion

Speaking with Turkish teachers about religion

19 Friday Jul 2013

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Recently we had the chance to speak with a group of Turkish high school teachers and professors of education. We discussed the common concerns of teachers – serving students of differing backgrounds and abilities, preparing students for standardized tests, responding effectively to parental concerns, etc. I also had the opportunity to ask a little bit about teaching religion in the schools. Unfortunately I was not able to get into the detail I would have liked, but one point struck me.

I was speaking with a very secular teacher who expressed dismay at a recent change in the schools. Prior to two years ago, the state funded a relatively small number of religious high schools, intended to train students for the ministry or for Qur’anic teaching. They have now begun these religious schools with middle school, and expanded the number of students. The teacher commented, “They want to get the girls to cover [wear the hijab] as soon as they are adults” (meaning the traditional religious definition, c. 12 years old). The teacher also claimed that there would not be enough jobs for the people who gradate from these schools. When I asked another, passionately secular Turk, about this change he said “the Islamic radicals [note – those were his words – I think “religious conservatives” might be more accurate] want the student to go to these schools before he can think for himself and say no to his parents.”

On the other hand, a friend asked another secular teacher, “Are students allowed time off during school to pray?” and she reports that the teacher seemed horrified. “No – they can pray on their own time.” And the veil is still disallowed in the state schools. If I am understanding the situation correctly, then, the schools appear to be a battleground for enforced secularism vs. enforced religiosity.

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Teaching religion in Jordan

02 Sunday Oct 2011

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At "Amman Beach," a day resort designed for Jordanians at the Dead Sea, Arabic speakers wore everything from two piece bathing suits to, as here, niqab. (Notice that modesty does not prevent her from taking a cell phone picture of the swimmer!)

My latest interviewee recently retired from teaching after twenty-three years. He taught religion and Islamic history in a government school in the north of Jordan, near the Syrian boarder. He found teaching to be hard; so many students in a class, so many class hours in a week, low pay, and the status of history and religion was so much lower than math and English language. Also, his narrative about his path to teaching religion was less than inspiring – he said that his math and science scores were not good enough to get him into medical school. That said, he did then mention that he sang the Qur’an well. I asked him what part of the Qur’an he thought would be most important for non-Muslims to know about. Interestingly, he did not mention specific verses but rather made two related points. First, the Arabic in the Qur’an is incredibly beautiful but very difficult to understand. Second, making sense of what the Qur’an is saying is not obvious.

While he did not make the connection directly, I believe he was making the point that while parts of the Qur’an could be interpreted to advocate violence, this would be a misreading. I conclude this because immediately after speaking of the difficulty of understanding the Qur’an, he began speaking of the peacefulness of the Jordanian people. He was extremely proud of being a Jordanian. He spoke about how upset he was that the Syrian regime was killing its’ own people. “You know that Assad means lion? Well the lion kills one animal and is full. This animal kills and kills and is never full. His father was the same. They drink the peoples’ blood.” This led us to several of his political beliefs. “President Assad is an Alawite – that is a bad kind of Shi’ite.” “Iran is why so much in the Middle East has problems – Syria, Lebanon.” “Sunni Muslims are peaceful.”

He then changed his demeanor slightly, and was a little more hesitant about saying the next piece. “You know there are two kinds of Jordanians – Jordanian Jordanians and Palestinian Jordanians. Jordanians are very hospitable. The Bedouins, in the old days, if your car broke down in the desert and no-one was around, a Bedouin would kill his sheep and have you stay for three days in his tent, get you help. The Palestinians are different.” “Everyone loves the king. Really – you know we have freedom of speech here – everyone loves him. You know the queen is Palestinian. So – this might be one of the problems. Also, King Hussein gave the Palestinians the same passport I have. I don’t know why – maybe it was the peace with Israel. Other places, it might say “Palestinian” on your passport, but here it just says Jordanian.” “A lot of the Palestinians have a lot of money.”

He was very proud of his children – one son, he reported with a smile, was in “the police – the secret police.” One of his daughters got top marks in science and was going on to university in science. When he had to have an operation recently, he had his teachers’ insurance, but his son’s job gave him access to the military hospital – “the best in Jordan.”

So some overall impressions: teaching religion in Jordan to Muslims means teaching the Muslim scriptures, theology and history. Someone with a religiously moderate outlook felt comfortable teaching in the government schools for many years. Class size and the status of the field are more concerning to a moderate than the content of the curriculum (though the language barrier prevented me from asking more about the curriculum itself). Finally, and less related to teaching, despite the government line, some Jordanians still clearly distinguish between those from Palestinian background and those who are not.

Teaching Bible in the religious schools

22 Thursday Sep 2011

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Doing Tanakh homework (photo credit: Flickr David55king)

Today I spoke with a woman who now works for a non-profit and who was a Bible teacher in a religious school. I so appreciated the time she took away from her work for our conversation. I’m lucky to have had the chance to meet her; in the course of our normal lives I suspect we would not have encountered each other. She lives in a small Jewish settlement far into the West Bank, and her husband runs a mechina (yearlong program between high school and the army) there to get students ready for the army. I would have loved to have asked her many things about her decision to be a settler. We did not talk politics, however – we talked religion!

What brought you into teaching?

Well, my father thought teaching good job for a woman. Also, I thought would be interesting. I wanted to work with people – that’s why I became both a school counselor and teacher. The teacher’s college was near my home. So it was natural.

I really wanted to teach but keeping discipline in the classroom became too much. Sometimes here we have 39 kids in a class. I wanted to talk about the Tanakh, what the students thought it meant. Especially in religious school,it’s not the first time the children have seen these stories. They’ve known them since gan, since kindergarten. So I wanted to talk about it with them. But there is not enough time with all of them. I tried to do some of that, but with the exams coming up I had to write it all on the board and have them copy it down. Tanakh should not be just knowledge, not just something to know. It is part of their lives. Now I feel like I do that work with my own children.

Why did you choose to teach Tanakh?

I knew it so well from the time I was a girl. Though I learned so much more about it when I became a teacher. 

What are some of the differences between religious school and secular school?

I don’t know so much about what is happening in the secular schools. They teach Tanakh, but just enough to know it, to pass the exam. In religious schools it is much much more. The exams are completely different. We use Rashi and Rambam and the Talmud. It is very complex, very rich and deep.

In religious schools, the students are living in the modern world and also living religious, just as my family and I are. So that brings up a lot of questions. It (studying Tanakh) is not just for school. It is about your life. You use, for example, the Psalms when thinking about the day.

What kind of a range is there in how religious the families are in the religious schools? Were there families who had debated between religious and secular schools?

It depends on where you are. In our school there were religious families, and there were also non-religious families who wanted their children to go to religious schools. There were the families who just go to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah – the ones who are more lightly religious.

Were there any who debated between Haredi (ultra-orthodox) and Dati (religious) schools?

Very few – very few. The Haredi system is much more closed. If you were to go to a Haredi school, they would want to know who your family was, that you were Haredi.

Do the religious schools teach about other religious traditions?

That is a good question! All throughout my schooling, never. Where I got my BA, we had a library, a library with two large floors. On the first floor were the Holy Books – and it was full. On the second floor were all the other books – psychology, sociology, etc. I went looking for the Christian Bible and the Qur’an. I found them – they had them – on the second floor, way in the corner out of the way.

Would they have come up in history?

Maybe, maybe one sentence in history, but not as religion.  

When we finished she offered to speak with me more, so I look forward to more conversations with her.

A secular history teacher’s perspective

15 Thursday Sep 2011

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A sculpture in Ramla represents peace among the three Abrahamic faiths

I spoke today to a man who used to be a history teacher in two secular Israeli public schools. He left because he felt that between the bureaucracy and the discipline issues, there was very little time left for teaching. He noted the class size of 35 – something I have heard referred to frequently as a concern. When I asked him about teaching about religion in history class, he said that “well, to teach about history and religion are the same thing in Israel. It is not like in the United States with the separation of church and state.” He gave the example that in history they would teach that the Israeli right to the land comes from their presence here in Biblical times. He noted that the Israeli Declaration of Independence is based on this claim. His tone implied he thought that using the Biblical history as part of the state’s identity was reasonable, though he did regret that “no-one talks about the common links between the religions.” This discussion led him to making a distinction between two kinds of what he called “rights” in Israel. “Individual rights, every person has those – the right to vote, the right to health care, etc. But group rights it is different. You go to an Arab village, the infrastructure is bad, while a Jewish town looks very nice.”

This former teacher also argued that non-religious Israelis have ceded the Bible class (which he did not teach) to “the religious people.” “It is too bad, really, because there are a lot of good stories for your life in that book.” In a dismissive tone of voice he said the Bible teaching was “all compare this book to that book,” by which I believe he meant it was a limited form of textual criticism. “The students just get ready for the final exam, that is all.” He qualified himself, saying this was true in the secular schools; “in the religious schools I don’t know, you would have to ask one of them.” He noted that the final exam requirements in both history and bible were very different for the secular schools, the religious schools, the Arab schools and the “very Orthodox” schools.

I was most interested in his claim that secular Israelis don’t try to influence the character of religious education, even in the secular schools – that they basically just deal with it and move on. To the extent that is true, it is both a lost opportunity for dialogue and potentially a waste of students’ time.

A divided teaching of religion for a divided land

07 Wednesday Sep 2011

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Bethlehem from Tantur, with the wall between the Jerusalem and Bethlehem areas.

Fr. Tim Lowe heads the Tantur Ecumenical Institute, and he taught English at the Ramallah Friends School for a year. He told me a little bit about how religion instruction is (or was, when he was there) structured in the Palestinian Authority. He said that all schools, whether private, parochial or public,  are required to teach religion, and that Muslim students are taught the Muslim PA curriculum by Muslim teachers and Christian students are taught the Christian PA curriculum by Christian teachers.

So for curricula so far, we’ve got: secular Jewish Israeli, medium-religious Jewish Israeli, ultra-orthodox Jewish Israeli, Palestinian with Israeli citizenship (differentiated between Christians and Muslims? – I hope to find out), Palestinian Muslim, and Palestinian Christian. I understand supporting kids in their core religion. Still, I believe one could design a class that all these students could take that would broaden their understanding of religion and of the other folks around them without undermining their own tradition.

A stab at what I’m doing here (i.e. a rough draft of my revised project proposal)

26 Friday Aug 2011

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Jerusalem's Old City from the roof of the Notre Dame Center

My friend Launa has a real blog at http://www.launawrites.com . There you can find actual writing – evocative, beautiful, and fun. Having looked at my posts so far, she gently asked what my project actually was. At the same time, Hilary suggested that the next step should be for me to more carefully define my research question. I can take a hint, so I have produced the following draft of my project proposal (extremely rough, almost certainly will change, feedback welcomed, etc.)

“I seek to interview Israeli and Palestinian teachers to learn what and how they teach about religion.

How one discusses religion is a highly contested part of any curriculum. Instructing young people on matters of faith was one of the earlier purposes of school. In medieval European universities theology was “the Queen of the Sciences.” In most times and places, to provide religious instruction different than that understood as correct by the majority could land you in a great deal of trouble; Socrates was prosecuted for, among other things, “prying into things in the heavens and below the earth.” People and institutions often respond to such tensions with silence. In the United States, for example, many people believe incorrectly that the courts have interpreted the separation of church and state to mean that it is illegal to teach about religion in the public schools. (In fact it is encouraged; proselytization is what is outlawed.) How a society approaches the teaching of religion can reveal a good deal about what that society values.

Meanwhile, most governments believe that good citizenship can and should be taught through that country’s public schools. Under various subject headings — civics, citizenship education, social studies, history, ethics, religious studies — public school systems seek to influence the values of the population. In such conversations, questions of belief are either going to arise or assumptions about them are going to be made.

Thus, some questions I might have for my teachers: What are some of the goals of your teaching? How do you design your curriculum, or how do you modify or implement the curriculum you are given? What do you see the role of your teaching being in your student’s lives? How do you see it informing their roles as citizens? How do you see it informing their personal religious choices?” Among other revisions, I will continue to add questions, of course!