Christian Privilege in U.S. Education Legacies and Current Issues [Hardcover]

Using critical curriculum theory as its lens, this book explores the relationship between religionspecifically, Christianity and the Judeo-Christian ethos underlying itand secular public education in the United States. Despite various 20^th-century court decisions separating religion and education, the authors challenge that religion is in fact absent from public education, suggesting instead that it is in fact very much embedded in current public educational practices and discourses and in a variety of assumptions and perspectives underlying understandings of teaching, learning, and teacher preparation. The book reframes the discussion about religion and schooling, arguing that it remains in the language and metaphors of education, in the practices and routines of schooling, in conceptions of the child and the teacher (and what happens between them in the spaces we call learning, the classroom, and curriculum ) as well as in assumptions about the role of schools emanating from such conceptions and in the current movement toward accountability, standardization, and testing. Christian Privilege in U.S. Education examines not whether Christianity has a place in public education but, rather, the very ways in which it is pervasive in a legally secular system of education even when religion is not a topic taught in school.

Introduction

1. Christianity and American Education: Historical Connections

2. Religious Sediments in Educational Discourses and Practices

3. The Bible: A Blueprint for Contemporary Educational Practices

4. The Inherent Religiosity of the Standards Movement

5. To Teach as Jesus (Would)

6. Pedagod: God as Teacher Co-Authored w/Scott Jarvie

7. Teaching as Revelation

Conclusion

Kevin J. Burkeis Assistant Professor of English Education, UniversilÉ