Education of the next generation is one effective way to introduce informal moral codes. Teaching only math, science, English, and other normative-neutral subjects does not provide the needed education for weaving or restoring a social fabric. This is illustrated by the fact that when pictures of Saddam Hussein and pro-regime statements were removed from Iraq’s old textbooks, they were replaced with nothing. US officials recruited Fuad Hussein, a former Iraqi professor and Middle Eastern scholar, to assist with reviewing Iraqi textbooks. Hussein visited Baghdad schools and chose 67 teachers to make up a textbook revision team. Meeting at the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) offices, the team faced the task of “de-Ba’athifying” the textbooks but were at a loss as to which new texts to provide. More broadly, the issue was not merely the introduction of better ways of teaching math, science, or English, although these are surely needed. The question was which values should be promoted through the various tools of education, including textbooks, the curricula, and the training and selection of teachers.

A political liberal’s first response to such an agenda is that value education should take place at home, in places of worship, or should be provided by other private civic entities. Public schools should not be involved in moral, value, or character education.

However, one must take into account that in nations that have long-standing police regimes, whether fundamentalist or secular, these private civic entities are often very weak. They either barely exist (as in voluntary associations), have been weakened (communal bonds), have been mobilized to support the state (favored ethnic groupings), or themselves support one form of authoritarianism or another (various warlords or sectarian leaders). As a result, there is a need to assist the development of a new, post-totalitarian core of shared values to unite various communities through public education. Otherwise the normative vacuum will further feed social anarchy, inducing people to favor the restoration of a strong-leader regime, as we currently see in Russia and in large parts of Afghanistan and as we will likely see emerge in Iraq.

The Viable Alternative

Theoretically, it is conceivable that the United States could replace a fundamentalist school system with a fully secular one that teaches rich normative content through civic ethics. However, forming a civic ethics education program entails much more than removing totalitarian or fundamentalist parts of textbooks and curricula and re-training teachers not to follow these lines of value education. It requires the recasting of histories. In Iraq, it would mean replacing the glorification of Saddam Hussein with either narratives about courageous Iraqis who died trying to unseat him or stories of civic leaders who served their nation before Hussein. It would entail scanning Iraqi, Arabic, and Islamic literature for novels that provide students with empathy for people of different social backgrounds and political leanings and adapting civics classes to draw on examples from Arab and other histories. One would have to start from nothing. Although parts of the current materials could be salvaged, after decades of oppressive regimes, most narratives would need recasting. All in all, preparing such a fully secular educational program is a huge task that would take many years and manpower to advance.

Most importantly, while some parents in the Muslim world, especially in the larger cities, would send their children to secular public schools, such education would be adamantly rejected by most Muslims. This is true for many Iraqis, especially the Shi’as, most Afghans and Saudis, and many Pakistanis, most prominently in the regions bordering Afghanistan. Therefore, to reach most of the population––specifically those hostile to economic and political development and inclined to religious extremism––some kind of religious schooling must be provided.

This observation should not come as a surprise to US citizens, given that nearly ten percent of US children attend religiously affiliated schools. A significant subset of parents sends their children to such schools in order to reinforce their children’s religious beliefs. The difference between the United States and several key Muslim nations is that large majorities in Muslim nations hold this view. Hence either most children will be educated in private schools, in which religious education—often of the madrasa kind—will prevail, or public schools will have to provide some religious education because those parents who cannot afford private schooling will demand public schools to remain religious as well.

Religion is Not “History”

The Enlightenment still guides the reflexive response of many political liberals and secular policymakers to the question of whether religion should be taught in public schools. In the wake of the rise of the age of reason, rationality and science were glorified, and religion was considered by the elites as a relic of the dark ages. It was expected that religion would be replaced by secular thinking. Indeed, for generations it seemed secularization was spreading over ever-larger parts of the world as people became less religious, relegating religion to the private sphere or giving up on it altogether. Secularization acquired the aura of being part of the march of history; only the uninformed or the bigoted would resist such progress. However, religion continues to be a major source of ethical and spiritual guidance for billions of people. Other hundreds of millions, especially those in secularized places such as the former Soviet republics, China, and Turkey, are returning to embrace religious beliefs. Religion fills the vacuum left when values previously promoted, such as communism or fundamentalism, wane or are found unfulfilling. In short, separation of state and religion, and in particular avoidance of teaching moral and religious values, may be possible in nations whose informal moral fabric, along with the civic entities that nurture it, is intact. But this is not the case in most, if not all, newly liberated countries or politically and economically underdeveloped ones. The separation clause can hardly be applied.

It is crucial not to treat all religious beliefs and education as if they were cut from one cloth, as Enlightenment thinkers did and many still do. The main fault line, relevant to analysis and policymaking for Western nations and new civic groups, lies not between religion and secularism but between fundamentalism on the one side and moderate religion and secularism on the other.