Secular Values in the Curriculum: Case Law

Case law regarding secular values in the curriculum addresses the power of the state to teach nonreligious virtues or ideas. Litigation over the teaching of secular values tends to fall into one of two categories: conflict with religious values and student rights to abstain from participating. Some examples of secular values in the public school curriculum that have been contested by religious groups include gay and lesbian rights, science-based discovery, and morality derived from man instead of god. The debate about teaching secular values is at the heart of many controversial curriculum developments during the past 60 years. As scholars of curriculum studies track the interconnection of social change, scientific discovery, and public education, the clash between secular humanism and religious values remains a source of inherent tension.

Petitioners have unsuccessfully brought suit against the teaching of secular values under the argument that certain secular ideas are hostile to their religious values. Attempts to bolster this argument include casting secular values as a religion called secular humanism. The effort to define secular humanism as a religion has been largely unsuccessful despite the writings of some sympathetic judges, most notably Justice Antonin Scalia. If successful, petitioners could claim that the teaching of secular values constituted the promotion of religious values thus violating the establishment clause of the First Amendment. A broader argument against secular values in the curriculum claims that the teaching of any values that do not include a deistic perspective promotes the “religion” of secular humanism over other religions. The argument continues to claim that the only way to avoid this violation of the Establishment [Page 776]Clause is by including religious perspectives in the curriculum to be taught with secular perspectives. It seems inconsistent with existing case law, however, that even a successful claim of secular humanism as a religion would allow religion specific instruction to be constitutionally taught. Presumably, the school would be compelled to create a neutral forum by which it would be expected that the range of ideas presented to students would be encompassing enough to avoid promoting any one religion. However, teaching the values of one religious faith in concert with secular values falls far short of the neutral forum standard established by the Supreme Court for political speech. Moreover, it is unclear that the court would accept the neutral forum standard for religious speech. The Court has yet to rule on establishing a neutral forum for religion in schools.

Efforts to teach creationism or intelligent design as part of the evolution curriculum has led to litigation that is central for defining case law on the issue of secular humanism as a religion. In Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), a state statute prohibiting the teaching of evolution was struck down by the Court. In response, several statutes were written promoting a “balanced treatment” of evolution that included both an explicit disclaimer in the curriculum that evolution was an unproven theory and a biblical perspective on the origin of man. The “balanced treatment” curriculum was found to violate the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution and eventually the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) that creation science was unconstitutional. The latest efforts to challenge teaching evolution casts creationism as the intelligent design of a creator. An interesting element of the intelligent design proposal is the claim that the “creator” is not necessarily a specific deity. By making a prima facie argument that the creator may not be God, the petitioners in Dover v. Kitzmiller (2005) were essentially aligning intelligent design with the secular curriculum. The Court in Dover found that intelligent design was not a secular theory and was in fact a progeny of creationism.

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