Religion or ethics?

by Debra Bendis

What should public schools do when it comes to teaching ethics and religion? Should they offer an ethics course that focuses on secular issues and only glancingly mentions specific religious faiths? Or should they offer courses on particular religions, teaching the history, personalities and ethical concerns of that faith tradition?

Last Sunday citizens of Berlin voted against an initiative that would have given their children the opportunity to choose between an ethics class (already mandatory) or a class in Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Judaism or another religion. (Religion classes are offered only as extracurriculars.)

Nearly half of Berlin's students are Muslim. It was the honor killing of a Muslim woman that prompted the creation of the ethics class, which supporters say teaches the common values of the city without bringing in divisive particulars of religions.

"Kids from different origins should not be divided into different religions," says pro-ethics-class spokesperson Gerhard Weil in the Christian Science Monitor. "It is better if all children can discuss ethical problems together."

But supporters of offering the religion class as an option to the ethics course argue that students in a multicultural culture need to understand religion better—and that this understanding will do more to foster religious tolerance.

Where do you weigh in on this question? Is a secular ethics course the best way to teach common values? Or do we need, before we can teach an ethics course, to know something about the origins of the ethics? Ethics have their roots in real people and their relationships with a deity or deities. Before we can know what our common values are, I believe that we need to know—and teach—something about the religious history, conflicts and believers who made choices within their tradition. These "details" are the reference points for ethics codes; we need the details to give life, to give ballast, to a code of ethics.