HARTFORD, Conn. (RNS) — For nearly 25 years, education on Islam in public schools has been met largely with fears of indoctrination. Now, the state of Connecticut is leaning into the debate.
A new state provision, passed as part of a larger education bill last month, directs the Connecticut State Department of Education to develop instructional resources on Arab and Islamic studies, offering public schools optional materials designed to expand how students learn about the history, culture and contributions of Arab and Islamic civilizations.
“As with previous legislative directives on Holocaust education, Native American studies, and Asian American and Pacific Islander studies, the Connecticut State Department of Education is convening a Curriculum Design Leadership Team of educators, curriculum leaders, higher education faculty, and other content experts,” a CSDE spokesperson said. The team will identify, review and curate instructional resources before making them available to school districts.
Casey Cobb, Neag endowed professor of educational policy at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, said it is hard to predict how widely the Islamic and Arab curriculum will be used, though he expects its implementation to align with local demographics.
“School administrators know their communities very well, and those who have substantial Arab American or Muslim populations are probably the ones that would want to represent those students in the curriculum,” he said. This leaves out rural districts that he said would likely benefit the most from this curriculum.
Implementation faces an uphill battle in districts where conservatives have made targeted runs for school board membership. They may see learning about Islam as at odds with their own beliefs, which are rooted in Christianity, Cobb said.
Some also object to the curriculum over First Amendment concerns that it endorses one religion over others. In a Hartford Courant story, Chris Healy, executive director of the Connecticut Catholic Conference, said the curriculum violates the First Amendment by endorsing Islam. “This is so clearly unconstitutional. … It’s similar to the outrage people would have if the Ten Commandments were put on the wall,” he told the newspaper.
Farhan Memon, chairman of the Council on American-Islamic Relations Connecticut, a Muslim advocacy group, said the legislation is meant to broaden how students learn about Arab and Islamic history and civilization, rather than endorse Islam as a religion. “The law is not about religion per se,” Memon said.
The measure, for which CAIR advocated, is designed to help educators present a fuller understanding of Islamic and Arab civilizations while remaining within the constitutional boundaries of public education, he added. “Teaching students about a civilization or a faith tradition is not the same as teaching them a religion to adopt it,” he said. “Ignorance itself creates fertile ground for fear and prejudice, and so education helps replace these stereotypes and furthers understanding between people.”
Susan Douglass, an educational outreach coordinator at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., who has spent decades training educators on teaching religion in public schools, said that distinction has guided public education for decades.
“You’re teaching about religion. You’re not teaching religion in a normative manner,” Douglass said, referring to longstanding First Amendment guidelines developed for public schools.
Earlier this year, two Muslim girls were assaulted at their Waterbury middle school in what authorities classified as a hate crime, prompting renewed concerns about anti-Muslim bias in Connecticut schools.
The investment into the new curriculum in the state also comes at a time when anti-Muslim bigotry and racism appears to be becoming increasingly acceptable in the public square on a national level. According to research by the Social Science Research Council and the Bridge Initiative, it especially flourishes during election cycles.
“There’s a whole cottage industry around Islamophobia,” said Douglass, alluding to a $57 million network that funds anti-Islam content identified by the Center for American Progress.
Anti-Muslim bigotry has become deadly in recent months. In May, three people were killed in a shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego, and a Muslim man was hospitalized after a targeted anti-Muslim stabbing attack in Utah in July.
Since the 9/11 attacks in particular, school districts across the country have faced resistance from parents who discovered their children were learning about Islam in school and feared religious indoctrination. That fear spilled into state legislatures. After parental uproar over a lesson on Islam in a Maury County middle school, Tennessee passed a state law in 2016 that restricted the use of educational materials from promoting or establishing any religion or religious belief.
“I did not fight radical Islam in Iraq just to come home and find our children being indoctrinated,” Tennessee Republican State Rep. James Van Huss said at the time.
Today, the debate over the place of religion in the classroom is being renegotiated. In Texas, students will be required to read portions of the Bible as part of a newly approved state reading list taking effect in 2030. This comes after the state became the first in the nation to require every classroom to hang the Ten Commandments — a law being challenged in court.
Cobb said conservative lawmakers have been emboldened in recent months by a suite of favorable Supreme Court rulings to push the boundaries of the First Amendment in Christianity’s favor.
“I don’t think there’s going to be a reversal of that momentum … my prediction is that it’ll continue,” he told RNS.
For Douglass, the significance of Connecticut’s law extends beyond a single curriculum.
“It’s vital to our continued coexistence as one of the most pluralistic countries in the world,” she said of supporting neutral, effective public education on all religions, including both Christianity and Islam. “If we’re going to continue to live together, we should be joining hands and not pointing fingers.”
