The Midcentury White House Conference report*, that provided essential social science support for the Brown decision of 1954, emphasized the importance of religion for the formation of the healthy child's personality. The report's discussion is so forthright that, from today's perspective, it is surprising; it provides a measure of the secularization the social sciences have undergone in the past fifty years.
"Children's well-being is dependent in large part upon their parents' sense of self-worth and ... that sense is intimately related to the values and workings of the society in which they live. The ethical and moral affirmations of religion constitute the base on which all this rests and from which social malfunctioning can be criticized. In this widest sense, then, religion is basic to healthy personality."(P. 160.)
The role of religion, the report said, was to provide ideas of the meaningfulness of life that the child requires. The healthy child has an inner assurance of her importance to the world. She believes that the world is set up so that she can make sense of her life.
"The individual must have some conception of the universe as meaningful and benevolent, and of his place in it. He must integrate his life around some ethical or religious concepts. Honor, grace, faith, courage: some integrating idea or idea must replace his parents as the objects of dependency and trust."(P. 159.)
The Judaeo-Christian tradition makes the individual responsible for what she does with her life. It provides a framework for a realistic understanding of human agency. Each person has both strengths and weaknesses. No situation is ordained; no situation is hopeless. No weakness or fault makes a person utterly worthless. Persons have the opportunity to transcend their weaknesses and faults and thereby to activate their strengths.
Religious education is an important part of child rearing. The spiritual qualities of each child must be cultivated and strengthened. They bind together the material circumstances of life and our psychological attitudes toward those material circumstances. Spiritual education helps create a total personality - whole and balanced.
Religion also provides ideals. Ideals are important as goals toward which the growing child should strive. During adolescence, the child learns of the sordid aspects of life and about failure of society to live up to its ideals; religion teaches the child not to accept failings with dismay, but to have hope in the child's and humankind's ultimate ability to overcome those failings.
"To be able to look squarely at the life that is before them without blinders or rosy glasses and to deal with it without either false stimulation or an opiate, children and youth need faith in God."(P. 222.)
The report does not blink before the issue of teaching the child about the existence of God. The healthy child learns to believe in God and to have faith in God as the source of ultimate meaning and hope for human ventures.
The belief in God is important, finally, in teaching the child to live in harmony with other peoples. God is God of all peoples. God is the source of meaning of everyone's experiences.
At a distance of fifty years, we can stand back from this report and evaluate its position on religion. We can see that religious faith was an important part of the lives of African Americans, strengthening them to cope with segregation and to fight against it. We can also see that religion was an important ingredient in making African American culture healthy (in contradistinction to the conclusions of the Myrdal report, American Dilemma).
Why did this acknowledgment of the importance of religious faith to American life disappear from American social science? Here we can only suggest answers. The allegiance of many social scientists to Marxism and co-existence with communism during the Cold War would have led them diminish the importance of religion to American life. The influence of European secular humanist philosophies - especially existentialism and post-modernism - helped to deprive religion of intellectual legitimacy. Radical feminism spurned religion, viewing religion as conservative and opposed to the complete social emancipation of women.
Public schools, too, played a role, because of the total school program. The total school program, impelled by the Brown decision, turned over the emotional development of children to the state through the public schools. With much of the child's growth controlled by schools, religion would have to be removed from children's lives, because of constitutional prohibition of state sponsorship of religion.
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* Helen L. Witmer and Ruth Kotinksy, editors, Personality in the Making: The Fact-Finding Report of the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, reprint edition ([1952, Harper & Brothers] Science and Behavior Books, Inc, Palo Alto, California, n.d.). Esp. chapter VII, "Religion as an Aid to Healthy Personality Development," and chapter X, "The Church and the Synagogue."
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