There was a time when Chris Dzierzawa's parents thought it would be good to transfer him to a Roman Catholic school from a public high school, even though the family wasn't Catholic. But when he was a young teenager, Chris dreaded the prospect of mandatory religion at <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Catholic-run Vancouver College. As it turned out, the course the engaging young man ended up liking the most was the one on religion and spirituality.

The religion teacher didn't ram Catholic doctrine down Dzierzawa's throat. Instead, he gave him the freedom to explore the powerful issues raised by religion and spirituality. What's more, Dzierzawa was nudged into reflecting on some seminal questions: Who am I? What shapes my morality? Is there a purpose to my existence?

"It was definitely not coercive. We were encouraged to do our own exploration. It got me thinking, that's for sure. I think it got me thinking about God and spirituality a lot more than other people my age. It's incredible what little people don't know about religion," says Dzierzawa, now 19, who credits the experience with his current desire to pursue a philosophy degree.

When Dzierzawa returned to public high school after Vancouver College, his only regret was that he no longer got to probe soul-stirring issues related to spirituality and ethics. In a public school system that has adopted a narrow brand of secularism, he found nervous educators rarely, if ever, allowed spiritual discussion to break out.

Most Canadian public educators are still in reaction mode: making sure we don't return to the days of Christian proselytizing in the classroom through reciting the Lord's Prayer and Bible readings. Understandably, in a pluralistic culture, educators don't want to be accused of indoctrinating children into any particular religious belief.

But they've thrown out the baby with the bath water of imperialistic Christianity. Religion, spirituality and philosophy comprise some of the most complex, thought-inspiring and meaning-filled subjects children could ever study.

Teachers need to pass on to students that organized religion and spiritual concerns have not only deeply influenced history, but continue to intimately shape the lives of nine out of 10 of the world's people.

Instead, most teachers ignore the subjects, thereby sending out out the message that religion and spirituality and ethics are a fringe concern. That's no small feat in a country where four out of five believe in God and where citizens are challenged to figure out how to live in one of the the most multi-faith nations in the world.

The problem isn't just in public schools. Although some universities and colleges teach religion and applied ethics courses as academic subjects, critics such as Bruce Wilshire maintain the bulk of higher education is overly committed to cold rationalism, professional specialization and careerism.

In his devastating critique, The Moral Collapse of the University, Wilshire says universities provide little opportunity -- even in many arid philosophy classes -- for students to ask questions about such things as goodness, beauty and meaning.

Although there are notable exceptions, educators' nervousness about religion-related topics has left a hole in citizens' development.

One of the few public-school teachers who've made religion a solid part of his curriculum is Patrick O'Neil, an elementary school teacher in the Kootenays. He told me: "I have been teaching for more than 20 years and I have never developed a unit that caught my students' interest more than the one I teach on religion."

Right now, only a few weeks of a Canadian high school student's education is set aside to explore religious issues, mostly how organized religions influenced politics, war and European history. There is no time set aside to formally debate juicy religious concepts such as God, truth, love, goodness, evil, Nirvana or whether nature can be called sacred.

Burnaby high school vice-principal Steve Bailey, one of a small band of public school educators who champion teaching about religion, says he frequently comes up against school administrators who maintain religious topics should never be touched, becausethey're divisive.

But if controversy is the problem, how have teachers found ways to discuss equally contentious subjects such as population growth, environmentalism, refugees, war, socialism and homosexuality?

Mark Wexler, a Jew, says schools are taking the separation of religion and state too far.

While schools must avoid favouring one religion or teaching children how to worship, Wexler said it's good for schools to explore spirituality and mark religion-related events such as Christian-secular Christmas, Jewish Hannukah, Chinese New Year and Sikhs' Baisakhi festival.

"It's tough for principals. It's hard to execute. But the net effect of banning Christmas and religious symbols in public and in schools is to discourage religiosity and spirituality. The unintended consequence of trying to be fair is you silence an aspect of humankind that is rather interesting and probably should not only be tolerated, but brought forth."

There are many techniques that can be used in classrooms to help students become more literate about religion, spirituality, ethics and their own emerging belief systems.

Here are five of them:

Teaching about religion

The standard approach is to teach about religion through lessons, projects, field trips to places of worship and guest speakers -- whether Buddhist, Christian, Sikh, Jewish, Doukhobor, Jehovah's Witness, Baha'i or secular humanist.

"It's sometimes frightening to me how little a lot of my students know about world religions," says Marco Jasnkowiak, a high school teacher in Coquitlam, where he helped develop a resource package for teaching religion. These courses are always done in ways that are neutral and descriptive.

Integrating religion into other courses

largely untried in Canadian public schools, involves informing students how religious beliefs have influenced history, literature, music, law, art and (controversially) science.

Regent College's John Stackhouse says a course on musical history, for example, could look at the importance of the Catholic mass to the development of classical composition. A literary history class should look at the impact of the King James version of the Bible on English. A Canadian history course could explore the missionary impulse among early explorers, from Samuel de Champlain on.

Then there is the explosive topic of integrating religious and spiritual themes into science courses. Some top-flight scientists, philosophers and theologians have been pressing to see the teaching of religion and philosophy in biology classes that focus on Darwin's theory of evolution.

Although the idea of Biblical creationism, that God whipped together the universe in six days, is widely discredited, Iain Benson, executive director of Canada's Centre for Cultural Renewal says it doesn't mean there is no point in public school students being exposed to it or to the theory of "intelligent design," which suggests some sort of cosmic mind could be behind the order of the universe.

Paul Allen, director of Canada's Centre for Theology and the Natural Sciences, adds he would like to see public-school students in Canada discussing philosophical issues such as "randomness, chance and design" in science classes.

He would not like to see intelligent design offered as an alternative to Darwinian evolution, but he would "like much broader classroom reflection on how the universe came into being."

Worldview courses

This program is already in place in part of Holland and has been advanced in Canada by Dutch-born Toronto educator Gerald Vandezande of Ontario's Multi-faith Coalition for Equity in Education. The idea is to teach that religious outlooks are not the only worldviews laden with values. So are communism, feminism, neo-conservatism, liberalism, multiculturalism and humanism.

Courses on worldviews would represent entire ways of life, Vandezande says. Students, he says, need to examine Marxism, feminism and humanism, along with world religions, so they understand society's debates.

Ethical development

Humans are not born ethical. But even short courses have been found effective in teaching ethical maturity to young people, says McMaster University's Jim Gaa, an applied ethicist.

Ethics can be taught on its own, or as part of a spirituality course. The simple act of discussing ethical dilemmas, such as whether a father should steal to feed his hungry child, can help hone ethical development, he says.

Learning from religion and spirituality

It's also possible for public schools to do more to shape young personalities than teach about religion and worldviews.

Since 1985, schools in England and Wales have also been devoting 80 minutes a week to courses devoted to more than reciting facts about world religions.

As British educator John Hull explains: "Learning about religion is the repetitive study of religions, a factual study. But learning from religion is encountering religious stories in such a way as to make a contribution to their spiritual, moral, culture and general educational way."

Hull maintains any well-trained person, regardless of their faith, can teach courses in which students learn from religion. In fact, Hull says, people deeply embedded in their own faiths probably won't be good religious-education teachers. And people who pooh-pooh everything won't be good religious-education teachers, either." Some of the finest religious-education teachers in Britain, he says, are secular humanists.

The second week of this series introduced us to Sarah Nixon, 15, who attends one of Holland's many government-funded Catholic high schools. Through a combination of the above techniques, Nixon, who is not Catholic, has been learning about spirituality, religion and ethics in a non-coercive way. It's helping her develop into a thoughtful soul.

When Nixon was in the Dutch equivalent of Canada's Grade 8, her Catholic school taught the Bible. "The teacher would say, 'I believe this about the Bible, but other people believe this. He'd never make you feel bad about what you thought."

When Nixon was 13, her school's religion program was devoted to learning world faiths. Again, the courses aimed at helping students learn about themselves, reflect on dreams, explore questions about the meaning of life and dig into what they would do if faced with ethical dilemmas.

"They got you to write stuff about what you liked and didn't like about each religion. We compared religions, to see how they fit into our lives. I didn't fit into any religion, but I thought Buddhism was pretty cool because it was about peacefulness. Buddhists believe you shouldn't kill animals, because they don't deserve to die. It's part of the reason I became a vegetarian."

You don't have to have an opinion on the hot issue of whether religious schools should be fully taxpayer-funded (as they are in Holland) to argue religion, spirituality and ethics should be a greater part of the curriculum in all schools.

As we can see from the Catholic-school educations of Dzierzawa at Vancouver College and Nixon in Amsterdam, students can be taught about religion, spirituality and ethics in a way that doesn't proselytize and reflects a pluralistic society.

Some, however, still fear bringing religious and other worldviews into the classroom because they don't trust teachers to handle themwith neutrality. That's probably true, in the strict sense. Teachers will subtly show their biases through their choice of materials, voice inflection and body language.

But that wouldn't be anything new in classrooms. Just as some teachers are a lot better than others at teaching, some reveal their biases more than others when they cover contentious subjects.

The trick for teachers is to present material about religion in as accurate, fair and balanced a way as possible, giving students full opportunity to express a range of opinion and feelings and personal insights in an atmosphere of tolerance.