Teaching about religion in public schools is back in vogue in the United States. In June, Texas mandated adding Bible verses to the K-12 curriculum. Now, new legislation in Connecticut requires the state’s Department of Education to create resource materials for teachers who want to include lessons on Islam and Arab studies.

This trend is justifiable on a theoretical level. The dissemination of foundational knowledge about human civilisations is arguably indispensable for informed citizenship. Yet attempts to introduce religious content in secular schools have a tendency to go off the rails, triggering conflicts at local school boards and litigation at the state level. In Texas, the problem is that the Bible verses — all 13 of them — are mandatory in the curriculum, opening the door to accusations that the state is favouring one religion. In Connecticut, the state-sanctioned lessons — which have yet to be created — are not obligatory, but there is no equivalent mandate to create resources for teachers who want to teach about the role of Christianity in Western civilisation.

One local newspaper has demanded the unequal treatment be corrected. “Skeptics of the new law should use the existence of a state-sanctioned Islamic studies curriculum as a clear precedent for a near-identical law pushing classes in Christian studies,” wrote the editorial board of the Republican-American last week. “Unlike the study of Islam, the study of Christianity is fundamental to students’ understanding of the society in which they live.”

Beyond constitutional questions, teaching religious content requires a certain deftness and equipoise that not all teachers possess. Public schools have included history lessons about Islam and Arab civilisation for at least a decade, leading to periodic conflicts in at least 10 states.

In 2015, students in a rural Virginia school district were invited to practice Islamic calligraphy, according to a Los Angeles Times account. They did not understand that the Arabic letters they were drawing spelled out the Muslim statement of faith: “There is no god but God, and Mohammed is his messenger.” That same year in Georgia, state officials discovered — and withdrew — a sample classroom guide that said Islam, Christianity and Judaism share the “same God”.

The Connecticut State Board of Education has yet to review and assemble materials for teachers. But educators and administrators can access a variety of online resources to help them teach about Islam and Arabic culture. Stanford University has posted such a reference guide online, conveying how academic experts believe this subject should be presented to pupils. One of the resources links to the University of North Carolina’s “ReOrienting the Veil” site, which invites teachers “to explore the multiplicity of discourses that are essential for a richer and more nuanced understanding of Islamic sartorial practices”.

It’s an implicit critique of the West that not everyone will be welcome. Many of the parent objections in past years have claimed that the lessons either promote Islam or distort the past by sugarcoating Islamic history to avoid charges of Islamophobia.

Today, in the era of critical Ethnic Studies taught in blue states, red states banning anything redolent of social justice advocacy from public schools, and political factions staking out hardcore positions on Israel and Palestine, the situation is much more polarised than only a few years ago. It’s increasingly likely that the question of how to teach about Islam, or even whether to teach about Islam, will not be decided by teachers but by the courts.