Charles L. Glenn, EdD, PhD, is professor and chairman of educational policy, and Fellow of the University Professors Program, at Boston University, where he teaches courses in education history and comparative policy. He was formerly director of urban education and equity efforts for the Massachusetts Department of Education. Dr. Glenn has authored a number of books, and he is currently writing The Long Tug-of War: Schools Between State and Civil Society Since Antiquity.
Are Christian schools somehow harmful to American society and that of other democracies? That claim is argued with complete seriousness by many advocates of the common public schools, on the basis of belief in a governmental monopoly of the right to provide public education. As the movement to promote public justice by public funding for nongovernment schools—most of which have a religious character—gathers force, it is important that we learn to make the case for their benefits to society.
Of course, the fundamental argument for letting parents choose the schools their children will attend is that they have a fundamental right to do so. Christians believe that this right is based unshakably on God’s intentions in creating the human family, but we do not have to depend on biblical arguments when we make this case in the public forum. The primacy of parents in making decisions about education is firmly established in international law as well as in that of the United States. For example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) states that “parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children” (article 26, 3).
This principle has been clearly established in American constitutional law since 1925, when the Supreme Court declared in Pierce v. Society of Sisters that “the fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept teaching from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”
We should never forget, in all the discussions about bringing “market forces” to bear on schools to improve their accountability for quality and to make room for genuine professionalism on the part of educators, that the most important argument for parent choice is that it is right to base public policies that affect families on a deep respect for the role of parents. Having insisted on that point, we should not rest our case on “consumer preference” alone. Most of us would agree that how children are educated is a matter that society as a whole should be concerned about. When a professor of legal studies at a prestigious university argues that religious schools are harmful to children—are in fact a sort of child abuse—we cannot simply shrug off such assertions in the name of parental rights. After all, we recognize that society has a duty to intervene in cases when parents are clearly abusive or neglectful.
When he goes on to argue that public authorities would be fully justified in ignoring “a child’s expressed preference for a kind of schooling that includes” what he calls the indoctrination and crippling of personality in religious schools, we need to sit up and take notice. Under these circumstances, he insists, overriding the child’s decision (not to mention that of her parents) for a religious school “would be appropriate and even morally requisite” (Dwyer 1998, 164–65). Do we have a convincing account of the benefits to children and youth of religious schooling to counter the charge that religious schools provide a form of indoctrination with profoundly harmful effects and thus that parents—in the interest of their children—should not be free to choose?
Now, of course, this line of argument of Dwyer’s is profoundly contrary to American traditions and to the very idea of a free society, and it is hard to believe that any reasonable person could make it. Dwyer’s argument that the state should intervene in the higher interest of young people who mistakenly harbor religious convictions is strikingly parallel to the rationalizations employed by communist regimes, described in my book on Eastern Europe. The Supreme Court has rejected such compulsory socialization again and again. The state must not set up any sort of orthodoxy, even a secular one, and seek to impose it through mandatory schooling.
We can be grateful, however, that Dwyer has expressed so clearly what many members of the academic elite no doubt believe. A more moderate form of the same argument is advanced by political theorist Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania. For Gutmann and other advocates of the mission of public schools to shape political attitudes, the other goals of education are altogether secondary. She concedes that “the evidence is scanty, but it suggests that private schools may on average do better than public schools in bringing all their students up to a relatively high level of learning, in teaching American history and civics in an intellectually challenging manner, and even in racially integrating classrooms,” but she then insists that “public, not private, schooling is an essential welfare good for children as well as the primary means by which citizens can morally educate future citizens” (1987, 65, 70).
An education that is solidly anchored in a particular tradition or viewpoint does not preclude independent thinking; indeed, it may provide the secure standpoint from which that tradition can be criticized and other traditions or perspectives appreciated.
It is clear that Gutmann—like John Dewey and others who have called for “democratic education”—has little use for the actual results of the political process or for the restrictions placed on that process in the name of individual rights. They assume that there is a formula for creating the sort of character and personality required by a democratic society. As Gutmann herself concedes, however, “although it is possible that there is a way that schools can teach autonomy, nobody has come even close to finding it” (1987, 60). It may be useful to recall Isaiah Berlin’s insistence that “the evidence of history tends to show ... that integrity, love of truth, and fiery individualism grow at least as often in severely disciplined communities ... as in more tolerant or indifferent societies” (1969, 128).
In fact, the truth may be that schools which assert a distinctive worldview are most successful in developing individuals able to participate in society on the basis of critical intelligence as well as tolerance for differing viewpoints. A Canadian educational theorist makes the following point:
Growth towards reflective, critical, and independent thought necessarily takes place within the context of “a convictional community.” ... [The] attempt to define a liberal non-indoctrinatory kind of upbringing fails to take into account the need for a stable and coherent primary culture for a young child, a need which can only be adequately provided within the context of a home which achieves an “organic unity” in which all share a common worldview, common loyalties, and commitments. (Thiessen 1993, 237, 246–47)
An education that is solidly anchored in a particular tradition or viewpoint does not preclude independent thinking; indeed, it may provide the secure standpoint from which that tradition can be criticized and other traditions or perspectives appreciated. We should directly confront the claim that Christian schools indoctrinate, and we should do so by insisting that they lay the foundation for a life of confident inquiry on the basis of settled commitments. A leading authority on education reform points out that a school chosen by parents on the basis of its distinctive identity “will be stabilized by its commitments and respond to the needs of a group of students and parents to whom it is committed rather than to the politically bargained preferences of society as a whole.” And there is a further social benefit:
Social trust and community feeling are higher when schools are distinctive and families have choices. In an ongoing study, the author has found that students in schools based on a clear set of common premises are more likely than students in less well-defined schools to engage in vigorous discussion of values and social policy. In schools that throw together students from different races and social classes without creating a common intellectual and values framework, students are likely to resegregate socially and academically along racial and class lines. (Hill 1999, 151)
There is another charge often brought against Christian schools: that they tend to cause social inequalities. It is, of course, ironical that this charge is brought by those who oppose the public funding that would make it possible for more families of limited means to send their children to Christian schools; the education establishment has imposed the economic conditions under which faith-based schooling must operate. But those bringing the charge commonly mix together elite “independent” schools—some 20 percent of the total private school world—with the much less expensive evangelical and Catholic schools. These faith-based schools are by no means socially exclusive, and the families who entrust their children to them are characterized more by strong commitment to education than by above-average incomes. Nor, as Jay Greene and others have shown, are private schools racially segregated. In fact, in all sections of the country, they are better integrated than are public schools, in part because they do not draw pupils from racially segregated residential areas.
A third charge brought against Christian schools—and this one has been around for 200 years—is that they divide society into warring camps. Only if all children and youth go to the same common school, it is said, will they learn to respect one another and to live in peace and cooperation. Sometimes the example of Northern Ireland, where most Catholic and Protestant children attend different schools, is cited to support this argument.
Like the other charges, this one is refuted by actual experience. In fact, efforts to require all children, whatever the religious convictions of their families, to attend the same schools has been a source of bitter social and political conflict in many countries. The conflict has been avoided by those countries that have accommodated religious diversity through pluralistic educational systems. The 70-year “school wars” in the Netherlands have been a distant memory since 1917, when the Dutch decided that Protestant and Catholic schools should be funded on the same basis as public schools. In France, many decades of conflict ended when de Gaulle’s government began to fund private schools, and heated up again in 1984 when a Socialist government sought—without success—to bring them into the public system. In Northern Ireland, the present system was instituted in the 1920s as a way to prevent conflict over schooling between Catholics and Protestants, and in fact this is one sphere of social life that has been spared the bitterness so prevalent otherwise.
The underlying assumption behind this third charge against Christian schools is that a society can function well only if everyone shares the same values and has the same way of understanding the world. The reality, however, is that American society is and always has been diverse and that Americans have been able to live together in relative peace because our institutions do not require that our cooperation be based on agreement about what we believe; it is enough that we agree on how to behave in support of a common life. We do not, for example, have ideologically based political parties, as many countries do.
What is more, we have always insisted that government has no business seeking to define an orthodoxy of belief, as the Supreme Court pointed out in an important decision about schools (West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette). The “first freedom” defined in our Bill of Rights protects us against any government-imposed religious establishment, yet we have gradually created an educational establishment with tremendous resources and a monopoly on publicly funded schooling. It is much more difficult in the United States than in most other western democracies for parents to decide what sort of education their children will receive. For that reason, the American educational system is less open and pluralistic than that of other western democracies.
This is not to say that the American public education system today seeks to impose a distinctive set of beliefs; generally it no longer ensures, as the Supreme Court suggested in Pierce v. Society of Sisters in 1925, “that teachers shall be of good moral character and patriotic disposition” or “that certain studies plainly essential to good citizenship must be taught.” No, such concerns have generally been abandoned in the name of toleration; too often, what is left is a sort of incoherence, a message to children and youth that there are no fixed stars by which to set their course in life and to guide how they act toward others. It is because Christian schools provide a basis for living a decent life and—by God’s gracious gift—a life of faith and discipleship that more and more parents are making what is for many the sacrificial decision to entrust their children to these schools.
References
Berlin, Isaiah. 1969. Two concepts of liberty. In Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Dwyer, James G. 1998. Religious schools v. children’s rights. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Gutmann, Amy. 1987. Democratic education. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hill, Paul T. 1999. The supply-side of school choice. In School choice and social controversy, ed. Stephen D. Sugarman and Frank R. Kemerer. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
Thiessen, Elmer John. 1993. Teaching for commitment: Liberal education, indoctrination, and Christian nurture. Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press.
Christian Schooling and the Public Good 8.2