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See my comments interlineated below.
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Is the "religious apartheid" worry (or "fragmentation" as Alan calls it) based on any empirical evidence? For example:
1. Is there any evidence that religious-school students socialize with others less well than do public-school students? I'm not aware of such evidence. (And we do know that in inner cities, Catholic schools are often more racially diverse than are public schools -- and often religiously diverse as well.)
The relevant question is whether students at religious schools that proselytize socialize less well than others. Inner city Catholic schools do not proselytize their non-Catholic students. The fact of racial and religious tension in all too many public schools is a given. But this suggests that we ought to address the problem head on. Getting schools committed to proselytizing also to teach toleration and respect for diversity is a tall order. Therefore, I am convinced that it would be easier to generate more toleration and respect for diversity in public schools than in proselytizing religious schools.
2. Any evidence that home-schooled children relate less well to others, when they eventually enter school systems, than do public-school students?
Again, the relevant question is the contextual one: the degree of or the extent to which the parents teach toleration and respect for (racial and) religious diversity.
3. Any evidence of greater interreligious tension, interracial tension, etc., in European nations that provide substantial state aid to religious schools than in America?
The European experience is significantly different from ours, that I am not sure that the data, if we had it, would be relevant. Again, the point is that the context in which European nations support religious schools is quite different than ours. Proselytizing (and the intolerance that it often generates) is not nearly as central to European custom and culture as it is to American experience. If there is a religious right in Europe, it is probably as much a Muslim phenomenon (consider the Netherlands, for example) as it is Christian, and, don’t forget that European evangelical Protestantism (especially continental European evangelical Protestantism) is quite different from American evangelical Protestantism. I am not aware that European evangelicalism has produced the likes of Josiah Strong, Lyman Beecher, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson.
4. Any sense of how many families will actually choose private education, and how many will stay in public schools, under school choice programs? The Zelman case tells us that even in Cleveland, where the credibility of the public system could have been seen as especially low, many eligible families chose charter and magnet schools in the public system rather than private-school vouchers.
The answer is that I have no idea. The problem is that the details of a voucher program are critical. What is the mix of schools from which eligible parents could reasonably choose. There is bound to be considerable variation on this point, and that variation matters.
My sense is that there isn't empirical evidence to support these warnings. But I'd be interested to know of any.
Tom Berg University of St. Thomas School of Law (Minneapolis)
From: Newsom Michael
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] See my comments interlineated below.
-----Original Message-----
Well, of course the pro-voucher side, correspondingly, generally accepts the need for a "common ground" and for some "state imposition." The vast majority of voucher supporters are willing to have some state oversight of the educational quality and, within limits, the educational content in their schools. The vast majority want their religious schools to teach basic values of human dignity, human rights, and tolerance and respect for others -- values that they see as required by their faiths. Of course many of them have different ideas about the scope of human rights or tolerance than some other citizens do. But that doesn't mean they oppose the general ideas of rights, tolerance, or "common ground" -- any more than the fact that public-school supporters favor public schools in which values are taught means that they oppose "mediating institutions" as sources of values. All of these arguments, however heated, are at the margins. Both sides, not just the public-school supporters, are willing to draw lines.
I am less sanguine than you are about the inclination of some people to support the teaching of tolerance and respect for others. The rhetoric of many people, including some voucher supporters, points to an America characterized by separate clusters or groupings of people distrustful or contemptuous of other people. One is forced to conclude that some people find nothing wrong with religious apartheid. (See David M. Smolin, Regulating Religious and Cultural Conflict in a Postmodern America: A Response to Professor Perry, 76 Iowa L. Rev. 1067 (1991).) I think that religious apartheid is a terrible idea, and it does little to engender the kind of cohesiveness that the country needs.
I don't understand how arguing for school vouchers -- which is what I've been doing, rather than arguing for religion in public schools -- "overlooks the role of mediating institutions" in forming children. Rather, the argument for vouchers emphasizes that role, since the universe of mediating institutions concerning children obviously includes not just families and churches, but also private schools.
There are good reasons to worry about putting too much weight on private schools, for the reasons that I mentioned earlier, among others.
The premise underlying vouchers is that the government can achieve its goals of education and basic socialization as much through private institutions as through public ones, and indeed should treat the two equally in funding so as to avoid discouraging pursuit of the private option. Moreover, if the family would choose a private instead of a public school, doesn't respect for the family itself as a mediating institution point toward presumptively respecting, rather than discouraging, that choice?
Again, we should be concerned about the possibilities of religious apartheid.
As to ways of decreasing economic pressure and increasing family time, I specifically said that lower taxes and fewer working women were not the only means of doing so. I simply said that, realistically speaking, they were among the means most likely to be on table in our society. To offer as an alternative to these "a radical readjustment of our economic rules" proves my point, it seems to me. As a Democrat (albeit a conflicted one), I want there to be more equitable rewards for work, and women to continue to participate fully in economic life. My question had to do with how realistic it is to think that the powerful dynamics that have led to increased reliance on schools for moral teaching can be reversed without incurring costs that defenders of public schools are unwilling to pay.
We appear to agree on this much: there is a Catch-22 at work here. As I said, Americans know the unfairness of winner-take-all rules, and yet don’t seem all that eager to get rid of them. One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to recognize and believe that the Catch-22 is no accident. We need to deconstruct your “powerful dynamics” and decide whether religious apartheid is to be our future. (And if religious apartheid becomes established in this country, the reintroduction of overt, de jure racial apartheid, given our awful history on race, cannot be too far behind.)
Finally, I don't see how single-parent families cut against my concerns; it seems to me that they are more subject to the concerns. Casting absolutely no aspersion on single parents, it nevertheless remains the case that they as a class have to work almost by definition and therefore are likely as a class to have to rely more on other institutions (often the schools) for the training of their children. In fact, I would assume that increases in single parenting in recent decades are another powerful reason why some of the moral training has shifted, on net, from families to schools. If there is such a connection, I then wonder further if "reducing the percentage of single-parent families" is a crusade that many public-school proponents will want to join.
If we recognize the Catch-22 for what it is, we can perhaps begin to come up with some creative solutions to the mediating institutions problem for both single parent and two-parent families. The point is to respect the zone of private autonomy while at the same time minimizing the risk of religious (and racial) apartheid. Reliance on private schools, therefore, is misguided because they can too easily become instruments of religious apartheid. The fact that powerful interests may be arrayed against this undertaking, it does not follow that the undertaking should be abandoned. It only means that it will be harder to get ourselves out from under the baleful alliance between rightwing religious and economic interests.
P.S. I, too, am a conflicted Democrat. But my problem is that the Congressional wing of the party is overloaded with wimps and ditherers, who, not surprisingly, cannot seem to find a voice, and who repeatedly get rolled by the Republicans. It would seem that the Democrats cannot continue to waffle on the unfairness of the winner-take-all rules and expect to regain national or federal power anytime soon. But on the other hand, one could read the history of American presidential elections beginning in 1860 and conclude, not unreasonably, that Democrats win the White House (taking it away from the Republicans) not because of anything that the Democrats stand for, but because the Republicans overplayed their hand and messed things up too badly. So I, too, am conflicted. History tells me one thing – waffle and just be “there” to pick up the pieces when Americans get too annoyed with the Republicans, and my sense of fairness tells me something else. (The virtual lock that the Democrats had on the Congress from 1932 to 1994 is another story for another time. It is a story that has a lot to do with the American South and the Civil War.) Oh well.
Tom Berg University of St. Thomas School of Law (Minnesota)
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