I think "religious apartheid" and "religious fragmentation" have very
different meanings.
But putting that issue aside for the moment, the questions Tom asks are
certainly fair and important ones.
I certainly don't know if there is significant empirical literature that
responds to his questions -- and I lack the expertise
to evaluate what may be available.
But let me offer a few responses that are not based on empirical studies.
1. The intuition that our children benefit from getting to know children of
other races, ethnic groups, and religions
is a pretty powerful one. Tom's own question reflects it when he notes that
Catholic schools are more racially
diverse than public schools. Why should we care about that unless we think
that interactions with others
of a different background or ethnicity matters.
Of course, other factors contribute to how well children will socialize
with others too. What kids are taught at
school and at home is pretty critical. So are other factors.
2. As to how many parents will choose private schools for their kids, I'm
not sure how much we can learn from the results of any one program, like
the Cleveland program at issue in Zelman.
But there is something of a disconnect here. On the one hand, I'm told that
the culture war is pervasive. There is no common ground.
The public schools will always be a battleground among warring parents over
the education of their children. It is intolerable
to have children subjected to values or theories that are inconsistent with
the values of their parents.
But then I'm told, Don't worry about vouchers because hardly anyone is
going to use them to attend private schools anyway.
One of the reasons I worry that government aid to religious schools and
other religious social programs will be fragmenting is that I listen to the
arguments of
people who support those programs, many of whom are much less moderate than
Tom.
3. As for interreligious tension in other Western democracies that provide
substantial state aid to religious schools.
I can't point to empirical studies. But I think there is considerably more
interreligious tension and less religious equality in many Western
democracies than exists in the U.S. It's complicated. It gets mixed in with
racial, ethnic, and immigration issues. I would not
suggest that the government's funding of religious schools is its primary
cause. But I think we have done a lot better job in creating a society in
which people of different faiths can live together than most other countries.
4. And speaking of empirical studies, where are the studies, here or
abroad, that suggest that government aid to religious schools is going to solve
the problems we have been discussing about religion and values in the
public schools. Most of the countries I am familiar with that fund
religious schools also
involve religion in the public schools in one way or another. I don't see
any clear inverse connection drawn between government funding of private
religious institutions and government promotion of religion in the public
sector itself -- with government funding of private religious institutions
necessarily reducing the promotion of religion in public "secular"
institutions. It is also common, I believe, for government funding of
private religious institutions and government promotion of religion in the
public sector to go hand in hand. Certainly, that is the pattern we see on
the U.S. Supreme Court. The same Justices that support allowing the
government to fund religious institutions that will use government money
for religious purposes also support allowing the government itself to
endorse religion. I understand that isn't Tom's position. But if we are
talking about what is likely to happen rather than what should happen, it
is not at all clear to me that the adoption of voucher programs will
markedly reduce attempts to have government endorse religion in schools or
elsewhere.
Alan Brownstein
UC Davis
At 07:21 PM 8/24/2005 -0500, you wrote:
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.)
2. Any evidence that home-schooled children relate less well to others, when
they eventually enter school systems, than do public-school students?
3. Any evidence of greater interreligious tension, interracial tension,
etc., in European nations that provide substantial state aid to religious
schools than in America?
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.
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]
Sent: Wed 8/24/2005 6:28 PM
To: Law & Religion issues for Law Academics
Subject: RE: Hostility
See my comments interlineated below.
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Berg, Thomas C.
Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2005 3:18 PM
To: Law & Religion issues for Law Academics
Subject: RE: Hostility
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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