In recent years, government, particularly at the federal level, has been increasingly hostile to the idea that the flourishing of religious schools can be encouraged by government policy. Now many Catholics believe that a shift in this government attitude can be expected with the arrival of the Bush administration – particularly in the area of school choice and school vouchers. What can Catholics, and indeed all moral conservatives, reasonably hope for from the new administration?
A recent spate of articles claimed that Bush insiders now acknowledge that the Bush proposal for a national education voucher proposal will likely be bargained away in order to strengthen Congressional prospects for the rest of the Bush education program. And Rod Paige, the Bush choice for Education Secretary, went out of his way in his confirmation testimony to reassure Senator Kennedy that vouchers were not one of his priorities. On the face of it, this looks like a clear defeat for the forces of educational liberty and a harbinger of worse things to come from a Bush administration. While this may be so, it is also true that a national voucher plan may not be the best object of moral conservative hopes and political efforts anyway. It is a complicated issue, and deserves some broader perspective.
The fundamental case for vouchers is one of justice rooted in the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Among the various “unalienable” rights not explicitly listed in the Declaration is surely the right of parents – barring clear, dramatic, and rare cases of incapacity – to maintain direct substantive control over the education of their children. This right is unalienable because it truly cannot be given away, which is the real meaning of unalienable. A parent can no more arrange for someone else to be ultimately responsible for the education of his child than he can for that child’s feeding or shelter. The parental claim that the education of his child is his own business derives directly from the fact that the education of that child is inescapably his duty.
Education, of course, is much more than the acquisition of the skills of reading, writing and arithmetic. The most important aspect of education, in fact, is the moral and spiritual formation that inevitably occurs, for better or worse, during the years of childhood. The true fruit of education is not what the child can do, but what kind of person he is. Accordingly, it is above all with respect to education as directed to the formation of character that the unalienable right of the parents must be respected.
From the beginning of the American experience, these truths have meant that education has been primarily a local affair. Many other countries, where the education of children has been understood to be important first to the country or the state, and only secondarily to the person, have educational traditions of centralized control and national standards. In America, self-government has always included self-government in education, and that has meant preservation of local initiative and local control precisely so that parents could exercise their essential role in the process. The entire history of the public school movement in America must be understood in this context, or we will fundamentally misunderstand its meaning and justification.
The public schools of the 19th century arose, for the most part, in conformity with the American tradition of parental control, and were usually quite aggressive in undertaking the mission of moral formation that decent parents expected of them. Because, however, of the overwhelmingly Protestant character of the country, it was perhaps natural that what became the “standard issue” program of moral formation in American public schools was, in fact, more narrowly based on a particular religious understanding than what American principle allows. It was natural, but regrettable, because it forced good citizens – chiefly, in those days, Catholics and Jews – to pay taxes to educate their neighbors’ children as well as to make great sacrifices to set up their own Catholic or Jewish system. It was wrong to force this sacrifice upon them, rather than to make greater efforts to make the system of publicly funded education more responsive to the sectarian diversity of the citizenry.
Today a number of moral conservatives, including many Protestants, are in a situation similar to that of their Catholic brethren of a century ago. Religious parents quite reasonably view the typical effect of the public school establishment as a state-imposed “moral” formation in secular relativism, if not worse. They face the choice of paying for the corruption of their own children, or of paying twice over – in taxes for public schools and tuition for private ones to which they send their children – to avoid such corruption. The voucher movement has arisen chiefly in response to this dilemma, as parents around the country have demanded that the financial sacrifice they make in tax dollars for the sake of education correspond in some way to the high goals they have for the education of their children.
