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Pluralism and Public Schooling
| Article
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12527 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1987 |
6,803 Words |
| Author
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Thomas J. Fleming
Thomas J. Fleming is editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of
American Culture and the author of The Politics of Nature
(Transaction Books: New Brunswick, N.J., forthcoming) and
coauthor with Paul Gottfried of The American Conservative
Movement since 1945 (G.K. Hall: Boston, 1987). |
A significant number of Americans have fallen out of love with state-supported schooling. The causes of resentment are varied. In many cases, the issue is religion. Some religious groups have established their own schools, and their members feel the economic pinch of supporting both parochial and "public" educational systems. Roman Catholics constitute the most obvious group, but there are others: Missouri Synod Lutherans, Southern Baptist, Orthodox Jews, and a host of evangelical and reformed congregations--all of whom prefer to rear their children to respect the faiths of their fathers. However, there are also religious dissidents inside government schools. Fundamentalists, in particular, have gone to court to demand the teaching of creationism in biology classes and the exclusion of books offensive to their moral and religious principles. At the other extreme are the Amish who refuse to school their children beyond the three Rs and vocational education. These Plain People believe in imparting their social and moral wisdom in the home, instead of in civics classes and school-based sex clinics.
The Amish, however, are not the only "home-schoolers." For one reason or another increasing numbers of parents are choosing to educate their children at home. Sometimes the motives are religious or ethical, but in many cases a number of factors are involved: lack of trust in the quality of government education, inability or unwillingness to pay private school tuition, or alarm at the prevalence of drugs, sexual promiscuity, and violence in nearly all American schools. Some parents, even those with children in public schools, are uneasy with the amount of power wielded by the state over child rearing. Their reaction to compulsory schooling, child-abuse laws, and sex education is a combined result of impotence and rage. Journalist Jeane Westin discovered a high level of dissatisfaction in parents she interviewed. In the book Parent Revolution, Westin summed up much of their hostility as "feelings of being shut out of the educational process." The parents who testified before the U.S. Department of Hearings on the Pupils Rights Amendment (in 1984) one after another told tales of harassment and coercive indoctrination carried out by schools in the name of values education.
In the more formal arena of academic debate, there are two main lines of arguments against the monopoly of government schools: (1) a usually religious argument based on the notion of pluralism and (2) a libertarian/radical argument derived from theories of individualism and natural rights. While neither approach is really rooted in the American experience (much less based on self-evident first principles), both are invaluable for the light they shed on the
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