Audi Alteram Partem
--Hear the Other side
At the February 6 Deliberative session about the school budget for Hampton public and private schools several arguments were made about why the town of Hampton was justified in paying for operating expenses at Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal's church school, the Sacred Heart School.
One of these arguments, which is my main subject today was the argument that of the 239 students, 53 were children living in Hampton, whose parents pay town (mostly property) taxes and those parent deserve to get a return on their taxes by having the town pay for the religious education of their kids, which is the education they have chosen for their own children. Why should they be forced to pay for the public education of the children of other Hampton taxpayers and not expect to get something from the town to pay for the education of their own children?
A second argument was simply there is nothing wrong with taxpayer funds being directed to a religious school because there is a New Hampshire law (RSA 189:49) which specifically permits this, and there was some, uncited, 1975 case at the New Hampshire Supreme Court saying this is perfectly alright and constitutional, despite the New Hampshire Constitution's Article 6 which says, plain and simple, "But no person shall be compelled to pay for the schools of any sect or denomination." (1784)
Other "arguments" coalesced around the notion the Sacred Heart School is a benign institution, a loving place, which treats its students lovingly, so why would anyone want to deny it anything it needs?
And then there were the indignant citizens who simply asserted sending the 53 students to Sacred Heart School saves the town $1 million every year, so it only makes fiscal sense, to send these kids to a cheaper school. This argument, of course, is unassailable, because despite testimony from the superintendent of the schools and from the treasurer of the SAU that the true figure might be anywhere from a savings of zero to $200,000, those who like this idea cleaved to it as if it were handed down engraved in stone tablets from the mountain.
An aside: The treasurer, who attended SHS herself, tried mightily to not agree the $1 million figure is absurd, said that depending on how those 53 kids get distributed among the 8 grades of the public schools, there might be no need for any new teachers or school buses, but if the students were all special needs going to one grade it could cost "a lot," as if neither she nor the superintendent had any idea at all about what the distribution of those students would be. That "Golly gee, we just don't know," was probably the most appalling thing about the evening. Everyone in that room knew both the treasurer and the superintendent knew precisely how many of those kids would go to each grade, and if they didn't, these two government employees had no business being locked into their current jobs.
But that is all beside the point.
The main idea I wanted to reckon with is the idea of what the taxpaying public owes to the parents of the children of Hampton.
Heaven knows, the town needs more children. Our schools have been afflicted with declining enrollments as Hampton is not immune from national demographics. And the Sacred Heart School has fewer and fewer students signing up, and fewer and fewer from Hampton.
But what about that idea of the town owing an education, whatever education the parents desire for their children?
Ron DeSantis has attacked public schools as a place where "indoctrination rather than education" happens.
And what does he mean by that?
If a parent does not believe in evolution, but he finds his child being taught that God did not create all the earth's creatures in 6 days, is that not indoctrination?
If a parent believes the path to uncovering and knowing the truth is simply reading the Bible and asking yourself "What would Jesus do?" and the public schools teach the scientific method, or that to be acceptable an argument must be based on evidence, not simply doctrine from the church: Is that not indoctrination?
And what is "evidence" anyway?
Or, as Ron DeSantis says, the public schools teach our children America is bad, that it embraced slavery for 300 years, that it waged wars on smaller, less developed nations like the Philippines and Vietnam and Nicaragua: Is that not indoctrination?
In college, in the social sciences, I had professors who declaimed there were true things in the study of anthropology, like there is no culture which is better than any other, or any worse, an attitude called "cultural relativism," so we should not judge. I did not agree with this, as I thought the culture of Nazi Germany or the tribes where children were sacrificed because they were considered a burden, were worse than cultures where this was thought to be evil.
Today, we have elite universities where dissension from the idea that gender dysphoria is simply a different way of being is deemed heretical. Paul McHugh, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins, was shunned and attacked by medical students and undergraduates for suggesting gender dysphoria is, like anorexia nervosa, a case of being ruled by "a wrong idea."
The lists of people who were unable to speak on college campuses because they advocated ideas like opposition to the notion of "microaggression" against Black people, or against women, or because they questioned the idea that college students should be allowed "safe spaces" where they are not perturbed by disturbing ideas. Or the idea that "believe the woman" supersedes the idea of the accused being allowed due process in his own defense, in cases of alleged campus rape.
When one side refuses to hear the arguments of the other side, the idea of public education and higher education collapses.
On the other hand, I can conceive of an education which simply demands that both views are presented students, every time. I think every editorial in every newspaper ought to be in the point/counterpoint format, and so it should be in the teaching of civics, constitutional law, history in public schools.
Personally, I think every high school student graduating from Winnacunnet should have read somewhere between the Academy and graduation the following books:
1. "A Peoples History of the United States," Howard Zinn
2. " Midnight in America," Adam Hochschild
3. "The Guarded Gate," Daniel Ockrent
4. "In Prison," Katherine Richards O'Hare
5. "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," Malcolm X.
6. "Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution," James McPherson
7. "A Stillness At Appomattox" Bruce Catton
8. "Anti Intellectualism in American Life," Richard Hofstadter.
9. "How the South Won The Civil War," Heather Cox Richardson.
10."War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning" Chris Hedges
11. "My War Gone By. I Miss It So." Anthony Loyd
12. "Animal Farm," Gore Orwell
13. "1984" George Orwell
14. "Living My Life," Emma Goldman
15. "Gone With The Wind," Margaret Mitchell.
16. "Mein Kampf," Adolf Hitler
And they should all watch the movie "Godfather" and the TV series, "The Wire."
And with each reading, and viewing, the students should be presented a rigorous counter argument to the case made by each author.
Of course, if someone chooses to home school her child or to send that child to Sacred Heart School, they can opt to read none of this.
And this comes back to the idea of what the purpose of "public education" is.
In my father's day, he went to public school to assimilate into the new country his parents had chosen. He did not speak English when he first set foot into the New York City public schools, and his parents wanted him to absorb what the teachers had to offer him--a new language, the values of his country and an understanding of what was considered proper and righteous in this new land. They could and may have given him a counter argument at home, but they wanted him to learn how to live in this new country and how to succeed and part of succeeding had to do with his learning what was considered acceptable and commendable by society as represented by government and academia, and what was not.
My father's parents knew he would have to function and compete in a larger world, a world larger than their own. They knew he would have to grow beyond them.
Generations of public school kids have brought home ideas which challenged their immigrant parents, who were sometimes scandalized by what their children were being taught in those schools, but these parents did not reject the schools or the idea of public education, however much they may object to some of the ideas about sexual freedom, equality of the genders and what constitutes a successful life.
England and France have struggled with immigrant populations, primarily Muslim, in which the parents reject the wider society of the country in which they live. Some Muslim parents, and this is not limited to Muslims, some Hasidic Jewish parents, look at the sexual mores, the equality of genders, the clothing of the children they see attending public schools and they refuse to allow their children to grow in those directions. They circle the wagons and withdraw into their own cults.
But few of these groups expect funding from taxpayers or the government for their schools. They may apply for welfare, as in the case of the Hasidim, but they educate their children at their own expense.
When I went to public schools, I met the children of the ruling class and I was changed by that experience, but I think they were changed by the experience of my challenging their beliefs.
Public schools served as a marketplace of ideas, when they were functioning at their best.
But now public schools are simply targets for those who do not want their own ideas challenged, and we are drifting toward a time where you do not have to accept the challenge--you can simply demand the taxpayers pay to allow you to reinforce your ideas upon your children's minds.
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