Audi Alteram Partem: The Case Against Public Schools

 

As the argument for separation of church and state has emerged in Hampton, prompted by the town warrant which provides an account to pay the bills for the Sacred Heart School of Our Lady of The Miraculous Medal Catholic Church, all sorts of irrelevant, misleading and frankly dumb arguments have emerged:

1. We are only paying bills only for non religious items in this religious school: Of course, if you pay to paint the walls of the classrooms so the Church can now buy new altars or pictures of Jesus, you cannot separate money which allows one from another, and, in fact, it has been revealed bills were paid for paper crowns possibly used in acting out nativity scenes, and for computers which may or may not have streamed mass from St. Patrick's Cathedral.

2. We are not really paying checks to the Catholic Church; we just pay invoices for some of their expenses. This, of course, is the same argument the husband makes when he is caught paying for the rent, the groceries and the wine for his mistress. "I never paid to have sex with that woman!" A classic distinction without a difference.

3. We must support all children in Hampton, and we cannot discriminate against those who prefer to go to a Catholic school or a religious school out of town, or a remedial school out of town. 

This tracks Justice Alito's argument that if a town or state chooses to fund any private school not part of the public school system it cannot discriminate against religious schools. 

Of course, using this loaded word, "discriminate," evokes the connotation that discrimination is bad in all circumstances, since racial discrimination led to segregated public schools, as an effort to  discriminate against oppressed minorities.

Lost in this, is the distinction between something you cannot change--your skin color--and something you believe in, namely that as a Catholic; e.g., you believe homosexuality is a sin, or as a Muslim you believe boys and girls should not go to school together or girls should not go to school at all.

In the case of the SHS, this "we're only doing this to support every Hampton child" is suspect because 75% of the SHS children are from out of town, so what you are really saying "we're only doing this to support all Catholic kids" or not even that, because a substantial number of these kids may not even be Catholic, but may be seeking out SHS for other reasons--as Frank DeLuca suggested, many of the kids at SHS were there because their parents rejected the idea of closing public schools during the pandemic, and SHS remained open. How many of these parents were anti vaaxers or believed COVID was a hoax is unknown.

The most fundamental problem of all is what government aims to do with respect to funding public schools. If the aim is to provide an education at public expense for every child living within a jurisdiction, then we have committed to paying for all children, but we really have never done this.

In Utah, next door to every public school is a school for the Church of the Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) and at noon, the children leave the public schools and file next door to the Mormon school for "lunch" and religious instruction. Then around 2 PM they all return to the public school building to resume their secular education. No public funds go to the Mormon schools. Mormon parents tithe to the church and the non Mormon children who have the schools to themselves in the middle of the day are not discriminated against. Surely nobody in Utah would claim religious schools there, which receive no state funds, are discriminated against. The difference is the Church of the Latter Day Saints respects the idea of separation of church and state. Financial support for the Church is built into Mormon worship. 

But the Catholic Church in Hampton, unlike the Mormons,  feels entitled to town funds because the Church has got that warrant article. And that church knows that "Recommended by the School Board" and "Recommended by the Budget Committee" means it gets its money every year. 

It's a sweet little deal, and all totally "legal," apart from being unconstitutional.

 At Deliberative Sessions members of the congregation say, "Well, any other religious or private school in town can do the same thing we do, and ask the voters to approve money for them."  

Well, almost any other church can ask. When an amendment to the article was proposed which said that if we appropriate $65,000 to the Catholic Church then any other private school in town will be awarded the same, two objections were raised by members of the congregation:

1/ There are no other private schools in town.

2/ If a Church of Satan moved to town with its own school, they would get the money. Which is to say, we only give money to churches we like.

Nothing wrong with that!

The Ideal Public School

If the commitment to public schools is to be sustained, we have to ask ourselves what that idea of a public education means.  

Once, it meant a place where kids could learn to read and write and do sums.

But as our nation grew and grew more diverse, complex and industrialized, and as we began to compete with highly developed countries like Germany, England and France, we realized education was essential to becoming a first world nation. You don't develop an Einstein in a little red one room school house. 

The Brits, with their sophisticated Oxbridge system developed radar, the Enigma decoding machine, the CAT scan and the MRI.

Ron Desantis has harped on the idea of public schools as a place where "indoctrination" happens. This is a way of saying, "they are teaching our kids stuff we disagree with." 

In the past, when my parents went to school, public schools taught new immigrants English, and they played a vital role in the assimilation of a whole generation of people new to this country, and likely they still do. 

And, in my time, they promulgated ideas of good citizenship (staying informed of public policies, controversies, voting) and obligation to serve the nation (paying your taxes, serving in the military) among other things.

Public schools became especially controversial when the anti-war movement fomented resistance to government policies on the campuses of public universities. It was no accident that the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students at a public university, Kent State, and slaughtered students who were learning and teaching ideas the local townsfolk abhorred: That sometimes the United States does really bad things, like burning kids in Vietnamese villages.

And, in New Hampshire, William F. Loeb, the owner and editor of the Manchester Union Leader, made the public schools, especially the University of New Hampshire, his most special whipping boy, inveighing against the pointy headed professors who believed they could get by teaching their communistic ideas of brotherhood and Kumbya and getting paid by the state to do it, not to mention all those "small breasted women" who wanted to talk about love and peace and opposing the building of the world's biggest oil refinery on the Great Bay at the doorstep of the campus at Durham, New Hampshire.

Nowadays, the objections are over sexual things: sexual preference, gender identity, whether or not a person born a boy and still harboring male genitalia should be able to strip naked and shower in the girls' locker room.

I'm no expert, but I suspect the current efforts to do "charter schools" and to fund religious schools in New Hampshire with taxpayer money are part of a conviction on the part of the governor and his head of state education, Mr. Edelblut, that public education is a bad thing and ought to be destroyed and replaced by private schools.