Sometimes secondary arguments obscure primary arguments.
Take the whole school voucher thing, once again in the news because the Supremes ruled that a Cleveland program was okay.
I’m convinced that a major reason this is such a bone of contention is because of hidden agendas. To wit, social conservatives and those who pander to them hate our public school system (both because they’ve been ideologically more or less kicked out of it, and because educational unions are a major opponent of theirs), and want to do something, anything, to break its back. Opponents of vouchers have the intellectual defense of church/state separation, but are really into it because, damn, anything those social conservatives want is likely evil of the deepest hue.
And that’s a fine set of arguments, if you want to talk about education reform. But that’s a public policy argument, and not a constitutional one. And, as a public policy stance, I’m against vouchers and for our public schools; indeed, it amazes me that social conservatives are so willing to cripple one of the great unifying elements of our nation, one of the great “Americanizing” elements of our nation, the public school experience. Not to mention the tremendous public oversight of the public educational system, vs. private or for-profit schools. But I digress, because we’re talking here not about whether voucher systems are beneficial or detrimental to our society (or how we think our society should be), but whether they are constitutional.
Vouchers, on the surface, seem to fail the constitutional test, since they in effect represent giving government money to religious institutions. That’s a bad thing, in principle (both for the government and for religious institutions). I’m a big believer in that wall between church and state, and, “ceremonial deism” notwithstanding, I think we are a better society for the strengthening of that wall over the past century. Where that wall has been weakened, we’ve tended to get not “Freedom of Religion” but “Freedom of Our Religion,” where “our” has usually meant mainstream Protestantism.
What gives vouchers the apparent consitutional out, though, is that it’s not the government actually giving the money, but individuals. And the model that can be used here in comparisoin is charitable contributions.
The tax deduction for charitible contributions can be thought of (and, indeed, is directly designed) as government funding of those receiving institutions. I have no doubt that people would still give to charity if the deduction were eliminated. I have no doubt, either, that the rate would greatly drop, and the governmental social net would have to be strengthened, probably further and more expensively than the cost to the government of that deduction.
I give money to my church. I can deduct that from my income tax. It is effectively no different than the government simply giving me that money and letting me give it to the church.
Is that a violation of church and state? The courts would seem to say no, because I, the giver, have the choice of to whom to give it. I can give it to a chuch. I can give it to a secular charity. I can give it to the local museum or zoo. There is elaborate regulatory oversight as to what qualifies as a donation to a qualifying institution, but the end result is the same, in that the government is funding my donation.
In theory, a school voucher system should work much the same. The government isn’t saying that you have to spend this on the Catholic school down the block. You can spend it at any qualifying educational institution.
Again, you can use the analogy of government workers. Not even the strictest church/state separatist would argue that just because Joe-Bob works for the State Dept. he should not be able to make contributions to his local church. That’s because we figure, hey, even if he’s being paid with tax dollars, once the money is in his possession, it’s his to do with as he pleases. That he may blow it on gambling or booze or cigarettes, or give it to a church or the KKK or the Republican Party is of no (official) concern of ours.
Now, in practice, most private schools have been religious-based, for a variety of reasons (the long tradition of religious community service and education, the desire by some folks to opt-out from the “godless secular humanism” of modern public education), but not all have been. There are plenty of non-church private schools around. And if a voucher system becomes more wide-spread, I would expect to see more of these, either run as non-profits or as for-profits.
I also expect that some voucher money will go to schools that promulgate world-views through their curriculum with which I disagree. Again, that’s a public policy issue, and no more constitutional a complaint than the complaints about “Look at the liberal/conservative/humanist/religious bullshit they’re teaching our kids today!” have been with our public schools.
In theory, of course, this could have been handled even more subtly, as a tax deduction as well. That might have made the constitutionality even more clear, but would have muddied the public policy issue, since it would have been a more direct benefit to wealthier families. The voucher system is still likely to benefit the wealthy more than the poor (since most private schools cost more than vouchers are likely to give), but, again, that’s a public policy issue rather than a constitutional one.
I’m still unhappy with the decision. I understand the reasoning of it. I would feel better if I agreed with the aims and goals of the folks who support school vouchers. But those are all secondary arguments, not the primary one. And, fortunately for everyone, the Constitution isn’t just about what aims and goals that I approve of.
Your viewpoint is well thought out.
I like the idea that funding private/religious schools is allowed as a charitable tax deduction – instead of paying the politicians all that money to use my money in a way that I see as unconstitutional, why don’t these people really put their money where their mouths are and pay for some inner-city kid to be bussed to a private school?
In the meantime – I want MY tax money to go to FIXING the existing problem. Our city schools have been ‘broken’ for an ungodly long time, and I want my money working on THAT problem. (And I say ‘city’ schools, not ‘inner-city’ schools – I was practically in the ‘burbs of Detroit as a kid, and the schools were in difficulty 30 years ago – I shudder to think of what they look like now.)
We should not have a public school system where the kids coming out of public schools think that they should be given concessions in college because of the insufficiency of their education.
Looking at this from another angle – the public schools kids shouldn’t have to take a year of make-up/catch-up classes just to compete at the college level. And this is pretty much the norm these days, even with kids who are on the honors level and taking ‘accelerated’ course offerings on the high school level.
If it’s broke, I say – then fix it!
And don’t spend MY money to further YOUR religious agenda. Please!
I agree with everything you say. But that’s the public policy side of the issue, not the judicial one.
I have to take issue with your social conservative bashing. As a fiscal conservative and a social moderate/conservative, I see the primary function of schools to teach my children reading, arithmetic, history, etc. I do not expect, nor do I wish, the school to teach my children what they believe to be ethical or moral. The problem that most social moderates/conservatives have with our public school systems is that the the three Rs are either equal to or have taken a back seat to things such as sensitivity training or esteem issues. The business world that my daughters will join do not care about how they feel, they care about the individuals ability to think critically and to be able to communicate.
I’m fortunate in that I believe my children attend a well grounded public school. If I were still living in Maryland, I would assuredly take advantage of the vouchers and place them in a private school.
My perception of social conservative commentary (which may get blended in at times with religious conservative commentary) is that many are more annoyed where the schools are teaching the wrong ethical lessons, vs. any ethical lessons.
Of course, ethics are not taught (or not) in a vacuum. While equations can be solved, usually, without any ethical content, it’s often difficult to teach reading or science (or history!) without ethics/morals/ideology creeping in. In some ways that is as it should be, since trying to strip public society and its activities of ethical context is either futile or dangerous. Your daughters will also be expected by the business world (one would hope) to be law-abiding, ethical, and able to work alongside others.
I do agree that teaching “self-esteem” has gotten way too much focus, though the pedagogical basis for it — the recognition that kids who feel worthless will tend to achieve little — has some value.
The very vocal, religous conservatives are usually the rable rousers who sqwuak about the “wrong” type of ethics being taught. I believe the silent majority wish not to have any type of ethics/morals taught. My view is, what you (feel free to replace this with Teacher or counselor) view as ethical or moral almost certanly is different than what I consider ethical and moral. I’m not saying that my view or your view is right or wrong, they’re just different. Mathmatics, reading, history are what they are. If the facts are taught, there’s not much to debate. An example it’s a fact that the north vietnamese beat the U.S. and South Vietnam. It’s when the teacher argues if a war/conflict was ethical or moral that problems arise.
If Enron and World Comm are any indication of ethics in the workplace, we should all be afraid.
As a history major, I’d argue that “history is what it is,” or “if the facts are taught, there’s not much to debate.” It’s very difficult to teach history without dealing with the ethnics and ideologies of those involved. Especially if you have only a very limited time to talk about any given subject, which means you have to leave things out, which allows more bias to enter in.
So, why did the US lose? Did it, really, or did it just not win? Why were we fighting there in the first place? Why did the US pull out? What role did civil unrest in the US play, and why was that unrest there?
And if you strip history down to dates and Presidents, down to the minimum of ethical and ideological context, all you end up with is kids bored out of their skulls.
And it’s dishonest history, at that, if you take that approach. Be it the Civil War or the Civil Rights Movement, it’s difficult to talk about what happened without talking about the motivations of the people involved, and how that affects what we do and say and believe today (which is, after all, why we study history in the first place).
It can be done, to some degree. But it’s like talking about the history of religion without talking letting one’s personal religious beliefs color things — it’s a very difficult tightrope to walk.
The kids may be bored, but it is honest and as unbiased as possible.
The problem, as I see it, is when you start adding your inflections or views into teaching history, you are distorting it to suite your own biases. I’ll stick with the Vietnam example (for reference, I’m way to young to be a vietnam vet). A teacher who demonstrated against the evil, capitalist America’s involvement in southeast asia will have a distinctly differnt frames of reference than the teacher who was a medic there. One will teach about the valiant struggle against a corrput government, and the other will teach about trying to survive and getting spit on at the airport.
To my way of thinking, the Who, What, When, Where are fact. The Why is where the ethical issues lie.
Can we teach them it is wrong to cheat? What about being fair on the playground? Should we let might make right in the classroom? Teachers can and should teach both sides of an issue; they will if they are teaching rather than indoctrinating.
Can we teach about the issue that caused wars? If not, then the lesson is incomplete.
not being a history buff, conservative of any type, or a teacher, you may discount my opinion as uninformed.
i have a problem with the idea that history should be taught in an “unbiased” manner. this shifts the arguement of how history should be taught away from the development of critical thinking skills and into the realm of, as dave said, bare facts.
one of the major benefits i received from my best history classes was the ability to question the “bare facts” that i received from any source — rumor, the news, supposedly “unbiased” texts, etc. the teachers that taught me in those classes didn’t approach the situation either from a biased or an unbiased opinion.: they presented information, led us to ask questions of the information, search for additional information, call into question possible biases, and examine found biases for their social context. history isn’t important because it happened; history is important because it happened in context.
one of the most natural questions for a student, especially in history, is to ask “why?” encouraging teachers to present a rich view of the situation, from different viewpoints, seems to me to be a better way of presenting history than a recitation of the bare facts, and blowing off students who ask “why?”
which, to get back to the original point, is how most of my history classes were taught in public schools. don’t ask “why?” in class — generally the teacher didn’t know, wasn’t able to articulate it other than as the natural, inevitable proceeding of one bare fact to another, and couldn’t tolerate because the questions, ahem, called their social conservatism into question.
so why did we fight the vietnam war? was it really to take back the world from godless commies? what are the other possibilities?
The history you teach demonstrates an ideological, if not ethical, bias. Make kids just memorize a list of presidents and their terms of office?
And by removing the “why” from history, you are, indeed, telling only part of the story. We wouldn’t dream of teaching kids chemistry by telling them only that chemical A plus chemical B produces reaction C — don’t ask why, just memorize the result. Similarly, simply asserting geometry without making kids provide the proof — the why — would be absurd.
Teaching kids that John Wilkes Booth upped and shot Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and just leaving it at that makes Lincoln’s death meaningless, a random act — and one that, without associating some values to Lincoln’s presidential agenda, doesn’t really mean anything. Was Lincoln great? Was he a hero? Simply rattling off what he did, sans context or meaning or interpretation or value won’t tell you.
Similarly, saying that the US had X troops in Viet Nam on date Y, withdrew all troops by date Z, and that South Viet Nam was defeated by the North on date D, isn’t providing the information that will be actually retained by the kid, let alone used. You might as well just go back to multiplication drills.
Vietnam? Well, America’s elite thought that we could waltz in and install a US-friendly government like we’d just done with the Philippines, utterly ignoring the differences between the two places. So they didn’t blink at jumping in on a counrty that had a thousand year tradition of guerilla war and 20-30 years of current experience against the French and Japanese on top of that. And the fact that we’d been their allies against the Japanese and then stabbed them in the back and supported the return of ham-handed French colonialism. Asians were Asians, they apparently thought, and all they had to do was push the right buttons. Didn’t help that the collaborationist (with the French) Dien family was the one we chose to back — until the CIA got tired of him and finessed his assassination.
If you sat down and made a list of all the ways to mess up a war you’d pretty much have a blueprint of the US strategy. The lessons of the Romans, Byzantines, Clausewitz, Sung Tzu, everybody, all thrown out in favor of . . . whatever the hell they were smoking in Washington in those days.
I think it was called “Containment of the Communist Menace.” A heady brew, and one which did a lot of internal damage as well as causing us to stagger about the way it did.
(Not that the expansionist policies of either China or the USSR were anything to ignore, but, jeez, let’s at least apply a modicum of sense and morality to our foreign policy.)
One of the great fears of the current War on Terrorism is that it’s the sort of monopolar thinking that will lead to the same sort of bloody buffoonery.
Current military thinking in the US was shaped by the former lieutenants who had their asses handed to them by the unholy combination of the Vietnamese and our own leadership. Hopefully those lessons will stay learned.
The wild cards, of course, being …
… the civilian leadership (Rumsfeld, Bush).
… the extent to which the Viet Nam lesson may have made the military strategy too gun-shy.
The way I see it is this…
I lived in Cleveland for many years. We don’t live there now but were there when this first became an issue. And it was one of the reasons we moved out of there.
My children have always gone to private Catholic schools. This is for many different reasons. We felt it important enough to give them this education. And when there was a time my husband and I could not afford it, he went and got a second job to pay for it. And when things really went to worse, he got a third job! We did it all by ourselves with no help from anyone, including goverment. We feel it is the parents responsibilty to find a way.
And when I shall see some of these voucher kids, well it is going to irk me that their parents were to lazy to get another job and are probably mooching from the government already!
I am tired of paying for all of them. Noone ever helped us when things got down and ugly. Neither did we ever consider trying to get the government to do it for us.
That’s an interesting alternative perspective. Of course, a lot of the partisans behind the voucher programs would probably choke on their cigars if you implied that this represented a welfare program.
The US military seems to be just about the right amount of cautious. Damned straight they don’t want to deal with Iraq. Put Saddam’s back against the wall and he will use the chemical and bio weapons he has around. How many tens of thousands of casualties is it worth to us to take him out? Because that’s what we could be looking at. Worse, these are hard-to-replace, expensively trained volunteer soldiers and not the mass draftees of WW2 or Vietnam. The military is a hell of a lot smaller than during Desert Storm. We cannot afford Pyrrhic victories.
[This is just a test comment trying to diagnose a blog problem I’m having. Nothing to see here. Move along …]
Broken schools.
~aithne~ brings up an interesting perspective. And yes. The ‘handout’ aspect of this program is one of the things that bothers me about it…
But the schools aren’t broken because they aren’t teaching history ‘ethically’ or ‘correctly.’
The schools are broken because they aren’t managing to get ‘Reading, Writing and Arithmetic’ into the kid’s heads.
All kids need to learn to read before they can enter the realm of critical thinking. And many of them aren’t getting that far.
I don’t have any suggestions for solutions to the public school problem…
but I am convinced that taking money away from the schools will only make their plight worse.
Hmmm. Maybe a blog post on “What’s wrong with schools today?” would be in order. It certainly sounds like it would garner a lot of comments.
Part of the problem is that I don’t actually have kids in school at the moment. Yet.
Another part of the problem is that I have a hunch that at least some of it is a attributable to the “Kids these day!” syndrome, where every generation has thought that schools are doing a crappy job of educating Junior.
But we’ll see.
Wow, go away for a day or two and the conversation gets away from me!! Even though a few of the arguments were compelling, I still believe in factual teaching. As much as possible, biases and ethics should be kept out. The teachers slant on what is right or wrong, or why something occured should not be taught. Example: Say there was anti semetic teacher talking about the “Why” of WWII starting. His or her slant would be because it was the money grubing jews who didn’t want to share wealth with the “native” german citizens. If you’re offended by that, then why can’t a parent be offended by a teacher talking about the evils of capitalism, US policy to oppress the world, or homosexuality? I firmly believe that a parent must be the final authority on what there children view as ethical or not.