Faith, Rights, and Choice in Education
Tuesday, January 16, 2024
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A newly published book, Faith, Rights, and Choice, details the evolution of the debate over religious schools in each of Canada’s provinces. Unlike the United States where, since McCollum v. Board of Education in 1948, the Supreme Court has twisted the First Amendment’s protections of freedom of religion into freedom from religion (especially in schools), Canada has afforded constitutional protection (and sometimes subsidies) to religious schools without anyone suggesting Canadian “democracy” was imperiled.
The title comes from the three foci the authors identify as successive bases on which proponents of those schools argued their case over the 156 years of Canadian nationhood. The focus was first on the rights of faith communities, especially minorities in given provinces (English Protestants in Québec, French Catholics in Ontario) to religiously-informed schooling. It later moved to “rights” to education, with religion often the substitute card for language/ethnicity. In recent years, it has shifted to “choice,” including both parental rights and the benefits of educational competition.
Without detracting from any of those factors, let me suggest how we should move the debate forward, at least in the United States: via persons. Specifically, I have in mind the persons of a student and his parents who, given the child’s status as a minor, have a legitimate role to act on his behalf. Bottom line: whom or what is education for?
The very interrogative pronouns in that question give away the issue. Is education for persons, i.e., students and their parents, or is it for schools, i.e., the institutions where students go?
Some readers may laugh at the question. Of course, education is for kids, not schools! But, if that’s so, then why are educational dollars – one of the things that makes education possible – for schools rather than kids?
Education makes no sense apart from the person educated. We can talk about what a person is taught, e.g., should faith be part of education or not? We can speak about why a person may claim an education, i.e., is it his right or privilege? We can discuss the range of educational options, i.e., school choice. But the bottom line is: it all keeps returning to the person.
So shouldn’t the question be answered on the basis of what a person is due?
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On Catholic grounds, the answer would be “yes.” A person has a right and duty to know things, including above all, God. A person has a right to education. Persons (in the case of children those primarily charged with their interests, i.e., parents) have a right to choose the appropriate education for that child. All this also stems, in the end, from the love due to a person, including his integral development as a child of God, endowed with intellect and freedom of choice.
On secular, democratic grounds, the answer should also be “yes.” Education is a good of persons and benefits society. That a government does not support a particular church’s form of education does not mean that it must, can, or should withhold support from a student who wants it. Society’s non-religious affiliation does not translate into an individual’s. And, in a society where religiously based education fulfills minimum state requirements under compulsory education, society cannot “stack the deck” by preferring one compliant school over another without abridging the equality of persons who might prefer a different school, or the equality of institutions that otherwise meet recognized educational standards.
My argument clearly goes in the direction of promoting school choice, but not for the economic reasons offered by many of its advocates. The authors of Faith, Rights, and Choice recognize that there are two competing motivations under the rubric of “choice.” One is parental choice: parents, on behalf of their children, should be able to pick the appropriate school that is otherwise educationally qualified for their child. The other is institutional and economic: choice is desirable because vigorous competition in the marketplace of educational offerings will promote quality and weed out mediocrity.
Clearly, I endorse the first, without denying some merit to the second: if parents are the primary educators of a child, their choice counts. The community should not impede it when it recognizes their choice of school is otherwise educationally qualified.
But I also want to shift this discussion from the fact of choice to the more important level: the person. “Choices” do not happen in a vacuum. Persons make choices. To discriminate against otherwise legitimate choices is to discriminate against persons.
For too long education, especially public education, has been mired in debates over what the state wanted to get out of education. Once upon a time, it was assimilated “Americans” (i.e., quasi-Protestants). Later, it was “flexible” children or “lifelong learners” or “inquirers” or whatever the pedagogical theory du jour was. But all of those theories turned the school not into a servant of the student but, rather, a servant of the state in promoting what values were on the agenda of the moment.
Today, when that value agenda increasingly collides with the Judeo-Christian heritage many students still bring to school, parents are rightly insisting that a state claiming no religion should not proselytize its values through school systems, especially through systems they privilege by conferring a funding monopoly, which often discriminates – particularly against less privileged children.
School systems are able to get away with it because of the fundamental assumption that the school, rather than the student, is the apple of the state’s (and its treasurer’s) eye.
A personalist ethic and educational philosophy would rightly reject this model.
So, is it not time we insisted on changing the terms of the debate to persons rather than institutions? After all, an education is from start to finish properly for persons.
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*Image: Christ Disputing with the Doctors in the Temple by Ludovico Mazzolino, c. 1522-4 [National Gallery, London]
You may also enjoy:
Kristina Johannes’ School Choice is Social Justice
George J. Marlin’s The Kennedys Versus the Church
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John M. Grondelski
John Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) is a former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. All views herein are exclusively his.
