February 21, 2007
Secular Schools
Arnold Kling has an excellent piece today in TCS. The man who brought us the superb coinage "Folk Marxism" now chooses to be called a "Civil Societarian" rather than a libertarian.
To excerpt the article too heavily is to risk reducing it to a few of its parts. I encourage people to read the whole thing.
A recurring theme is the "religiosity" of progressivism.
As far as I can tell, there is no way to draw the line between church and state in public schools. To me, the only way to separate church and state in schooling is to have private schools. Getting government out of the schooling business would return schooling to the realm of civil society, where values and ethics may be taught without inhibition.The religion of the public school system tends to be a mixture of environmentalism, political correctness, and worship of big government. Many private schools preach the same thing, so perhaps little would change if we had a system of all private education. However, if there is any chance that students might delve more deeply into issues of ethics and social problems, it would be in a setting that is not constrained by government bureaucracy.
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Liberals worry that religious conservatives will impose a Christian theocracy. That threat is both obvious and far-fetched. Instead, I wish that liberals could recognize the dangers that their own religion poses to civil society. Price controls on pharmaceuticals would represent a much more serious war on science than denial of funds for embryonic stem cell research (although I personally would not oppose such government funding).
There's more in there, including what I think is a reasonable claim about our propensity to tie our beliefs into a larger picture.
We need to love something larger than ourselves. Many people love God. Perhaps civil societarians can love our ideal of a civil society. I am happy to love the flag and the republic for which it stands. Just not in public schools.