What Religious Liberty?
The Incredible Ever-Expanding Dead End
Anti-Cure, Anti-Life
Whose Values in
Education?
Toppling
Dominos
Anti-Christians
don't have to be Hypocrites but Many Volunteer
Intolerant Tolerance
The Emperor's
Clothes or a Cheap Tuxedo
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part I
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part II
Embryonic
Stem Cell Research Again
The Madness of
Secularism
"Don't Impose Your
Religion on Me"
Dictatorship of Relativism
Two Babies at Christmas
Living Will or Death
Warrant?
Court Ordered
Slow Motion Torture-Death Sentence
Men in Black
A Lot of Hot Air
The Culture War
Battles
"Stay with us, Lord"
Secular-to-English Dictionary
Moral Guidance for
Catholics in this Election
Christians
Losing America
Stem Cell Wars
Catholic
Pro-Abortion Politicians and Communion
Useful Idiots
Who Killed Jesus?
A Primer on Gay
Marriage
Whose Side are You
on?
Vouchers Revisited
Real and Fake
Cloning Bans
Broken Compasses
No Room in the Inn
Killing Fields
Revisited
Gay but not Merry
Adam and Steve?
The Battle for the Court
Victimless Crimes
More Salt, Please
The Next Big Fight
When Religion
Becomes Evil
Virginity Making a Comeback?
You've Come a Long Way,
Baby
The Incarnational
Approach
The Many Meanings of ACLU
Things Your Media Never Told
You
A Nasty Little Secret
Two Points of View on the Birth of Jesus
You Gotta Kill Them. How Else
Are They Going To Learn?
Perplexing Christmas Questions
How Do You See Christ Today?
Now that there is Another Ewe, will there be
Another You?
What is Conscience Anyhow?
Divorce of Love and Life
What Counts as a Mass?
What is a Covenant?
I Wish I had Your Faith
Are there Too Many Decrees of
Nullity?
Dutch Treats
Ecumenism
Going from Baby Doe to Granny Doe
Comments of Evangelium Vitae
The Exception Corrupts the Rule
Good Morality or
Good Medicine
Generation-X'ers Smart in Every Way But
One
A Matter of Good Breeding
Herod and Pontius Pilate at the
Polls
Hitler's Pope or Righteous Gentile?
The Unknown God
What exactly is wrong with
homosexuality?
Ideology Trumps Science, Reality,
and Common Sense
What Exactly is an Indulgence?
Infallibility and Error in the Church
Pilate Asked, "What is Truth?"
The Truth about Families
New Killing Fields
Choice of Language and Language of
Choice
A Lexicon for Our Day
Why are there so many bodies?
Marijuana, Medicine or Menace?
Medical Research and Ethics
Meditation
"You Taught me well,
Mommie dearest"
Moral Fallout
Neutral on the Wrong
Side
"These are the
Nineties After All"
Many are Wed but Few
are Married
"...Prepare him for
additional obligations"
A Useful Lie
A Partridge in a
Pear Tree
Religious Persecution in
the U.S.?
What Makes a Person a
Person?
The Point of a Point of
View
Politically Correct,
Morally Depraved
Population
Controllers out of Control
Practical Dreamers
Social Progress
through Immorality
Shall we Do Evil for
Goodness Sake?
Reason and Faith
Resurrection Glory
Same Sex Marriages?
Pearl of Great Price
"I used to be
schizophrenic, but we're all right now"
Sexual Morality
Irrelevant in Judging Public Officials?
Undesirable Side Effects
Some News is Good News
SOSSLQ's, not POSSLQ's
Spoils of Splits
Why Attend Mass
Every Sunday?
Is it All Right to Pull
the Plug?
An Appeal for Intolerance
Topics Catechetical
A Voting Catechism
A Moral Guide to
Voting
Vouchers: Has Their Time Come?
What Child is This?
What did they die of?
You are the Man
You may be a liberal
if...
Get Rid of that Worthless
Relative
Planned Un-Parenthood
Weighing Pro-Life Issues
Prior to Voting
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by Monsignor James C. Brunner |
Faith Points |
Whose Values in Education?
Public schools paid by general taxation should not push any religious creeds. Fair enough. But does that mean that anti-religious values can be promoted at taxpayer expense? Secularists who are ultra-sensitive about religious encroachment in public education, as in singing Christmas carols or even calling holidays by their traditional names of Christmas or Easter, are not at all distressed by the indoctrination of Christian students with secularistic values.
Let us look at some examples. A few public schools offer abstinence only sex education but most prefer comprehensive education in contraception. For more than a decade parents have had to battle public school authorities who want to incorporate in the school curriculum messages about homosexuality. Under the guise of protecting gay children from abuse or ridicule instruction has the effect of presenting the abomination that is homosexuality in a favorable light. A parent does not have to base his stand on religion to oppose homosexual approval. Homosexuality is not merely an immoral lifestyle but a destructive deathstyle. Homosexual behavior reduces the life span of males from eight to twenty years. By comparison male smokers lose an average of 13.2 years and female smokers 14.5 years. Objection to homosexual instruction is not just a religious but an entirely reasonable health choice.
In science classes Darwinism must be taught but not intelligent design. As a scientific theory Darwinism is acceptable but it is not just a bald, neutral scientific theory. It has atheistic presuppositions and is riddled with problems having nothing to do with religion. Secularists cannot tolerate presentation of intelligent design with its presupposition that there might be a God involved in creation of the universe. The atheistic assumptions are okay, but not the God assumptions.
Decorations specific to any winter holiday are banned from many public schools in Yonkers, New York, and in Boulder, Colorado, school officials denied the formation of a Bible club as not related to the curriculum, while at the same time allowing a Gay/Straight Alliance on the grounds that it is related to the health education curriculum. As an example of an unhealthy life style?
In California a proposed a law would make mandatory gay history and the positive historical impact of homosexuals in America. Can similar requirements for the transgendered be far behind?
Fresh from passing a since-vetoed bill abolishing traditional marriage and replacing it with “any two people”, California legislators are proposing a new law that will force middle and even elementary schools to include materials and speakers that promote homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgenderism. The bill redefines gender as “gender identity and gender-related behavior whether or not stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth.” If you find that confusing, let me explain. It does not matter whether you were born a boy or a girl. It’s how you choose to behave. Thus a little boy who is confused about his gender and wants to wear a dress to school should be encouraged to do so. Enforcement of masculinity or femininity would be subject to discipline.
In public schools, an Ohio middle school student last year won the right to wear a T-shirt that proclaimed: “Homosexuality is a sin!”, but a teenager in Kentucky lost in federal court when he tried to exempt himself from a school program on gay tolerance on the grounds that it violated his religious beliefs.
The public school systems have become a social climate where conservative Christian views are frequently bullied into silence. Meanwhile any sort of secularistic ideas that are frontal assaults on Christian belief are promoted as if by Constitutional right.
There is no such thing as a “value free” education. The question is not whether education—any education—inculcates values because every one does, but what values are going to be inculcated. The problem in public education today is the de facto dominance and inculcation of secularistic values.
Where is it ordained that only the secular point of view may be presented to a parent’s child and that the parent must subsidize the indoctrination that represents the antithesis of his values? If all teaching must be done from a particular philosophy what makes secularism the default philosophy that will prevail in areas that are debated? If religious viewpoints are ruled out of court when some taxpayers oppose them, why are not secular views ruled out when other taxpayers oppose them? Who made secular ideology the official religion of public education supported by compulsory taxation? This is taxation without representation of the worst sort.
An obvious solution to the problem of ideology in education is to give vouchers to parents who may then choose the kind of education that would most closely reflect their values. Professor Eugene Volokh of UCLA wrote:
To my mind, the best solution would be to get government out of the business of supplying education (though it could still fund it through vouchers or tax credits). That would reduce, if not eliminate, the state’s ability to engage in large-scale indoctrination of children. Individual private schools might still make bad decisions, but there would be no centralized authority capable of enforcing a dangerous orthodoxy throughout the whole of the nation or an entire state.
Vouchers have been used in other democracies without harm to the unity of the nation. They would solve the intractable, built-in problem of reconciling incompatible philosophical systems. As of now the solution selected is in having minority secularists shove their views down the reluctant throats of the majority.
Where educational vouchers have been tried the competition for students that they engender has improved both public and private schools. And there is much in public schools that needs improvement. Not one US state can boast that a majority of 8th-graders in the public schools last year achieved grade-level proficiency or better in reading or mathematics. Recently released findings of the Program for International Student Assessment ranked US high school students 24th out of 29 countries. American 15-year-olds demonstrate less mathematics proficiency than their counterparts in Hungary and the Slovak Republic. The United States Department of Education found that nearly half of all college students must take remedial courses in mathematics and reading. The National Center for Education Statistics said that in 2000 close to 80 percent of colleges offered remedial courses. How educational vouchers issued to parents could help improve this sorry situation is the topic for another article. The main point that I wish to develop here is that vouchers are a way out of the ideological battleground that the public schools have become.
It would be useful to follow the lead of the June 1, 1925 Oregon School Decision of the US Supreme Court:
The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments to this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public school teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.
If secularists want to propagate their ideology, is it too much to ask that they do so on their own dime?
(Printed May, 2006)
St. Mary's Church Pastor & Vicar
