The Separation of Education and State

A New York Times article, “How Christian Were the Founders?” reveals some alarming trends of the Texas Board of Education to direct the curriculum toward religion. The thing that makes the annual meeting of this particular state board significant is that according to the Times article, the Texas board is the most influential in the country – and also one of the most socially conservative.

Image credit: The New York Times, Montage by Carin Goldberg

The article is somewhat lengthy, but worth reading in its entirety for some of its frightening details. (It gets a little bogged down in concretes, pitting one side of the argument against the other, but I suppose that aligns with its journalistic intent.) One of the prominent figures in the article is Don McLeroy, a current Texas Board of Education member and former chairman who was removed from that top position for his aggressive attempt to insert creationism into the classroom:

[McLeroy] identifies himself as a young-earth creationist who believes that the earth was created in six days, as the book of Genesis has it, less than 10,000 years ago . . . ‘Textbooks are mostly the product of the liberal establishment, and they’re written with the idea that our religion and our liberty are in conflict,’ he said. ‘But Christianity has had a deep impact on our system. The men who wrote the Constitution were Christians who knew the Bible. Our idea of individual rights comes from the Bible. The Western development of the free-market system owes a lot to biblical principles.

For McLeroy, separation of church and state is a myth perpetrated by secular liberals. ‘There are two basic facts about man, he said. ‘He was created in the image of God, and he is fallen. You can’t appreciate the founding of our country without realizing that the founders understood that. For our kids to not know our history, that could kill a society.’[Note 2, emphasis mine.]

I don’t want to spend time in this post refuting the several items I disagree with in that quote because there is another point I wish to focus on. In other writings, I’ve addressed the fundamental incompatibility between faith and individual rights (and its derivatives, including capitalism). And notwithstanding isolated quotes (like Madison’s, “If men were angels . . .”), the notion that the life-embracing, Enlightenment principles of America are based in essence upon a “fallen man” point of view is absurd.

The main point I wish to make is that although I sympathize with this Times author’s implicit warning of the incursion of religion into public schools, I see no indication that he grasps the fact that makes it truly lethal: that it is imposed by the state. One gets the impression from the article, particularly from its first few paragraphs, that as long as the Texas Board signs off on text books praising Ted Kennedy instead of William F. Buckley, Jr., or Jimmy Carter instead of Ronald Reagan, then it is perfectly acceptable for the state to ram its monolithic message down students’ throats. The author is irked only because it is not his views that are being declared as the official ones.

The article cites some economic reasons why the Texas Board is particularly influential; they have a huge educational budget, buying and distributing some 48 million textbooks per year. The problem here, however, is not economic power but political power.

If private schools demand that creationism be taught alongside actual science, or that history books be re-written to indicate that America was founded upon Christian values, they have every right to do so. I vehemently disagree with such nonsense, of course, and I sharply criticize it. But private schools that teach creationism (or for that matter, leftist dogma like multiculturalism and quasi-religious environmentalist orthodoxy), however ubiquitous they could become on a free market, cannot block out competing ideas by force. Only governments can do that.

For the very same reason that there must be a separation of church and state, there ought to be a separation of education and state. Governments should not be controlling what children think.[Note 3.] Everything a government does is by its nature compulsory. The more consolidated and federalized public education becomes, the more it uses force to present a single message to students. The very presence of public schools disrupts the potential market of private schools, displacing - and in some cases, eliminating - the ability of competitors to offer other ideas.

Of course, the free market cannot guarantee that schools will teach objective history and science. But what the free market does guarantee is that objective facts will not be silenced or smothered by force.

NOTES

1. Image credit, The New York Times, http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/02/14/magazine/14texbooks-span/14texbooks-1-articleLarge.jpg.

2. Russell Shorto, “How Christian Were the Founders?” The New York Times, 11 Feb 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14texbooks-t.html?tntemail1=y&emc=tnt&pagewanted=all.

3. An excellent resource on this topic is the ARC web page, Separation of Education and State (http://principlesofafreesociety.com/separation-of-education-and-state/).

The Information Age

In my previous post, my qualified statement that sometimes I love the Internet - and sometimes I don’t - led to the obvious comment from LB: “And why don’t you love the Internet?”  I started to reply in the comments section, but my response got so long, I turned it into another post (this one).

Overall, the Internet is a great thing, of course.  In terms of boosting human productivity it is of immeasurable value, and it is (so far) a vast forum of those hallmarks of liberty: free speech and free commerce.  Just for me personally it has revolutionized the way I do my job (as an electrical engineer), and obviously I would not be publishing this blog post were it not for the Internet.  Understand, too, that my comment was a little bit offhand, and I wouldn’t “wish the Internet away” even if that were possible.

Nevertheless, there are a few things that temper my complete enthusiasm for the medium.

Perhaps my most prominent complaint is that I think the Internet should almost never be used for educational research until maybe college.  (When I say "should not," I naturally do not mean there should be laws or rules against it; I mean that teachers should consider it to be largely detrimental to their students' development.)  The immediacy that made it possible for me to discover the painting Amity in less than four minutes is the very thing that subverts a developing conceptual faculty.  Why?  Because the information on the Internet is largely flat, hierarchically.  

For instance, suppose a typical high-school student today had to do a report on the first scene of Wagner's Ring cycle.  (Forgive the contrived example, which I concocted more or less randomly from a book that happened to be near me.)  The student would probably “Google” the text "first scene of wagner's ring" and out would pop dozens of pre-digested summaries.  Ten minutes later, he would be finished with his report and move on to something else, like playing video games or watching MTV.  

In contrast, my student (if I had any students) would be forbidden to use the Internet.  Thus, he would have to look up Wagner in an encyclopedia, where he would discover that the Ring is actually a four-opera behemoth, the first of which is called Das Rheingold.  He would then have to jot this information down, go to the library, find the section on the arts and music, and find a volume on operas.  In this book, the student would have to peruse the table of contents to see how the volume is arranged; he would see that there is a section on Wagner, a sub-section on Der Ring Des Nibelungen (which he would, in an exclamatory “aha!” moment, deduce must be the full name of the Ring), and a sub-sub-section on Das Rheingold.  This would lead him to flip to page 490, where he could read about the opening scene and decide what was relevant for his report.  Obviously, the latter experience would be incalculably richer for the student than the former.  He would make far more connections, would perhaps be drawn by curiosity to explore more paths along the way, and above all, would see how his narrow topic fits into the larger picture.  In short, he would have accumulated knowledge systematically and hierarchically. 

But there’s more.  Add to this the weight of a book that is held in one’s hand; the indescribably solid scent of age and wisdom that wafts toward one’s nostrils from an old hardcover that is cracked open; the gentle woosh and pop as one’s caressing finger slides along each sheet to reveal the next page; and the delicious exhaustion of emerging from a sustained mental effort, having been immersed without interruption in a magnificent volume that for all its wonder will not give of itself passively, but will open itself to - and bear fruit within - only an active mind.  Contrast this with Internet “research”: the contextless information that is plucked from a vast cauldron of disconnected facts by a search engine, and handed to a student with almost no effort on his part, seems a poor substitute for education indeed.

Another problem I have with the Internet - well, it’s more a product of the Information Age than of the Internet per se - is the plummeting quality of discourse, particularly in email correspondence.  The ease and convenience of writing a note today seems to be in inverse proportion to the need to punctuate, capitalize and spell correctly, or use proper grammar.  

This, incidentally, is not some sort of snotty, elitist position on my part.  (I was once accused of “insensitivity to the disadvantaged” when I complained about grammatical errors.)  Some of the worst culprits are the high-level managers that I’ve worked with.  I am convinced that it is not a matter of intelligence, but of laziness.  I can understand mistakes; try as I might to avoid them, I occasionally make spelling or grammatical errors myself.  But the deliberate, fashionable carelessness of perpetually “texting” teenagers and the Blackberry jet set is alarming to me.  I fear for the preservation of the English language.

Finally, no why-I-don’t-love-the-Internet list would be complete without mentioning the viruses, spyware, adware, etc. that can become a supreme nuisance.  A few weeks ago, my computer at work was assailed by a virus despite my having up-to-date anti-virus software.  It’s hard to stomach such pointless malice.

Now, I want it to be understood that these items do not discourage me from using the Internet or marveling at the technology; it simply makes me wary.  I recognize that my position is a little bit ridiculous - like disliking automobiles because there exist car thieves.  My reservations about the Internet are really only a specific case of a more general principle: to rigorously bear in mind the context of a tool, and to continuously remind oneself of the benefits and perils.  Really, this all comes down to the old maxim that my father impressed upon me in his workshop when I was a child: respect a tool, and use it only for the purpose for which it was intended.  The table saw that saves me physical labor can cut my hand off.  The spell-checker that automatically corrects errors in my paper can deteriorate my ability to spell words myself.  None of the disadvantages that I have listed are necessary aspects of the Internet and all (except maybe the malicious viruses) are in the complete control of the users.