Wednesday, March 10, 2010
How should a Catholic react to the new national education standards?
It looks like we're going to have national education standards soon, as 48 states have come together, along with the Obama Administration, to support standards laying out what students should be learning year by year, from kindergarten through high school, in math and English.
It's probably not too tough to guess the two holdout states: Alaska and Texas. Texas Gov. Rick Perry explained that only Texans should decide what their children learn. (In reality, I think Texans have a big role in deciding what all American children learn, but that's another issue.)
So how should fans of subsidiarity respond to the new standards? It's reassuring that states seem to be taking the lead on this, and it will be up to the states to decide whether to adopt the standards. More broadly, is there any harm in adopting a "best practices" model to ensure that all Americans are equipped with the skills necessary to thrive in an increasingly competitive and connected world? Or is the danger related more to the trend that this represents -- i.e., if we can have national math and English standards, maybe we should have national standards on social studies, civics, service learning, sex ed, etc. In other words, are the Texans just being Texans, or are they wise to stay on the sidelines?
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/03/how-should-a-catholic-react-to-new-national-education-standards.html
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Thanks for the interesting questions.
Amazing how education choices have gone from being a predominately family-based decision/issue to a federal decision/issue in just over 100 years. It appears that national economic interests in promoting serviceable workers for a global economy are steam-rolling parental interests in what (formerly) was generally regarded as the parent's primary responsibility for the education of their children (I believe this is still the general Catholic view, with particular force of application in the area of "family life" education.) Although these interests may have more or less coincided in the past, it is not at all clear that national standards would not result in a tyranny in the case of a country the geographical size of the United States that encompasses what is likely the most diverse population in the world.
Is it possible that national economic interests promoted in national standards aiming for success in this world could ever so vary from those contained in the divine commission given by God to Catholic parents to put their children on a path for everlasting success in the Kingdom of God?