The topic in my Law & Religion seminar earlier today was private schools, so I assigned the students two articles: Jim Dwyer's School Vouchers: Inviting the Public Into the Religious Square, 42 William and Mary L. Rev. 963 (2001), and co-blogger Michael Scaperlanda's Producing Trousered Apes in Dwyer's Totalitarian State (abstracted here earlier by its author). Dwyer essentially argues that the government is morally obligated to make school vouchers widely available not only to ensure that private schools receive the funding necessary for an adequate education, but also as a vehicle by which private schools may be brought under the government's regulatory control. Because parents' interest in the upbringing of their children is secondary to the children's interest in their own education, and because children cannot act on their own behalf, Dwyer insists that the state must step in whenever parents choose an educational path that falls short of the standards required to equip students with the minimum tools for self-fulfillment and individual autonomy. This includes, only by way of example, situations where religious beliefs unduly color the teaching of secular subjects, and where the curriculum teaches racial or gender bias. Religious schools are prime targets for this expanded state monitoring function.
Scaperlanda, not surprisingly, takes issue with many aspects of Dwyer's vision, including its utter disregard of intermediate communities, effective prohibition on visions of the good that might compete with any state-defined educational good, and the relativism underlying pedagogical objectives focused solely on individual autonomy. He offers instead an "education for freedom," steeped in the moral anthropology highlighted in the various posts on this weblog. Both Dwyer and Scaperlanda construct their positions with sincerity and thoughtfulness, and both articles are worth reading by anyone wishing to engage the moral anthropology as applied to education.
I was somewhat surprised that Dwyer's vision had as much traction with the students as it did. More students spoke in favor of his vision than Scaperlanda's vision. A couple of students expressed confidence that, whatever happened at school, it could be more than balanced out by the countervailing influence of the family, and thus did not see an expanded state regulatory role as much of a threat. Relatedly, several students thought Scaperlanda exaggerated the ramifications of Dwyer's vision. In their view, the educational standards offered by Dwyer are largely unobjectionable, and students placed in environments where even such minimal requirements are not satisfied cry out for state intervention. Students challenging Dwyer's vision did not focus on the marginalization of faith in the educational sphere that would accompany an expanded state oversight of private schooling. Rather, they felt threatened by the state wielding such power in the abstract, especially at the expense of families.
In most of the religious liberty contexts we have discussed in class, students have occupied a range of positions, all generally within the mainstream. While they quickly recognized that Dwyer's views are extreme, I was somewhat surprised that most of the students were sympathetic to his worries over private schooling. More broadly, the students were not at all convinced that the anthropology underlying Scaperlanda's argument was an effective rejoinder to the secularist approach to schooling in the liberal state. This may be a function of several phenomena, including the infrequency with which students are confronted with such anthropology-driven arguments, as well as the remarkably high comfort level we have with arguments founded on individual autonomy. In any event, the discussion highlighted for me the importance of making policy positions shaped by moral anthropology accessible to the broadest audience possible. Whether or not such anthropological arguments are ultimately persuasive, it's important that they are, at a minimum, familiar.
Rob
