The belief that a society or a nation can be unified – its barriers of religion, class, and race broken down – by bringing its children together in common schools that express a lowest-common-denominator vision of national life is a persistent theme throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and has especially been evoked against schools created by immigrant groups to teach their children within their own religious tradition.
Critics like Jeff Spinner-Halev counter that pluralism is a positive social good, and allows individuals freedom to shape their own lives in terms of real choices:
A relentless diversity flattens the pluralism of society. … A pluralistic society is not a place where every institution mirrors the ethnic, racial, and gender composition of society. A pluralistic society has different kinds of groups with different kinds of memberships. … This kind of society will offer its members more choices than one that is diverse “all the way down.” … the irony of a diversity that is taken too far: eventually it makes society more homogeneous rather than heterogeneous. … A society that has different institutions with different audiences, customers, clienteles, or students will be more pluralistic than a society where all the institutions are composed of the same people.
Advocates for an educational system that encourages non-government schooling argue that freedom in educational provision and the pluralism of the education provided requires the flourishing of alternatives to the schools operated by government, but only if these alternative schools are not compelled – or seduced – into adopting a pédagogie d’état which makes them essentially similar to government schools.
For the sake of freedom of conscience and of expression – itself founded on the principle of tolerance as well as ideological and philosophical principles of non-discrimination – no educational monopoly by the state can be justified within the democratic order. Freedom of conscience and expression are meaningless if children are subjected to mandatory indoctrination in a particular viewpoint selected by the state.
The 20th century saw a steady increase in the role of government in taking over functions that traditionally had been met by families, religious associations, and other civil-society institutions, and also in addressing needs that had previously been ignored. While the benefits of this expanded state role are manifest, there has also been a weakening of what could be called the muscle or fibers of society. In many respects, individuals are free as never before in human history to shape their lives and even their identities as they will, but in important ways they are also subject to manipulation that can be harder to resist than outright authoritarianism. One of the primary spheres of this manipulation is the education of children and youth.
Isaiah Berlin, in his famous essay on “Two Concepts of Liberty,” pointed out “to manipulate men, to propel them towards goals which you – the social reformer – see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.”
Policies that protect individual liberties may nevertheless oppress individuals if they refuse to recognize the role of associations and institutions in making it possible for individuals to choose to live by norms that differ from those promoted by the dominant consumer-oriented culture. It is a bias of extreme liberalism to see individuals exclusively as self-shapers detached from communities of tradition and shared behavioral expectations. Political philosopher Michael Sandel has defined the role that these inherited communities play in the development of a stable identity and character: most people “conceive their identity – the subject and not just the object of their feelings and aspirations – as defined to some extent by the community of which they are a part. For them, community describes not just what they have as fellow-citizens but also what they are, not a relationship they choose (as in a voluntary association) but an attachment they discover, not merely an attribute but a constituent of their identity.” Choosing to remain loyal to such a community and to the norms which it imposes is as much a human right as is choosing to reject an “inherited” group, and deserves the same level of protection.
A central goal of such communities (and this includes non-religious groups organized around ecology and similar perspectives) is to socialize the children of members into becoming themselves loyal to the beliefs and norms of the group, “to provide a child with an identity, sense of purpose, and orientation to life strong enough to tie him to that life and identity throughout adulthood.”
Some liberal theorists like Amy Gutmann insist it is the responsibility of the State to liberate children from these inherited worldviews and help them to become self-defining autonomous individuals. “As philosophical conclusions,” William Galston counters,
these commitments have much to recommend them. The question, though, is whether the liberal state is justified in building them into its system of public education. The answer is that it cannot do so without throwing its weight behind a conception of the human good unrelated to the functional needs of the sociopolitical institutions and at odds with the deep beliefs of many of its loyal citizens. As a political matter, liberal freedom entails the right to live unexamined as well as examined lives – a right the effective exercise of which may require parental bulwarks against the corrosive influence of modernist skepticism. I might add that in practice there is today a wide-spread perception that our system of public education already embodies a bias against authority and faith.
Thus, to take an issue about which there is much current discussion, even if not all Muslims – or even a majority of them – in Europe want to have their lives shaped by Islamic rules and tradition, it is profoundly unjust for public policy to make it difficult for those who do make that choice to live it out and to communicate it to their children through schooling informed by that tradition – provided that the common norms of the host society are respected.
(Image from thefreemanonline.org)
