Will Public Funding For Religious Schools Ease Culture Wars?

Mike Petrilli, head honcho at the Fordham Institute, has a theory. Maybe, he suggests, spending public tax dollars on private religious schools might actually ease some of the continuing cultures out there. 

Indeed, there’s good reason to believe that, as more parents gain access to school choice, including the option of sending their children to religious private schools, we will see today’s education culture wars recede.

I don't think so. Here's why not. 

First, silos don't solve anything. Letting people of differing values retreat to their own separate silo has not ever solved the issue or reduced the conflict. The history of segregation in the US is as good an example as any; it did nothing at all for reducing racial issues and tension in this country. 

We've even tried this out in education before with the post-Brown segregation academies, where some parents were free to pursue their value of "get my kid an education where he doesn't have to be around Black kids." That didn't serve some Americans well, nor did it ease the tension caused by different values regarding race. 

What separate silos do is make it easier to target certain folks. All the Others are over there in that group, so we can easily rail away at them. The second part of the segregation academy movement was for white folks to say, "Now that this school system over here is mostly Those Blach Kids, let's stop funding them." Which they could safely say because their own kids were safely somewhere else in a different silo.

We've already seen that much of the culture panic is animated by folks who are not merely concerned about what values and books and humans persons that their own children are exposed to, but what varieties of human experience everyone's kids are exposed to. Hence the need to make sure that nobody's child can read "And Tango Makes Three." Hense the establishment of a school that centers LGBTQ students immediately becomes a target. 

Since we're talking about religious private schools, there's another problem. You will have noticed that within the Christian church alone, there are a gabillion sects. Thise exist thanks to centuries of doctrinal differences. In short, many churches are not only bad at welcoming pluralism outside their walls, but inside as well. Once our silo is established, then it's time to make sure that everyone inside is pure and in compliance.

And for some fairly vocal culture warriors, choice is not on the table. They will consider the culture wars over when their side has won and all the other sides have been silenced and/or obliterated. These are the allies the choice movement chose, and at some point it's going to bite choice in the butt.

None of these factors will ease the culture wars. In fact, not only will they not ease them, but they will lead to a side effect that nobody wants.

Battles amongst the various silos will escalate. Those will be exacerbated because despite reformster magical thinking, you can't run 15 parallel school systems for the same money that barely ran one ("Our business is running into financial trouble, so the solution is to open a bunch more branch locations" said no corporate operation ever). The religious schools will argue about which other religious schools should be allowed to exist, and they'll all be pissed off that the Satanic Temple is also setting up schools. Politicians will argue that Certain Schools are not run by Real Religions and therefor shouldn't be allowed to operate at taxpayer expense (spoiler alert: already happened). Others will argue that taxpayers shouldn't fund LGBTQ schools (spoiler alert: already happened). And even Petrilli notes that he's rather have some safeguards against schools that are strikingly low quality, though I don't expect any such school to say cheerily, "Yeah, that's us!"

So ultimately, the state will have to either sort it out or fork over a pile of money or defund education of all sorts. One end result is the State Department of Religious Okee Dokeeness, where state bureaucrats decide which religious schools can be certified 100% fresh and which cannot. 

Benefits to society? None. People don't learn tolerance of LGBTQ persons or conservative wingnut persons or persons of different races or religions if they spend their school years in a bubble where they never actually meet any of those humans. 

It is tempting to think that the culture wars will ease when we try to give people the impression that they have won, but the loudest culture war voices have shown us who they are again and again, and who they are are people who don't just want a quiet corner of their own, but to claim dominion over the whole education mountain. 

I love our Puritan forebears. Hell, I'm related to our Puritan forebears. For all their virtues, it's inaccurate (as I told my students) to say the Puritans came to establish a country where anyone could worship the way they wished; they came here to establish a country where everyone would worship the way the Puritans wanted them to. It was the ultimate attempt to solve a culture war by silo, and while in many ways it was better than their brethren's attempt back home to win a culture by killing the king and taking over the country, it ultimately didn't end the conflict. 

In short (okay, too late), public funding won't ease culture wars. It will likely intensify them, and most probably shift the battlefield to state and federal government, where the question of which values get to have their own schools and how much they get paid to run them will be endlessly relitigated. Maybe forever, or maybe until some wise sage discovers that the best way to preserve pluralism and religious freedom is a public school system that is inclusive about students and neutral about religion.