Public education means different things in different countries. In the United States, it means government-funded and government-delivered schooling—schooling that is supposedly ideologically neutral but in fact reflects a progressive tradition strongly committed to beliefs and to an educational philosophy rejected by many Americans. Not surprisingly, we now fight a great deal about public education. Other democracies fight about education, too, but less divisively, because for them, “public education” means educational pluralism: government support for diverse institutions that reflect a wide variety of beliefs and commitments.
One hundred and fifty years ago, America’s elites, faced with waves of (mostly Catholic, ethnic, and poor) immigrants, concluded that only state-enforced uniformity could effectively make one people out of many. Once bitterly contested on grounds of religious liberty, this belief in the uniform common school, and its ability to create citizens out of disparate groups, is now so embedded in our consciousness that we cannot imagine public education otherwise.
Because the secularist view has dominated American public education since the mid-twentieth century, many Americans reflexively confuse “secularity” with “neutrality.” Some religious groups have responded by creating parallel educational institutions.
Other liberal democracies took a different view. Beginning in the nineteenth century, most Western countries established centralized standards and funding that supported a variety of institutions with diverse philosophies of education, religious and cultural commitments, and student populations. Today, the Netherlands supports more than thirty types of schools on equal footing, and in England over 60 percent of Jewish children attend Jewish day school at state expense. Nearly a quarter of Italy’s schools are fully supported nonstate schools. Israel’s state schools are religious or secular, Hebrew- or Arabic-language, and the government funds from 55 to 75 percent of the costs of almost all nonstate schools. Educational diversity is increasing exponentially in places such as Australia and Sweden, and India is introducing vouchers in some of its provinces.
What binds the diverse groups and their schools together in most cases is commitment to a national (or regional) curriculum and assessments, so that children in quite different classrooms engage in a common civic and academic project. These curricula tend to prescribe general rather than specific goals (such as demonstrating knowledge of a particular genre of English literature rather than studying particular sonnets) and are often negotiated between national and local governments.
Recent American educational innovation—charter schools, vouchers, cyber-education, Teach for America—are encouraging educational diversity, but they can only go so far. Lasting, structural change requires reframing “public education” to mean publicly funded or publicly supported, not exclusively publicly delivered, education. This in turn requires a different political philosophy, a turn to a model of education based on civil society rather than state control.
It is important to note that educational pluralism is not a proxy for religious education, although it does embrace religious as well as secular, philosophical, and pedagogical variety. Nor is it tantamount to “privatizing education.” Rather, it affirms both the dignity of diverse commitments and society’s interest in the nurture of the next generation.
Educational pluralism would certainly not solve all of America’s educational troubles, and it would generate concerns of its own. However, it offers an honest acknowledgement of the myriad value judgments inherent in any education and generously accommodates a variety of beliefs and opinions in a way more congruous with the United States’ democratic political philosophy than does the current system. While some people fear that such pluralism would produce division and harm the students educationally, evidence suggests that, in fact, pluralism often yields superior civic and academic results.
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