Christian Ethics - Lesson 13

Dr. Ronald Nash

Christian Ethics

et501-13

A Cure for Public Education

Lesson Transcript

[00:00:03] Just to jog your memory in chapter five, which is titled The Educational Establishment, I give you some reasons, some evidence why public school teachers are as incompetent as as they often appear. And those reasons are grounded in at least these these facts. Number one, the people going into public education these days are usually at least this is what the statistics indicate, are usually the academically weakest students in any university. And when you're talking about American higher education, that's saying quite, quite a bit. All right. Their A.C.T. scores or their S.A.T. scores, rather, are typically 40 to 50 points below the average S.A.T. scores. This is this is no reproach on the good public school teachers that we all know are out there. But the fact is that public education today can only get worse because the people who are typically being attracted to this profession tend to be people tend not always, but they tend to be people who couldn't get a college degree in any other program. All right. And I'm not making that up, which is not to say that everybody who obviously there are dedicated people, men and women who go into education, who plan to teach, who are who are bright, well-educated. But we're talking about the trends here. The second reason for so many incompetent teachers and I give you we have evidence here of a functional illiteracy on the part of public school teachers. The second reason is that these below average students are not given any content courses to speak of in their college curriculum. They are required to take over a year of courses and education courses in which everybody gets a straight A, assuming that they better the professor up adequately.

[00:02:34] All right. So you've got essentially a content plus degree program with students who are well below the norm or the average. And these are the people who are going to end up teaching your children and your grandchildren in years to come. And then, of course, we also have in this chapter some frightening information about the professional educationists who control state certification, who control access to a career in public education, who teach the courses that you must take if you want to be state certified and teach in a public school. And frankly, many of these people are are are hardly impressive either for their own academic growth and sometimes their character. And then finally, the last the last group of great educational leaders we talk about in chapter five is the group called the National Education Association, which for years has been a far left, ideologically controlled group that typically works in harmony with the American Civil Liberties Union and other radical left wing groups. The NEA is an enemy of America's young people. The NEA does not care, and the evidence is in chapter four. The NEA doesn't really care about the education of American young people. All the NEA leaders care about is controlling education so that their left wing agenda can become the basis on which American young people are indoctrinated in the future. Well, in Chapter six, the Four Essential Steps, and I'm sure there are others that could be identified, include getting a clear focus on the educational role of the family. My daughter teaches fourth grade in a Christian school not far from here, and we were saying just this weekend how the kids who are the real troublemakers, even in a Christian school, are the children of parents who really don't care about their kids education.

[00:04:50] They are unwilling to lift a finger to help Johnny do his homework. They are usually the parents who don't do anything when discipline problems arise. So to the extent that Christian families are not assuming their their proper role in the educational process, the kid is going to get shortchanged. It was Jay Gresham Meacham who said the most important teacher for any youngster. Is that youngster's parents? It's not the pastor. It's not the not the teachers in the private school or the public school. It's what those kids learn from mother and father. And then, of course, the student himself must bear a responsibility in this where the kid is not properly motivated. He is not prepared. He's not going to learn. And then the third step is increasing local control. In most cases, public schools. And here we're talking about trying to turn the situation around in public school. In many cases, people simply don't care enough about improving the situation in public schools to run for school board, for example. I mentioned just two little things here. There is at least one state in this country, the state of Virginia, where local school boards are not elected. There may be other states where this is the case, but this is an abominable practice. Everybody who serves on a public school board in the state of Virginia is appointed is appointed by somebody in political power. I don't know whether it's done at the county level or the whatever they call it. There are smaller political divisions in the state of Virginia. That is something that the state of Virginia really ought to address. But I've also had people tell me that even though they cared about running for school board, that they quickly became targeted as evangelical Christians and their enemies use this against them.

[00:07:02] And as soon as an evangelical Christian gets into the race for school board, his faith, his convictions, his stance on certain important moral issues becomes becomes a target of the left wingers who are running for that program. But then the final in the fourth, the most important step in improving education in this country is school choice. And that's something that we will we want to return to. So I don't want to spend any time on that. Let's move on beyond that to chapter seven, which is the separation of school and state. And let me hear some highlights, some information that you really ought to have at your disposal. First of all, this idea that private schools are not entitled to public moneys is a relatively new idea in the history of American education. Chapter seven takes you into some important studies on this issue that shows that during the earliest centuries in the history of America, we had a dual track educational system. We had private schools which typically were controlled by church related institutions, church connected bodies. We had private schools that receive taxpayers support, tax dollars, support from tax dollars. And then we had what was referred to as the public school track. And the only difference between these two tracks of education in this country was who controlled them, who sat on the boards, who made the decisions. In the case of the private schools, it was a private organization. The appointments came from within the community or the society or the church or whatever. But there was no thought at all about depriving these private schools from public monies, because after all, the people who were paying the taxes were themselves members of these religious communities. What turned that thing around in this country was a and this this is important information will turn that situation around in this country with a small group of activist Unitarians in New England, led primarily by a Unitarian named Horace Mann.

[00:09:52] What Horace Mann did here is one man and a small group of Unitarians with him, whom he wanted to destroy the private school system in this country. He wanted to deny private Christian schools access to the monies needed to keep them functioning at a healthy level. And so he considered a brilliant strategy. And that strategy. G was to go around, first of all, Massachusetts and then New England and then the broader country. Convincing people that a private school system was somehow un-American, that it was somehow elitist, that it was not a quality parent. And in fact, one of his major arguments went like this We want to make public education available to everybody. But what a phony argument that you see under the old system. That is the two track system. Education was available to everybody. It was available there. There was nobody who had to be denied access to education in this country. It was available through the private track or through the public. Correct. So what we had was a clever diverting of attention to a set of specious issues and claims such that beginning in the 1840s and then rapidly increasing control and influence beginning in the 1840, state after state, began to deny public schools access to the public support that they had received for for well over a century. And then, as Chapter seven indicates, then during the 20th century, you begin to get a series of Supreme Court decisions which begin to operate on the idea of a false understanding of the First Amendment, a false understanding of what is euphemistically referred to as the separation of church and state, such that by the time you get into the fifties, in the sixties and then the seventies, it becomes unconstitutional for public dollars to be used in any kind of support of religious activities.

[00:12:26] My wife taught before our marriage. She taught as a Bible club missionary, which meant that she and her colleagues would go into the public schools in the state of New York. This is upstate New York. They would have released time where the kids would be released. They would walk across the street to a church and they would have a Bible lesson for an hour a week. That sort of activity was killed by these by this specious misrepresentation of the First Amendment and the so-called separation of church and state, which, of course, all leads to what Chapter four calls the spiritual illiteracy of the moral and spiritual illiteracy that presently plagues the public schools of this country. One final point from Chapter seven. There is only one nation in the industrialized West that today denies public tax dollars to private schools. Only one nation. Every other nation in the industrialized West provides public support for private religious schools. And that one exclusion, that one exception is the United States. Canada. I'm not quite sure. We have some Canadian exiles here. Maybe you can tell us how it works. But Canada makes some public moneys available to private schools. Certainly the nations of Western Europe do. Only in the United States is this deemed somehow unacceptable. Now, what we also find in these in these nations that do have some measure of public support for private schools, what we do find is that the public school systems in those nations have not been weakened. They have not been devastated by this. What does educational choice mean and what is the mechanism by which that can be affected? Educational choice means bringing families, bringing parents back into the educational process process and making them giving them the opportunity to make the most important decision that affects where a student goes to goes to school.

[00:15:12] And that decision is where my child be forced to go to this particular elementary school. Or middle school or high school. Well, I, as a parent, have the option to pull my child out of that particular school where the state hitherto has decreed the child must attend. Will I have the right to send my child to any school I want? So parental choice means that the decision about where children go to school is no longer up to the state. It will henceforth be in the hands of the parents, in the hands of the family. Now, the mechanism for effecting this is what we call a school voucher. Now, let me explain that. An educational voucher. It will be a piece of paper. It will be something like an educational food stamp that will have a certain value. Its value probably will be the cost of the average cost of educating a youngster either in that state or in that community or in that school district, something like that. We could take as an average figure something between 2530 $500 a year, which would be significantly less than the state of Florida and other large states presently pay to educate each student during a during the course of a year. Now, that voucher will reach a family before the school year starts, and then that family will use that voucher like a food stamp, let's say, in lieu of paying tuition to that to whatever particular school they decide to send their child to. Now, it will be up to each family, whether they send their child to a private Presbyterian school, a private Baptist school, a private Jewish school, a private Muslim school, or whether they will use that voucher to send their child to a public school.

[00:17:41] All schools will suddenly become equal. All schools will suddenly depend upon the lifeline of the supply of money that will come through these vouchers. There will no longer be any separate, independent support for the public school systems. The public schools will be placed in a situation where they where they will have to compete for the educational dollar in competition with private schools, who will be trying to attract those same parents to their particular school. Now, what we need to realize is how this voucher system will affect and will change education in America. I argue that it will it will solve the three major problems of education in this country. It will solve the quality problem. It will solve the cost problem and it will solve the value problem. Let me quickly show you how. You've already seen the evidence in the closing of the American heart about how bad so many of America's schools have become. The reason why the public schools are so bad these days is because they have no competition. The administrators have no incentive to clean up their act. Teachers have no incentive to do a better job if they could. What we will do is turn the schools of this country into businesses which will either succeed or fail depending upon how effectively they deliver their product. And their product is the quality of education. Schools will go. They will be public schools in this country that will go out of business. There will be private schools in this country that will no longer survive because there will be this enormous competition. It will introduce the same kind of competition into education that presently drives the business world. A restaurant that doesn't deliver, that can't cut it, but can't attract sufficient customers goes out of business.

[00:20:16] Why should schools be any different than that? That's my. Secondly, a voucher system will solve the cost problem. If you read your newspapers, you know what's going on in the state of Florida. The educational system can't can never get enough money in any state. Higher education, the grade schools, they gobble money up as though it's turkey fee. They want more of it. They need more of it. Now, the fact is we could educate to a greater degree and to a superior degree. Every kid in Florida for 50 to 60% of the tax dollars that are presently supporting public education in Florida, we could do that by moving towards a voucher system. You're saying if the public schools of this state can't survive now on the monies that are presently available to them, how could they how could we possibly maintain even the status quo in education for a smaller amount of money? The answer is there is presently no incentive for public schools in any state to introduce proper economies. Well, the third the third problem, the value problem. Everybody says if you're going to talk about values in school, if you're going to talk about religion and morality, whose values are you going to teach? See, that's the big push behind the values clarification movement. What we have is a pluralistic world these these days. And so you can't be allowed anymore to talk about Christianity because you may have Muslims, you may have Buddhists, you may have atheists in your class, as if as if you see the moral values of a Christian are going to be that's significantly different from the moral values of any decent person. What we're talking about when we talk about moral values is teaching kids that it's wrong to steal, that it's wrong to lie, that it's wrong to harm other people.

[00:22:49] Who's going to be offended at that kind of moral instruction? What school choice does is permit every family to send their child to whatever school teachers and represents and defends the values that are important to that family. So if you have a Jewish family, they probably will not elect to send their child to a Catholic or Presbyterian school. There will now be financial incentives to start up more Jewish schools, Hebrew schools. If you've got a family that is humanistic, that is atheistic in its values, there will be people who will cater to that value system. There will be there will be obviously a flood of schools that will that will join the schools that presently defend Christian values. So all in one fell swoop. We take care of the value problem. We take care of the cost problem, we take care of the quality problem. Now, let me address one of the challenges that you that that is sometimes raised to a private school, the private school choice. And you'll hear this from liberals. They see the push for private school choice is really a subtle, sneaky effort on the part of Christians to gain control of public tax dollars and and then acquire the right to use that public support to indoctrinate young people in their particular worldview. In other words, this is elitist. This will do harm to minorities. This will do harm to poor choice, to the children of poor families. Now, here's a proper reply to that. Actually, that's a multifaceted objection. But let's take let's just take one angle of that. There is presently there is presently school choice in this country. There is no question but that access to private schools gives whatever children so blessed access to a better superior education.

[00:25:20] But under the present system, that access to private schools is only available to families that can afford it. See, we have school choice, but it's school choice only for the wealthy. Those who can afford it wealthy. That would be anybody dedicated enough to have to spend that money to send your kids to a private school. Now, what you want to point out to liberals is this. Since we know, since the evidence is clear that private schools do a better job of educating youngsters, what the liberals really want is to deprive poor families from the same privileges that are presently available to middle class families. Middle class families are willing to make the sacrifices to pay the extra moneys that it takes to educate their kids in private schools. Poor families don't. And so what school choice would do is not injure the poor. It would enhance the opportunities for the poor. School choice is really the civil rights issue ought to be the civil rights issue of the next decade. Because what we want to do is give these children of poor families, most of the minorities, give them the same privileges and the same opportunities to escape the evils of the public school system in this country. And the liberals won't give the poor that that opportunity. So if you ever find yourself talking to a liberal, ask the liberal this question When did or when it hurts? You'll watch them wince. Ask When did you become an enemy of the poor? I'm serious. When did you become an enemy of the poor? Because that's what's really driving them. You see, if they really cared about the poor, they would switch their allegiance and support school choice. Because nothing will solve the predicaments of the poor.

[00:27:37] And this the educational predicament of the poor in this country any quicker than school choice. I can see I can see large numbers of minority mothers, for example, saying this voucher represents the first chance my kid has to get out of this environment. There will be more poor mothers who will see that. As for the poor parents who will not see that and who will not care. Here's my answer. Their kids will not be any worse off than they are now. Their kids will not be any children who come from families that uncaring are undoubtedly already doomed. And in some inner city public school. So we are not going to this is not a panacea. We're not going to solve the problems for every poor kid, but we certainly are going to improve the future for large numbers of them. Isn't it true that with public support comes public control? And I will admit that you put your finger on what is the most serious problem with parental choice, with a voucher system. That's the serious problem. Every time the government gets its foot in the door, it tries to gain control over what is done in that school. I will concede that that's a problem. And all I can say is this. Number one, we must take pains to see that when the legislation is written, it is put in black and white. What the state may and may not do with regard to private schools. The state does have a right to care about the educational mission of these institutions. The state has a right to guarantee that these are really schools and not fronts for some kind of phony operation. But the state has no right. It must have no right under this legislation to come in and say to us, tell a school what it may or may not do religiously, what it may or may not do with respect to prayer.

[00:30:05] And the minute we lose that battle, and we probably will lose that battle down the road, given the propensity of the state to intrude into the operations and the rights of societies, Once we lose that battle, then we have to go back to the drawing board. But what I will say to you is this this issue is important enough. It is the present. It is presently the only hope for the educational system in this country, that that is a risk that is that we have to take. But we have to keep both eyes on these politicians and the bureaucrats who run these state agencies to make sure that they don't then come in and try and take our liberties away from us. But that can't that doesn't have to be that hard. Listen to me. After World War Two, we had a G.I. Bill of Rights and that G.I. Bill of Rights entitled Veterans of World War Two to go to college at government expense to any school they wanted. And many of those guys took took that check, took those checks and went to two religious schools. And there was no governmental interference under that program with the religious mission of those schools. So it can be done. Of course, we're dealing now with a different decade, different kinds of politicians, different kinds of bureaucrats. But it was done once. It can be done again. We just need to draw the line in the right place. All right. If we oppose the introduction of alien religious viewpoints into the public schools through books like that impression work, how can are we not inconsistent when we advocate a return to the McGuffey readers, which certainly support Judeo-Christian values? Well, there are two things that need to be said there.

[00:32:13] Number one, read the last chapter. Of the education book and which following Bill Bennett, I argue that obviously in a pluralistic society, the public schools which have a monopoly on free education cannot become a tool or an instrument of one particular religious viewpoint. I would assent to that. It is no longer possible in the pluralistic society in which we live for a monopoly, a monopolistic public school system, to expose students to a particular point of view. You and I wouldn't be happy with that if the minority, if the majority in this country was Muslim or Buddhist or cultic in some way. And we shouldn't we shouldn't support an imposition of our position. But nonetheless, as Bill Bennett has pointed out, once we recognize the wide agreement on moral and spiritual considerations, the wide agreement on issues even within our pluralistic society, there is much more that we could be doing that we are not. And we ought to do everything that our pluralistic society would permit us to do. That falls short of indoctrination into any kind of sectarian position. We can talk about the value of courage and truth telling and promise keeping, and there's nothing there's nothing that forbids us from even using Bible stories to illustrate particular moral virtues. Bill Bennett says. So that's one that's one thing we need to consider by way of an answer to that. The second thing we need to consider is that that's precisely what a movement towards the privatization of education would solve. Then, if a family wants to send its kids to a school and indoctrinated the kids in witchcraft, they can do it without input, without forcing those particular values upon the children of families who find that objectionable or offensive. So we, as I said, we solve the quality problem, the cost problem and the value problem.

[00:34:44] If you don't want your kids to study these particular values, private choice would let you escape those values. It would let you send your kids to a school that concentrates on values that are important to your family strategy. President Bush claims that he is a friend of school choice. I have no reason to doubt his claim because as we know everything George Bush says he believes. Right. George Bush wouldn't wouldn't take us out. The fact is, however, that the odds of getting any kind of school choice legislation through the Congress, unless some strange things happen this November, the odds of getting school choice through the Congress are practically are in fact nil null and void. This has to be a state issue. This is a state issue. So the first thing you need to recognize about strategy is you forget the whole country and you focus only upon particular states. That means then you have to begin the work of educating people. You have to educate families to the benefits of school choice. You have to begin to lobby legislators only once, only until the general consciousness of the public is raised so that this becomes a civil rights issue. Only until this becomes a kind of crusade issue will the politicians begin to pay attention. But they will pay attention. Let me give you a couple of examples. In the city of Oakland, California, this last month, the black citizens of Oakland were infuriated, outraged because their candidate for school superintendent in the city of Oakland was bypassed by the largely white school board. They had a black candidate from Sacramento who was head of the school system in Sacramento, California. And as far as I can tell, this guy looked pretty competent. This guy probably is more competent than the individual who got the job.

[00:37:15] So what a lot of. Appears to be a political decision. The school board in Milwaukee some I'm sorry, the school board in Oakland thumbed its nose at the black people in Oakland and appointed a non-black to be head of the school system. Immediately you began to hear black activists and they were quoted on, on and on the nightly news. They began to argue like this. They said, Well, I guess we're just going to have to move towards a private school system. We're going to have to move towards voucher. All right. Here are black liberal Democrats in Oakland, infuriated by what the largely white school board does to them. And the only recourse they see is private choice, this thing. Once that becomes an option, people will see it as a way of redressing the wrongs against them. Here's a second example, and you probably know this lady now has become famous. Her name is Polly Williams. Let me tell you about Polly Williams. She is a black state legislator in the state of Wisconsin, in the city of Milwaukee, a raving liberal during his two runs for the presidency, during Jesse Jackson's two runs for the presidency, Polly Williams was Jesse Jackson's state campaign chairperson and in the state of Wisconsin. This is no closet conservative, but Polly Williams grieved over the condition of black kids in the inner city schools in Milwaukee. And she finally reached the point where she said these schools are corrupt, they are hopeless. There is no future for black kids in the inner city of Milwaukee as long as they have to go to these rotten public schools. So she used her punch and pull in the state legislator to push through a pilot that is an experimental program that provided money that would allow 1000 kids from the inner city of Milwaukee to escape the public schools and go to private schools.

[00:39:37] 1000 kids. Now typical of Wisconsin religious schools where we're excluded from this. So these poor kids couldn't go to Catholic schools, they couldn't go to Protestant schools, they couldn't go to Hebrew schools. They could only go to secular private schools because there weren't enough secular private schools in Milwaukee. Not all of the 1000 kids had been able to find slots in the private schools. See, that's. You cut out the religious schools and I forget one or 200 kids haven't been able to get into these private schools. Now, here's what's happening to those kids. Their lives are being turned around. They're beginning to learn. Their grades have shot up. There's their scores on. Test scores have shot up. It is working. What this private voucher system, this experimental voucher system in Milwaukee has been challenged in the courts. And who do you suppose has been challenging it? The NEA, the National Education Association. See? Where's the harm in this? If you really care about kids getting an education or not, the NEA, all the NEA cares about is power. They don't care about these kids. The NEA. Liberal politicians in Wisconsin and all of the public school administrators. You see the bureaucracy, the fat cats, The power structure is failing. Poor Polly Williams. Now they picked on the wrong person. See, you don't fight Polly Williams because she loves to fight and think great things are happening. And oh, this is this is going back and forth in the courts. Actually, it's going back and forth over a kind of a technicality.