The Rants of Issachar

Jim Pettit made a comment on Raphael Alexander's post about John Tory that got me thinking.

There's no way that I'll let religious whackos determine what goes into the school system.

It's a pretty reasonable sentiment that I'm sure most people would agree with although they'd tend to differ on who the "religious whackos" were.

I might as well start out by saying that I'm not a seven day creationist, although I obviously believe that God created everything. I find Rikki Watts' lecture on the meaning of Genesis extremely compelling if you're interested.

But back to funding faith based schools. Obviously parents can teach their kids pretty much anything they want to. Equally obviously, society has a interest in universal education which pretty much means we need publicly funded education.

So should parents have a choice in what their children are taught in a publicly funded educational system? Obviously on a wider level in Canada they do. The contents of the public education system are ultimately publicly determined by the government which is dependent on a democratic mandate.

So in a pluralistic society should we have a choice of publicly funded schools and if we do should those schools be allowed to add to the standard curriculum? (I'm excluding the possibility that they should be allowed to deduct from it).


I taught for three years in a partially publicly funded faith based school, so I might have a vested interest here, but it occurs to me that public funding is actually irrelevant to the real question which is: should our society allow minority groups to send their children to schools that teach a different curriculum. I would have the same objections to a hard-core Islamic school that taught the inequality of women and preached jihad against non-Muslims whether it was publicly funded or not.

So why is it reasonable that Christian parents sent their children to the school I taught at, but these hypothetical Muslim parents can't send their children to this hypothetical Islamic school?


I think it ultimately comes down to whether or not the faith based school in question is sufficiently in line with the values we collectively want to instill in our children. Of course this question applies to secular public schools as well. One of the primary objections many parents have to public schools is that they believe the schools are attempting to instill values they don't share. Now if the parents values are out of step with our generally shared cultural values, I don't have a lot of sympathy. Where I have a lot of sympathy is when educators are attempting to instill values they think society should have rather than values it actually does have.

The sentiment behind the Jesuit saying "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man," is either encouraging or very, very threatening depending on who is saying it. Educators who believe in public education need to remember this.

Posted by:  Raphael Alexander

So why is it reasonable that Christian parents sent their children to the school I taught at, but these hypothetical Muslim parents can't send their children to this hypothetical Islamic school?

I think the answer to that question is that if we're going to define Canada as a secular country in which religion is afforded an equal respect bestowed upon all varying faiths, then you can't have that contradiction. If, however, Canada were to enshrine a cultural precedent, like Middle Eastern countries do, it would be different. The reason it sounds hypocritical is that we afford new religions to Canada an equal founding status with Christians. This causes problems when we try to use our secular-Christian hybrid model in a country which uses cultural relativism instead of cultural chauvanism. If we simply said "Christianity gets special privilege as a founding religion" we'd probably be a lot better off. Either that or we abolish Christian schools. Funding all religions seems like a terrible idea.

Posted by:  issachar

Raphael, I agree that funding all religions is a terrible idea, and I don't see Canada as a secular country in which all religions are afforded equal respect. I think Canada is a country with separation of Church and State in which all people have freedom of religion because it is a universal and inalienable human right. It's subtle, but there's a distinct difference.

So what are the implications of that on my apparent contradiction?

What we have in this country is a country whose secular values are largely informed by a Christian history. Therefore religious schools schools (Christian or otherwise), qualify as "schools" for the purposes of required education in as much as they teach the standard curriculum and instill values that are roughly in line with those of larger society.

That means that had my school given into the demands of some parents and stopped teaching evolution then it shouldn't qualify as a "school".

So as far as my contradiction goes, it's not a contradiction because what would stop that hypothetical school from operating as a school wouldn't be it's Islamic nature, it would be that it's values weren't sufficiently in line with our society's.

Posted by:  issachar

Raphael Alexander said:
This causes problems when we try to use our secular-Christian hybrid model in a country which uses cultural relativism instead of cultural chauvanism.

A very good point, but isn't there a massive flaw in cultural relativism in as far as it relates to values? We pretend that Canada believes in relativism, but then we also insist that sexism, gay-bashing, slavery and the like are objectively wrong. There's a giant contradiction in there...

Posted by:  Raphael Alexander

This got me thinking and I wrote a new article in which I blame the rise of progressivism in liberal democracy.

Posted by:  issachar

I just read it. Very interesting. Anyone else reading this post should go give it a look.