Religious Education under Secular Assault – Part 2

An earlier article discussed the conflict over religious education occasioned by the attempt to require secular content in the curriculum of Jewish schools, called yeshivas, that provide education to Haredi and Hasidic Jewish children in New York. The current legal and political situation, as explained by participants in a Heritage Foundation panel, is muddled, with the Jewish groups concerned claiming a right to train their children by their own standards, and critics claiming the state should require certain standards for all education that fulfills the compulsory education requirement.

Another panelist, Rita Koganzon, Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, focused her comments on the “political theory” behind the secular attack on religious schools. She said that it holds that education should aim at opening “as many doors as possible” for children and young people. Education that precludes many life alternatives is regarded as “a bad education.” She referred to the legal philosopher John Rawls, who said that children should be educated for an “open future, or for autonomy.” They should be able to “critically examine and revise their conceptions of the good.” They should be encouraged to “change their received opinions and beliefs.”

This necessarily, in fact, primarily would include religious beliefs and opinions received from parents as the truth.  Challenging received opinions is done by providing education which exposes children “to a diversity of life.” This writer would add that it is critical to note that not only does Rawlsian education as Koganzon described it hold that children should be taught that there are many diverse ways of life, but that these ways of life may be proper, if inculcating “autonomy” in children is the objective of education. This then contradicts the claims of at least a number of exclusivist belief systems. Consequently, Koganzon said, “autonomy” means that children “can’t choose to adopt many seriously religious ways of life.” Thus, all education should “promote autonomy, and expose children to diversity.”

Those who advocate this as correct education would favor strictly public education, but if parents insist on private schools, the state should nonetheless require these criteria (i.e., be supportive of autonomy and diversity). This, she said, is the prevailing educational doctrine of secular liberals and the academy. It was articulated “mostly in the 1980s and 1990s, and it was articulated in response to a kind of growing liberal fear of the religious right, and of the sort threat of the rise of theocracy.” Koganson said that she hoped that by this point it the twenty-first century, it should be “clear” that Christian theocracy is not a threat. She noted that “schooling has been substantially deregulated since the 1980s, parents now have more control over their children’s education, and Evangelical adherents have actually decreased substantially in that same period.” She asked whether it is time to “move beyond these sort of Rawlsian categories to think about these conflicts” between parents and the state in a different light.

Koganzon maintains that the problems liberal societies face today are “not resurgent religious fundamentalism, but the anomie and aimlessness that have come with an increasingly bifurcated economy and society.” In this society the “economic and cultural winners, the highly educated and affluent professional class, are living the Rawlsian dream of mobility and choice, while the losers, those with less education and mobility are suffering from autonomy’s dark side, increasingly social pathology like unemployment, crime, family dissolution and drug abuse.”

The principle losers in today’s society, she said, are not the children of conservative religious groups with religious education. Those suffering from the problems of contemporary liberal society did not have “an insufficiently Rawlsian or autonomy-oriented education, they’re mostly secular, and products of secular public schools. They may not have been the best public schools, but we have no reason to think that their teachers did not promote autonomy or expose them” to alternative ways of life. She said that the problem is not that Rawlsian education harmed them, but didn’t do anything to help them join the “professional elite.” On the other hand, religious communities such as the Haredi Jews are not integrated into the professional elite, are not particularly inclined or able to join it, and are markedly distinct from the rest of society. But they don’t have the problem with anomie that is prevalent in the secular population. This would indicate that religious education may be helpful to the wider society, and that “it can more effectively address our present challenges.”

Koganzon sees “two basic reasons that the autonomy argument fails, especially in light of the current challenges facing liberalism.” First, while contemporary secular education purports to give children a broad view of the world, “it actually has a very narrow vision of a good life.” Its ideal of “autonomy and open ended choosing” favors the way of life of “the secular upwardly mobile professional.” This group has the greatest variety of careers, friends, hobbies, and general life choices of any group in the American population. While she said that this kind of education is “open in some ways,” it also “closes off many possibilities. It makes it harder to justify pursuing a trade” (since vocational training “isn’t as flexible and transferrable” as a college degree). It makes it difficult to justify such things as “remaining in one’s hometown, or taking care of one’s family.” These choices, she said, “close off future opportunities.” It also “makes it difficult to join a serious religious community like Orthodox Judaism.” Orthodox Jewish children acquire a deep knowledge of language and tradition, without which one cannot be a member of such a community. Prioritizing autonomy, she said, means closing off many ways of life and choices “that don’t prioritize freedom from obligation.”

Another problem is while that autonomy based education is supposed to expand thinking, it actually “undermines the development of self-control.” This, she said, is the “virtue that’s necessary for independence.” Self-control demands “persistence” in adhering to a set of principles, “rather than their perpetual revision.” She said that “exposing children to diversity” without any principle to “discriminate” (horrid word!) between the many alternatives shown by exposure to diversity simply inculcates in students “a kind of vapid consumerism and what one liberal theorist has aptly called ‘polymorphous nihilism.’” She said that the absence of self-control leaves a child without any check on his desires, or “from society’s demands on him.”

It is worth noting that “early liberals, like John Locke or Jean-Jacques Rousseau” held a markedly different view of education. They held that children should be subject to “a single source of authority” to educate them and inculcate responsibility. Children are not competent to “adjudicate” proper desires. “Unlike Rawlsian liberals, who see almost all the danger in education arising from indoctrination by the family, early liberals saw little to fear in the family.” The danger seen by Rousseau was the power of popular culture over individuals “once traditional authorities have been disestablished.” The family, they thought “provided a counterbalance against society and public opinion.” They believed “insular family education was almost always” superior to alternatives, such as public schools. She said that while this is not a practical possibility today, “we’ve gotten a lot closer in the last year.”

Koganzon said that “parent controlled religious education” works against the popular culture and protects “him from it until adulthood.” It also works against “the inclination to reject adult authority in the name of democratic equality.” Instead, parental direction of education puts “the child under the relatively consistent and harmonious authority of parents and teachers.” Under this regime, self-control is developed, and it “is highly transferrable.” It benefits the student by giving him or her self-control, whether they choose to remain in their religious community or not. With yeshivas, she said that the training in religious texts and argument of their interpretation gives students both self-control and the “critical capacity that liberal theorists argue is necessary for liberal citizenship.” The combination of self-control and critical capacity “is all but absent in liberal theory, which tends to view all authority as an obstruction to the equality and liberty that children ought to learn in school.”

But the constant revision of one’s concept of the good means “a great deal of instability,” and particularly “in those spheres where stability is most essential for success, like family and career.” Particularly with people without substantial material resources “such instability can be financially and personally devastating.” She said that contemporary education “has valorized a kind of education that only a small elite can really well afford.” For those outside the circles of affluent professionals, not only can they not financially afford such instability, but “more importantly, psychically” they cannot afford it. This is “because it is designed to weaken – in the name of autonomy – the source of commitment to family, to religion, to a place that anchor life for the vast majority of Americans.”

On the other hand, “Haredi education … does precisely the opposite” of liberal secular education. It encourages commitments, and even the concept of “commitment itself.” This “in turns improve[s] life,” even for relatively impoverished people. She said that groups like the Haredi Jews, or the Amish which “are sort of outside the secular mainstream” may be essential to democracy. They provide needed stability. The secular liberal educational ideal of autonomy as a standard of education for all children undermines the stability needed for life in many parts of society.

Not surprisingly, most people aren’t inspired by a life that they have to give meaning to. Secular professionals are consumed by their careers, and they must have the discipline and interest in their work, as well as the aptitude for it, to have risen to the top. They too, may feel the pangs of aimlessness caused by a modern, disenchanted world. But their work itself, which consumes much of life, can give their lives meaning. But the average American student does not have the aptitude, nor likely the interest, to rise into the professional elite. The meaning they can find is found in cheap, and not uncommonly, destructive entertainment made available in our secular society, and which to some extent powers the economy. A transcendent reality, or at least striving for it, can give life meaning, which is why religious education should not be prohibited, discouraged, or restricted by the state.