Oklahoma’s Statewide Virtual Charter School Board has approved what could be America’s first publicly funded religious charter school through the authorization of St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School.
Governor Kevin Stitt (R-OK) applauded the school board’s June 5 decision, calling it “a win for religious liberty and education freedom.”
Religious charter schools could make Christian education more accessible to lower-income families, like how an increasing number of American families can now use state-funded school vouchers for religious schools. The role religion in education remains contested.
Religious liberty isn’t the only issue that the American school system grapples with. Identity politics regarding critical race theory, LGBTQ agendas, and political biases are overwhelming classrooms, and the role culture should have in curriculum remains unclear.
Nat Malkus, Deputy Director of Education Policy Studies at American Enterprise Institute, provided some clarity to this issue at AEI’s second annual conference on the future of the American university on May 23 in Washington, DC, where speakers addressed education at the university level and pedagogy for K-12 schools.
Malkus challenged the widely held belief that the purpose of education should be to achieve one specific end, such as painting a particular worldview, instilling character, merely teaching job skills. Malkus called these different ends ‘projects.’ He contended that education’s purpose is not to advance one project but to transmit culture from one generation to the next.
“Culture is not innate, and because until it is transmitted, individuals cannot flourish or even begin to function in society,” Malkus stated.
Malkus defined culture as “our shared way of being” and described how culture is also a means to an end.
“At its most basic level, it’s the security and continuity of life, and once that is secured, it further provides the basis for which individuals can flourish, and it allows us to answer the questions of: what might we do next, how might we do it?” Malkus explained.
Malkus then distinguished between formal education and learning in general, emphasizing the family and the church as respected venues for cultural transmission.
“It would be a mistake to confuse schooling with education in the broadest sense since education can and is largely done outside of schools,” noted Malkus.
Concerning the role of school systems, Malkus believes that schools’ central project should be teaching individualism because it gives students the freedom to engage fully in culture. He promoted autonomy and illustrated that treating students as ends rather than means “gives them the capacity to pursue the good life in our culture as they conceive of it, and gives access to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Malkus expounded that, ‘Without a good education, students will be limited; they will have diminished ability to control their lives. They will be less free not only insofar as they have fewer career options or less money, but they will also be less free and limited in terms of what they can think or do since we value the individual. A good education should promote students’ autonomy by making them literate and intellectually capable at a basic level.”
As a solution, Malkus decreed that our education system necessitates a “robust and varied set of K-12 and post-secondary institutions” because “students demand a varied set of institutions that allows students to embody a palpable and coherent culture” while warning that one singular institution shouldn’t try to be all things for all students.
“Some want to make education about character but in so doing; they’ll miss out on job skills. Others may privilege job skills and, in so doing, miss out on citizenship. Others are willing to privilege citizenship at the expense of science or morality,” Malkus explained.
Malkus concluded, “Education and the schools that serve it should strive to develop students who can engage with our culture in the broadest sense. It should do so by recognizing just how broad the culture we seek to transmit is and to transmit a coherent view of it.”
Although Malkus never explicitly addresses religion in schools, his proposal for the future of American school systems is one that should be considered. A “robust and varied” set of schools leaves room for Christian and non-Christian schools alike, while curriculum which encourages individualism allows students to learn what is good, beautiful, and true through studies in the classroom in conjunction with knowledge gained in their families and churches without being swayed by biased agendas in the classroom.
The full conference can be viewed here on the American Enterprise Institute website.
Comment by John on June 16, 2023 at 1:33 pm
Public schools and most charters are bound by federal laws against discrimination in the enrollment. They cannot deny students enrollment on the basis of race, sex/gender, religion, sexual orientation, ability, or economic class. Religious schools are exempt from most of these laws and cite their religious beliefs to defend such privilege. Most of the segregationist academies that formed following Brown v. Board skirted the new laws against racial discrimination by declaring themselves religious schools and were able to operate as such for decades. This proposed law would be asking taxpayers to hand over their money to fund schools that could refuse to admit their own children. Never before has the government asked parents to fund institutions that openly discriminate. For all its shortcomings, public education as it currently exists doesn’t ask any taxpayer to fund schools they themselves would not be able to avail themselves of. You may think that religious exemption is only used by these schools to maintain deeply-held beliefs on campus, but in numerous instances they have been used simply to avoid spending money on vital programs and special education that has nothing to do with their religious beliefs. For instance, some parochial schools have avoiding making their campus fully handicap accessible or refused to implement programs for children with developmental disabilities and then used their religious exemption successfully in court to avoid lawsuits. Often the sectarian sensibilities of the state or local government dictate which type of religious schools get the funding more than need. For instance, school and state boards that have been more than happy to offer financial support to Catholic and Protestant schools, have rejected similar requests for aid from Muslim families and institutions. This is why the one-way separation of church and state model advocated by many contemporary conservatives today doesn’t work. If you’re receiving government funds you have to play by government rules. Allowing religious exemption will be a gateway to all manner of discrimination in our public schools.
Comment by Joe on June 16, 2023 at 5:18 pm
Excellent article!
Comment by David on June 17, 2023 at 8:05 am
Religion in public schools has sometimes proved inflammatory. In the 1840s, Philadelphia school days began with a major bible reading and prayers. With the influx of Roman Catholic Irish and Germans, objections arose as to the use of strictly Protestant texts. The local bishop requested that Catholic students be excused from religious exercises not of their faith. This was granted by the school board of that time.
However, a rumor arose that the Bible and prayers were to be banned from schools altogether. Anti-immigrant groups seized this issue which resulted in the Philadelphia Nativist, Prayer, or Bible Riots of May and June 1844. A number of Catholic Churches were burned and the militia called in to restore order in the city.
After that time, the Catholic bishop supported the establishment of separate religious schools. When the cathedral was built shortly thereafter, it was decided to omit any ground floor windows for concerns over safety.
Comment by Diane on June 19, 2023 at 2:25 pm
Courts have consistently ruled in favor of public schools when parental rights re what’s taught in public schools is the issue. Courts recognize that public schools are tasked with preparing students for citizenship in a pluralistic democracy. When a lesson, book, or topic is introduced and no expectation exists that students concur/agree with the material, courts have ruled no indoctrination has taken place. Indoctrination occurs with coerced agreement. Courts have also ruled that religious freedom rights are not lost when material presented is not long-focused in duration . Parents may use such short-term lessons to teach their religious beliefs at home and explain why the lesson (s) don’t align with their beliefs. It is not the public school’s job to design curriculum around religious beliefs, as those beliefs differ among students in a pluralistic democracy.
Charter schools are public schools and are free, depending on state laws, to discriminate. Their curriculum does not have to align with the state curriculum in public schools. As a retired public school educator, we constantly had children enrolling throughout the year who were suspended or expelled, usually for behavior, during the year. Public schools have to take all children…which is why there’s a greater need for funding public schools. Children with behavioral issues do best in small class-size environments with hands-on materials designed to keep them engaged in learning. That means more funding for classrooms, teachers, materials and professional support for public schools.
Public funds for education must be directed toward schools that are required to take every child. The push for private school vouchers, which will not provide transportation for students from low-income families, is a power grab by folks who believe their children are entitled to tax dollars for the purpose of disassociating in educational settings from people they can’t tolerate.
Private schools often don’t mean quality. They pay teachers less and offer fewer benefits. Neither tend to attract quality teachers. Faith based schools are prone to teaching flawed critical thinking based on narrow, faith-based worldview.s. I cant count the times I’ve seen conservative Christian school curriculums and teachers make themselves full-blown hypocrites when they use lgbtq-authored children’s books. Their faith bubble has taught them to assume everyone is heterosexual until they learn otherwise. Hundreds of classic, award winning children’s books are authored and illustrated by the gifted, talented, creative lgbtq folks they love to condemn.
Comment by Amber on June 21, 2023 at 2:50 am
Diane, regarding your last paragraph, it is generally the more “progressive” viewpoint that the worth of a person’s opinions is inherently tied to his or her identity or that a person’s positive contributions to society are rendered null and void by any undesireable traits that person might also have. Who is it insisting that men can’t speak on abortion, white people can’t speak on race, or slave owning founding fathers must be erased from the nation’s history?