Religion, Education, & Standards

Religion, Education, & Standards

The August 14, 2008 Inside Higher Education has an article about the lawsuit concerning University of California's standards for recognizing private high school classes:

If you look at the admissions requirements of most colleges, you’ll find
listings of high school courses: specified numbers of years of mathematics, science, English and so forth. Frequently, there are references to the courses being college preparatory, not just any course in the subject area. And that begs a question: Who gets to decide what is college preparatory?

A federal judge’s ruling has upheld the right of the University of California to make its own evaluations of high school courses,
provided that the university demonstrated a “rational basis” for its decisions, and that the decisions were not based on animus toward any group or faith. And Judge S. James Otero found that the university’s decisions to reject certain high school courses at some Christian schools met that test.

Christian groups are appealing the decision to the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, so the dispute is far from over. The groups suing say that the case is about religious freedom, but university officials say it is about academic standards. Outside California, admissions officials have been watching carefully because colleges must often evaluate the quality of high school courses — at religious or secular schools — and many feared that their ability to do so would be jeopardized if the university lost the case.

I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to the admissions officials. There are a lot of private schools in the U.S. Some of them are really outstanding; some of them are pretty mediocre. (Of course, that also describes a lot of public schools, also.)

I can appreciate the concern that the University of California has about this. A teacher I know taught 7th and 8th graders in a private Christian school in California. The biology textbook had a definite fundamentalist streak to it, but was still pretty decent with respect to description, how systems work, and so on--until the subject of evolution came up. The book didn't even make a serious attempt to discuss evolutionary theory, its basis, or its weaknesses--it was simply childish insults.

Not surprisingly, the teacher didn't use that part of the book. Instead, she and I worked together on producing a useful discussion of evolutionary theory, its origins, the philosophy and purposes of science. I'm sure that the kids ended up with at least as complete an understanding of evolutionary theory as they would have received in a public middle school--perhaps better.

At the same time, there is a very serious issue involved here. If a state school treats certain positions as "wrong" or intellectually inadequate, and the state school's position is on something like evolution vs. creation, there is a serious question as to whether their actions run afoul of the First Amendment's establishment clause--or at least, if you interpret the establishment clause as broadly as the ACLU does when it comes to a Ten Commandments monument in a city park.

In both cases, strictly speaking, the government is not recognizing an establishment of religion in the sense that the Framers meant. The Framers meant that the government should not pass a law that did anything relative to a particular religious body. (Hence that word "respecting"--meaning having any reference to, positive or negative.) No special tax break for Baptist churches--but if all religious institutions enjoyed a tax break, no problem. No special legal protection for Congregationalist churches--but a law that prohibited disrupting religious services would be perfectly lawful, as long as it protected all churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques (although that would have startled the Framers). No punishment of a particular church's method of worship--but a law that prohibited polygamy, as long as it applied to everyone, regardless of their reasons, would be Constitutional.

The ACLU's notion that anytime government says something positive about religion, or encourages religious worship or belief, that it violates the First Amendment--that's an absurd stretch. The evidence is just not there that the Framers understood the First Amendment this broadly. But for those who insist on that reading--this case involving the University of California is perilously close. If they put students who attend private religious schools at a disadvantage because the values that those classes promote are religious--even if the objections aren't phrased in antireligious terms--then the government is saying that the values associated with some religious (Unitarians, Episcopalians) are acceptable, while the values associated with more fundamentalist religions are not. That's a pretty clear hostility towards the values of some religious establishments--in the same way that getting all twitterpated about a Ten Commandments monument on public property is expressing hostility towards the religious values of at least 2/3 of Americans (the percentage who regularly indicate that they have no problem with such displays).

Still, some of U.C.'s concerns make me wonder if they have any idea what goes on in a lot of public schools who they doubtless consider orthodox:

The judge’s decision goes through the various rejected courses and finds that the university’s rationale meets the “rational basis” test, and rejects arguments that there was evidence of religious bias. For example, one of the courses was an English course called “Christianity and Morality in American Literature.” The university noted that the text used “insists on specific interpretations” of various literary works, rather than allowing students to engage in critical thinking about them.

Wow! A textbook that behaves like a few university professors that I've had! What a shocker! I wonder what their reaction would be to a biology textbook that "insists on specific interpretations" of the fossil record concerning evolution, or a science textbook that "insists on specific interpretations" of the motions of the planets with respect to the law of gravity.

UPDATE: After I posted this, I was reminded of the situation in eighteenth and nineteenth century England, where Oxford and Cambridge required you to be Anglican to be student or faculty. One consequence was that Dissenters (essentially, all Christians who had disagreements with the Anglican Church) had to either lie, or attend the Dissenter colleges--which had the advantage that they were starting from scratch, and ended up for a while being well ahead of Oxford and Cambridge in practical subjects such as engineering. One consequence was that Dissenters ended up dominating Victorian industry.

If it wasn't for the enormous subsidies that public schools enjoy that private schools do not, I suspect that something similar could happen here and now. If you think about it, with the exception of biology and cosmology, there would be no intrinsic disadvantage that evangelical Christian school preparation would suffer relative to public institutions.