This is a subject that has been coming up increasingly, recently. I have been following various news stories relating to church/state separation in the United States and an argument that often comes up is that religious teaching should be kept out of state schools, by way of following the constitution (another subject entirely that is worth debating) but that people who want to send their children to private religious schools have every right to do so. I honestly think that the real crux of the matter is being missed, or at best ignored.
The role of an education system is to prepare children for their future; this point I think would be unquestioned. Part of that preparation clearly involves teaching children important techniques that they can use in their higher education studies, or in life as a whole. It’s vital for children to understand how to calculate percentages, for example, because otherwise others could easily extort money from them. Equally it is important to teach children to read and write because communication is vital to modern human existence. I would tend to argue that an additional purpose of state education is to give children access to a selection of other peoples viewpoints. It is clear, of course, that for the most part these “other” viewpoints will be whatever is currently the prevalent view in society, and part of the challenge of devising an effective education system is to minimise this and attempt to include as wide a range of viewpoints as makes sense.
Indeed, in one sense, including only the majority viewpoint is not necessarily a bad thing. School is intended to prepare people for their futures in society, and teaching what society holds to be standard is not unreasonable, and in many cases such as racism and so on is quite important as social norms evolve. An imperfect setup, certainly, but vastly superior to teaching only a minority viewpoint in the majority of cases (I’m sure counter examples can be found).
It is on that last point that private religious education falls down. Clearly we cannot over generalise, many private religious schools are excellent, however, it seems that this is in spite of their being private and from a specific viewpoint than because of it. One can create a private school that gives the same broad education as a state school should, the problem is that one need not necessarily do so. In the case of the argument mentioned earlier that people make for teaching specific religions in schools, for not teaching evolution in schools and so on we are not talking about giving that broad education, but instead allowing people to pay for their children to be educated in a narrow viewpoint that their parents happen to possess.
We cannot easily restrict what parents teach their children at home, and nor should we because if we did then new views of interest would not have a chance to develop in society. The propagation of views that fit into categories such as “racism”, it seems, is a side effect of developmental freedom that it seems we must accept as being necessary. We can attempt to give them a wide education in state schools, however. An education that their parents are welcome to disagree with.
In fact, should the education not directly cause debate between the children and their parents? Is debate not a primary technique for developing critical thinking skills necessary for survival in a changing society? If children go home and their parents are upset that the child has learned something with which they disagree, surely that is exactly the kind of narrow minded thinking that teaching a range of values is intended to correct.
All of these points still miss the one which seems to stand on its own as the most important issue of all. Why should a parent assume that because they have a particular viewpoint (religious or otherwise), their children should be educated to share that viewpoint? Richard Dawkins made this point clearly when referring to religion he said “We’d be aghast to be told of a Leninist child or a neo-conservative child or a Hayekian monetarist child. So isn’t it a kind of child abuse to speak of a Catholic child or a Protestant child?”. Though you might debate whether abuse is a fair word to use, the point that assuming children are what their parents are is a dangerous one for progression of a society.
It is my view, then, that private religious education, in the completely free sense of being able to teach whatever the parents want to be taught, achieves a status that I can only really call immoral, and certainly has no place in a society which is accepting of change, social development and freedom of thought for its young.
