This article was downloaded by: [University of Glasgow]On: 12 September 2013, At: 08:54Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Religious Education: The official journal of theReligious Education AssociationPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/urea20

EDUCATIONAL DIVERSITY IN POST‐SECULAR AMERICARichard John Neuhaus aa Council on Religion and International Affairs, 170 East 64th Street, New York, NY 10021Published online: 10 Jul 2006.

To cite this article: Richard John Neuhaus (1982) EDUCATIONAL DIVERSITY IN POST‐SECULAR AMERICA, Religious Education:The official journal of the Religious Education Association, 77:3, 309-320

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0034408820770306

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in thepublications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representationsor warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Anyopinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not theviews of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should beindependently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses,actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoevercaused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

EDUCATIONAL DIVERSITY INPOST-SECULAR AMERICA

Richard John Neuhaus

Council on Religion and International Affairs170 East 64th Street

New York, NY 10021

We are witnessing the collapse of the 200-year hegemony of thesecular Enlightenment over public discourse. That is a very am-bitious proposition, and I will not attempt to defend it exhaus-tively here. My purpose here is to explore some of the evidencethat such a collapse is indeed taking place, and, more specifically,to explore what such a collapse might mean for the future ofeducation in the United States.

By the secular Enlightenment one refers, of course, to thatmovement of thought and its political ramifications dating partic-ularly from the late eighteenth-century and associated with theFrench Revolution. Obviously the Enlightenment had manyvariations, some more expressly and militantly secularizing thanothers. The secular Enlightenment refers to that viewpoint whichwas characterized by a certain posture of skepticism, if nothostility, toward religion. Usually it was connected with twostrong propositions that might be called secular dogmas. The firstis that there is something inherently incompatible between partic-ularist faith and Enlightenment. From this it was asserted that aspeople became more enlightened, more educated, religious faithwould wither away. The second part of the proposition was thatif religious faith did not in fact wither away, it must at all costs beexcluded from the public arena. And so the agora, or place inwhich the serious business of the polis, of the city of man, was tobe discussed and decided, was hermetically sealed off from theinfluence of particularist religious faith. The assumption was thatreligion was purely a private matter and must not be permitted tospill over into the ways in which we dream and decide in publicabout the constructions of society.Religious Education Vol 77 N o 3 May-June 1982

309

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 0

8:54

12

Sept

embe

r 20

13

310 EDUCATIONAL DIVERSITY IN POST-SECULAR AMERICA

The consequence of these dogmas, as they became largelyoperative in public life, is that we created a sector that was se-cured from religious influence, a sector sterilized of any specificreference to the sacred. This sector I would describe as the nakedpublic square. And it seems to me that this naked public square,this agora denuded of religious reference, is at the heart of whatin sociological jargon might be called the legitimation crisis ofAmerican public life and its institutions.

Synchrony

The United States is not immune from the dynamics that affectall societies. One dynamic is that government, in all of its parts,is viewed as morally legitimate when it is in synch with, so tospeak, the values of the people who are governed. In the UnitedStates it is an indisputable sociological given that the values of thepeople are overwhelmingly associated with particularist religiousbelief. That is, the great majority of Americans believe, or wantto believe, that their operative values are inseparable from theway in which they ultimately put the world together. Theirworldview is tied to, and derived from, the Judeo-Christian tradi-tion. Of course, this is not true of all Americans, but it is unques-tionably true of the politically effective majority and probably ofthe overwhelming absolute majority.

If government and especially that aspect of government mostclosely related to the transmission of values, namely education,are out of synch with, or even perceived as hostile to, the beliefsystems and the value systems of the governed, then one has avery serious problem indeed. This, I would suggest, is the prob-lem with which we must wrestle in American life today.

Modern means secular?

Until a relatively few years ago, social theorists who troubledthemselves with such questions believed that there was an un-breakable connection between modernization and secularization.That is, as a society became more modern, it would also becomemore secular. Today many of these social theorists have almostreversed field on this question. It is now suggested that as societybecomes more modern, as lif e becomes more specialized, and thethreat of atomization becomes more immediate, the need for anoverarching meaning system, which is to say religion, becomesmore urgent. Therefore, it may well be that in a post-industrial

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 0

8:54

12

Sept

embe

r 20

13

RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS 311

modern society such as ours we are witnessing not the witheringaway of religion, but a new resurgence of religious belief.

Times of resurgence are, of course, always troubling. Whenthe conventional wisdom is challenged or begins to collapse,cracks open inviting entry by strange, even bizarre new beliefsand new purported wisdoms. Thus we see today a virtual explo-sion of cults, both explicitly religious and pseudoscientific, inwhich people desperately seek an ordering system to ward offthreatening chaos.

At the more serious and disciplined intellectual level, we wit-ness in other areas of our lives a new appreciation of the religious.Despite Carl Sagan's valiant effort with "Cosmos" to restore highconfidence in nontheistic science, the fact is that throughout themany scientific disciplines we perceive an evermore explicitlyadmitted search for the metaphysical, the transcendent, thereligious meanings which the complexity and indeterminacy ofcontemporary science suggest. Similarly in jurisprudence there istoday a host of new publications, periodicals, and books challeng-ing the old secular positivism and suggesting once again, inaccord with a tradition that dates back to classical Greece, thatlaw is not self-justifying, that law must be justified by a higherand, finally, a religious or quasi-religious legitimacy.

If there is one theme that seems to be pervasive in our cultureit is that of debunking the pretensions of value-neutral or value-free scientific discourse. This is as true in the area of education asit is in law or science or other dimensions of contemporary life.We have, it would appear, over the years had thousands of closetmoralists, so to speak, in both academia and public life. Andtoday the moralists are coming out of the closet.

Religious New Right

A particularly abrasive, even vulgar, coming out is evident inwhat is called the Religious New Right. One thinks of MoralMajority, the Religious Roundtable, Christian Voice, and similarorganizations. They attack in a rather aggressive manner whatthey have termed "secular humanism." We are all well aware thathumanism, even secular humanism, is a very honorable, indeedvenerable tradition. But in the version of the Religious New Right,secular humanism is an aggressively atheistic force that is at-tempting in coercive ways — and has largely succeeded in recentdecades — to destroy the operative religiously-based values ofthe American people.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 0

8:54

12

Sept

embe

r 20

13

312 EDUCATIONAL DIVERSITY IN POST-SECULAR AMERICA

The Moral Majority and Dr. Jerry Falwell may or may not be amajor national force five years from now, but I do believe that theattention paid to the Religious New Right is fully warranted. In-deed I think we ought to pay closer and more sober attention,abandoning the alarmist reactions which have characterizedmuch of the criticism of the Religious New Right to date. Weshould recognize that groups such as the Moral Majority, althoughthey may not understand what they are doing with any degree ofsophistication, have kicked a cultural tripwire alerting us to somemuch more major, long-term changes in American culture and inAmerican politics.

A fundamental proposition of the fundamentalists is thatAmerican life has traditionally been seen as possessing a tran-scendent purpose. That is to say that the United States is not likesome nations of the world, a nation simply by virtue of historicalcircumstance, but that the United States is a nation, Americansare a people, on purpose. And that this purpose has some rolewithin a grand historical drama, indeed, that this purpose is insome sense providential, guided and directed by God.

In 1954, for the worst possible reasons during the McCarthyera, the words "under God" were put into the Pledge of Alle-giance: one nation under God. Many people have found thatobjectionable over the years because it seemed to suggest that weare saying that America is especially chosen or elected or isimmune from the sins and the iniquities of other nations. But"under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, correctly understood,suggests nothing more than what has been a basic assumptionover the last 200 or 300 years of the American experiment,namely, that in some sense this is a new thing under the sun, thisAmerica, that it is indeed an experiment. And it suggests thatupon its success or failure a great deal depends, not only forAmerica and Americans but also for the destiny of world history.Certainly from the Mayflower Compact in the seventeenthcentury up through Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream"speech of August 28,1963, this theme of providential purpose hasbeen almost second nature to Americans in their understanding ofthemselves.

Until quite recently — one could almost specify the time asbeing the mid-1960s — most Americans were not shocked or sur-prised by the suggestion that in some sense this is a Christiannation. The language about Christian America is today seen as theexclusive and rather threatening property of the far Right. But it

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 0

8:54

12

Sept

embe

r 20

13

RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS 313

is surely one of the curiosities of our present moment that the ideaof Christian America is today deemed in many circles to be un-American.

Let me suggest that there is a similarity between what JerryFalwell is attempting to do and what Dr. Martin Luther King at-tempted to do. I realize the suggestion may strike some as out-rageous. Obviously there are enormous differences in theirunderstanding of what is wrong with America and the possiblesolutions for what is wrong. But the similarity is that both violatedthe dogma of the secular Enlightenment by pressing into the pub-lic arena with explicitly religiously based moral judgments. Bothviolated the understanding that our basic concepts of justice canbe defined without direct reference to Judeo-Christian tradition.That tradition has been formative historically and continues to belegitimating sociologically for public discourse in the UnitedStates.

This rethinking of the naked public square is evident in manydifferent circles, and different groups are coming at it in quitedifferent ways. Notable in this connection is what is happening inAmerican Jewry. In talking with Jewish leadership about thesequestions over the years, it is generally agreed that in the 1930s, atno one meeting or in no one resolution, a consensus developedthat if one asked the question "What is good for the Jews?", aquestion that for obvious reasons must be asked, the answer wasgiven then that the more secular the society the safer it would befor Jews. Today, fifty years later, it is obvious that that answer isbeing reexamined. Thinkers such as Daniel Bell and many otherscommonly-called neo-conservative are beginning to articulatethe view that in a totally secular society there is no transcendentcheck upon evil, including the evil of anti-Semitism. The percep-tion grows that the naked public square is a very dangerous place.A dangerous place not only for Jews but for other minorities whowithout religiously based inhibitions at work in society are vul-nerable to vulgar majoritarianism. What I believe we are wit-nessing today, and what has been triggered by the Religious NewRight is a very long-term shift in American culture and politics. Asea change, if you will.

Jefferson's Fragile "Wall of Separation"

I know that many of our friends talk about Teddy in '84; they seethis present moment symbolized by the election results of 1980

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 0

8:54

12

Sept

embe

r 20

13

314 EDUCATIONAL DIVERSITY IN POST-SECULAR AMERICA

as being a temporary aberration, a blip, on the screen of publiclife. But in investing their hopes in Teddy in '84,1 believe they aremistaken. They might as well be talking about the return ofTeddy Roosevelt. And I believe we are mistaken if we see thesea shift as a purely conservative or as a reactive force. It is aforce that at its heart touches upon the nature of religion andsociety and one that can be turned to constructive and progressivepurposes.

We need to develop what I would call a mediating language inpost-secular America. That is, we need to find a way to speakabout values in public that is respectful of the Judeo-Christiantradition in which our discourse is historically rooted and yet thatdoes not leap from the Bible text to legislation or court decisions.One of the problems with the Religious New Right today is thatmany of the Moral Majoritarians understand America to be aChristian or a biblical society in a way that is amenable to legis-lating specific biblically-based imperatives without respectfulregard for those who do not share a biblical belief system. Yet, atthe same time, they are correct in seeing that a connection must bemade. But it must be made in a way that is not violative of thepluralistic values that we would cherish. It is false to say that wecannot legislate morality. Obviously every piece of legislation ofany significance is a statement regarding our values — what webelieve to be right and wrong, the nature of justice and in-justice.

So, while we do, in fact, legislate morality, and indeed whilelaw that is not reflective of moral judgment is illegitimate lawand has behind it no transcendent claim upon obedience, it is alsorequired that no particularistic reading of the tradition become,in effect, an established religion.

The much misunderstood religion clauses of the First Amend-ment, namely, the no-establishment clause and the free-exerciseclause, have been used in order to preserve and indeed intensifythe segregation of religiously based moral judgment from publicdiscourse. To that extent they have been abused, and that abusemust be corrected through court decisions and other actions in theyears ahead. But the notion of the wall of separation of church andstate, to use Thomas Jefferson's phrase, is an important one thathas not to date been internalized adequately by the leaders of theReligious New Right. I quickly add that it is apparent in observinga person such as Jerry Falwell that there is a very dramatic, rapidprocess of change taking place in the Religious New Right; but it

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 0

8:54

12

Sept

embe

r 20

13

RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS 315

still has a long way to go before it is able to be the bearer of areligiously based morality that is respectful of the philosophy thatmakes liberal democracy possible.

To illustrate the kind of question that is now very much at theheart of our discontent, let me allude to an issue that is extremelycontroversial. It is the single, most volatile and fevered question inAmerican public life today and the one that most inescapablyjoins religiously based moral judgment and public policy. Theissue, of course, is abortion, and the decision of the SupremeCourt in Roe v. Wade, 1973, illustrates the dilemma in which wefind ourselves. In that decision, and in subsequent judicial andlegislative battles, it has become obvious that all sides are dealingwith ultimate questions, that is, we are asking questions thatunavoidably engage our deepest beliefs about the world, abouthistory, and about our place within the world and history.

The abortion debate is really a debate, I believe, over thequestion of who belongs to the human community for which weaccept common responsibility. The debate, it might be admittedreadily by all sides, is not really over when human life begins, butover when that life has a moral and legal status that is able to asserta claim upon public policy. In biblical language, the question is,"Who is my neighbor?"

We may disagree about what law should be with respect toabortion or indeed whether there should be any abortion law atall. What I would focus on is the severe and untenable separationof public policy from religiously based moral judgment. Forexample, as a consequence of Roe v. Wade there has been inrecent years the celebrated court case McRae v. Califano, inwhich the contention was made that any restriction on abortionwas unconstitutional because it is enacted by virtue of religiousinfluence and thus constitutes a violation of the "separation ofchurch and state." Whatever we may believe about abortionpolicy, it is obvious that this unnatural bifurcation of religiouslybased morality and public discourse cannot be sustained for long.Indeed, McRae v. Califano is a classic formula for socialdelegitimation. The Supreme Court wisely overruled the lowercourt's finding in McRae, but the arguments involved are far frombeing settled. We cannot legitimately address ultimate questionswithout reference to those beliefs that bear the ultimate convic-tions of the American people.

Analyzing the problem is, of course, not the same thing ashaving an answer. How will public discourse be reconstructed in

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 0

8:54

12

Sept

embe

r 20

13

316 EDUCATIONAL DIVERSITY IN POST-SECULAR AMERICA

a way that is more responsive to the operative values of Ameri-cans? Historically the definition of American life has been mostpotently shaped by what today we would call the mainlineProtestant churches. These are the churches — Methodist,Presbyterian, Congregationalist — which accepted the Puritantask of providing a concept of transcendent purpose for theAmerican experiment. For numerous reasons, the confidence ofmainline Protestantism in the American experiment seems to becollapsing today.

The Italian social theorist Wilfredo Pareto had a winsome andplausible theory which he called the circulation of elites. That is,when in a society any specific function — economic, commercial,military, moral — has been for a long period of time exercised bya specific sector of that society, that sector constitutes itself as anelite. When that elite, for whatever reason, is no longer fulfillingthe function, the function does not go away, rather the functioncirculates to another sector of the society. This new group thenbecomes the new elite. In terms of giving moral definition to theAmerican experiment the Religious New Right is making a strongbid to become that new elite. For the reasons alluded to above, Ihope that the Religious New Right will not succeed in its ambi-tions. Or, to put it somewhat differently, if it succeeds, I ferventlyhope it will no longer be identifiable as the fanatically tingedNew Right that we know today.

Education, Values, and Expertise

If there is any merit at all to this analysis of our religious, cultural,and political moment, the implications for education are clear.They are clear, that is, if we understand that education is, amongother things, inevitably the transmission of values. Professionaleducators today are sometimes comfortable with the talk aboutvalues clarification but become more tongue-tied when thesubject moves to the transmission of values. Yet, I suspect, that forthe great majority of parents and other concerned citizens,nothing is so self-evident as the fact that the educational process isthe passing on not only of skills and information but of the worldviews, of the overarching meaning systems by which we makepurposeful sense out of skills and information.

Today no educator needs to be told that there is a robust skep-ticism abroad with respect to the connection between educationand schooling. Ivan Illich, among others, has persuaded manyeducators also that the assumptions of the past are no longer valid,

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 0

8:54

12

Sept

embe

r 20

13

RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS 317

if they ever were. The notion of expertise in education has beenthe victim of the most vigorous debunking, and the suspiciongrows that parents are the real "professionals," with respect to theeducation of their children.

This atmosphere of debunking of educational expertise, thisrobust skepticism toward the notion that education can be value-neutral, is not untainted by a populist anti-intellectual dynamic.Yet, it is more creative to try to understand the current disillusion-ment with schooling and educational expertise than to dismiss it.For the last three years I have been working with Boston Univer-sity sociologist Peter Berger in co-directing a project which wecall the Mediating Structures Project. The Mediating StructuresProject, to put it too simply, is designed to complete the NewDeal. That is, we affirm the intention of the New Deal to expandthe definition of those public needs which are indeed public re-sponsibilities. But, we contend, the mistake of New Deal ideol-ogy, so to speak, was in the assumption that a public responsibilitymust be governmentally exercised.

The education of the young is obviously in the public interestand an issue in which government is properly involved. But itdoes not follow that government ought to do the educating. Theissue of educational diversity, more specifically the question ofpublicly supported alternatives to the government school, hasbeen pressed from a number of directions in recent years and, Ibelieve, will be pressed even more urgently in the years ahead.

One can observe today a coalition of forces raising proposalssuch as education vouchers. These forces are motivated by some-times different and conflicting rationales. For example, one hasMilton Freidman and the Chicago school of market-orientedeconomics proposing education vouchers and similar alterna-tives. At the same time one has the perspective represented byChristopher Jencks, generally identified as left in its rationale,pressing educational alternatives out of a profound suspicion ofestablishments in general and especially of establishments thatpresume to deal expertly with values. There is a strong push alsofrom those concerned chiefly with equality. They are eager tosee, through educational vouchers and similar instrumentalities,that the poor have the same choice as is presently enjoyed by thebetter-off. There is a civil libertarian facet in this coalition for ed-ucational alternatives. It is motored chiefly by an almost libertar-ian passion for people being the "artisans of their own destinies"apart from governmental interference. Then there is the very im-portant sector of the coalition for educational alternatives which

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 0

8:54

12

Sept

embe

r 20

13

318 EDUCATIONAL DIVERSITY IN POST-SECULAR AMERICA

is impassioned by the belief in religious freedom. Here one wit-nesses the burgeoning of so-called Christian schools and acad-emies, not only in the South but in every part of the country. It isalleged that there are three new Christian schools opening everyday in the United States. Whether that figure is accurate or not,there is little doubt that the movement is increasingly towardwhat Sugarman and Coon of the University of California callschools-of-choice.

The very terminology we are now using is reflective of thedeeper changes taking place. It is not evident today that oneought to make the distinction between public school and privateschool. Rather, the distinction suggested is between governmentschool and voluntary school or school-of-choice. I suggest thatthis change in terminology reflects an accurate perception thatall schools are public schools if they serve the public purpose, thepublic purpose in this case being that children are educated inthose elementary skills and attitudes necessary to citizenship inthis democracy. The school, whatever its sponsorship, is a publicschool if it meets the needs of its relevant public. The idea of rele-vant public is important because we tend to deal with "thepublic" as a grand abstraction which obscures our understandingthat a school is not serving, nor is it accountable to, "the public"but to a particular part of the public, namely, the parents andchildren most intimately involved.

Community and Fairness

The issue of education vouchers and other means of achievingschools-of-choice engages church-state controversies of longstanding. Certainly it would seem that the rulings of the SupremeCourt over the last several decades pose a major obstacle to themovement toward schools-of-choice. At the same time, withoutbeing cynioal, one observes that the courts also read the electionreturns. Current cultural and political changes have their impactalso on jurisprudence and the idea of fairness, which the courtshave in recent years erected as the touchstone of our public no-tion of justice. These changes strongly favor a new educationalapproach in which people of whatever persuasion — for reasonsreligious, political, or aesthetic — will be able to transmit theirelected values to their children.

When one mentions alternative schools, the objection is some-times raised that the idea overlooks the danger of strengtheningracial discrimination. Far from overlooking this issue, the pro-

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 0

8:54

12

Sept

embe

r 20

13

RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS 319

ponents of alternative schools have consistently addressed it withcare bordering upon scrupulosity. The work of Sugarman andCoon, Peter Skerry's study of Christian schools in the South, andour own Mediating Structures Project have all come to a conclu-sion compelled by the evidence: racial prejudice resulting inracial discrimination is not a significant factor in the movementtoward schools of choice. To the contrary, many such schools,both urban and rural, are more racially integrated on a voluntarybasis than are government schools operating under legal man-dates to integrate. Nonetheless, the tortuous history of racism inAmerica requires that this continue to be a matter of urgent con-cern. As a back-stop position, Jencks and others have proposedelaborate formulas for assuring that schools of choice not abetracial discrimination. While it may be reassuring to have suchprovisions in place, I believe the evidence suggests they will notin fact be necessary.

The contention is also pressed that the end of the public schoolwould mean the end of a common socialization that is necessaryfor citizenship. Here, of course, one has the myth of the little redschoolhouse, which served such a crucial role in both rural andurban settings in "Americanizing" the vast immigrant hordes. Intruth, as Diane Ravitch and others have pointed out, the publicschools of the great immigrant periods were not nearly as inte-grating a factor as the myth suggests. It is also observed that to-day with television and other communications media there is ameeting place of common discourse which engages abnost theentire population. So the movement toward educational diver-sity does not represent the centrifugal threat that many fear.

Quite apart from this, the dilemma is that if education is thetransmission of values, it becomes increasingly difficult forpeople in government schools to transmit those values which aremost important to the parent. Especially sensitive are those valuesthat relate to family and sexual mores and which engage religiousbelief. This is a relatively new development. It has not, as somewould suggest, always been the case that the public school was agrand melting pot where the common faith was promoted in away that did not violate the particularist beliefs of students andparents. To the contrary. In the great ideological construction ofHorace Mann and others it was simply assumed that the commonfaith was, in effect, a rather low-level mainline Protestant faith:

The consensus regarding the "common faith" has clearly notheld, and so we find ourselves in this odd situation where the oldvalues, which were once transmitted through the government

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 0

8:54

12

Sept

embe

r 20

13

320 EDUCATION DIVERSITY IN POST-SECULAR AMERICA

school, are now viewed as particularist values and quite rightlyviewed as such, for indeed they are. Values clarification is widelyperceived as a very poor substitute for the abandonment of anytrans-subjective, or if you will, objective value system.

Those who have the deepest interest in perpetuating thepresent government school system are understandably disturbedby what has happened. But it is a time for them not to assertnaked self-interest in trying to deny public support for educa-tional alternatives or by trying to coercively sustain student popu-lations in the government schools. The latter measure, it should bepointed out, can succeed only in dealing with the poor, for theupper-middle and middle classes are quite capable of exercising achoice in education. Rather, in a world in which the concept of"public education" will be much more inclusive, those who arecurrently the leaders in government schools will be called upon tocompete. One can imagine, though it is by no means certain, thatsuch competition will enhance not only the expansion of schools-of-choice but will enhance government schools by making them,in effect, the schools-of-choice for many parents and children inAmerica.

This analysis of what has happened and what might happen isbased upon the assumption that politics is a function of cultureand that at the heart of culture is religion and ethics. If it is true,it is a matter of extraordinary importance that we seem to bemoving into a post-secular period of American society. And if, inturn, American society is as some allege the "advanced society," ithas obvious import for the future of modernization throughoutthe world. Far from viewing this moment as one of conservativeand repressive reaction, I think it is an exciting time in which first-principle questions are being asked for the first time in a longtime. Its impact upon education is at this moment uncertain. ButI am certain that there is no such thing as "the future" of educa-tion. There are a number of possible futures, and the explorationinto those that hold greatest promise has just begun.

Pastor Neuhaus is Editor of Lutheran Forum and Senior Fellow at the Councilon Religion and International Affairs. This article was adapted from an addressat a June, 1981 Conference at New York University on Religious Education andPublic Policy, jointly sponsored by N.Y.U. and the R.E.A. It has also appeared inthe Winter 1982 issue of New York University Education Quarterly.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f G

lasg

ow]

at 0

8:54

12

Sept

embe

r 20

13