For example; there is one thing that can be done anywhere, and whenever
enough votes can be assembled to carry through the necessary
legislation. At present the law regards with an austere disapproval that
reflects a popular opinion (now happily tending towards decay), what are
known as "denominational schools" and other institutions of learning.
Those that maintain the necessity of an intimate union between religion
and education, as for example the great majority of Roman Catholics and
an increasing number of Episcopalians and Presbyterians, are taxed for
the support of secular public schools which they do not use, while they
must maintain at additional, and very great, expense, parochial and
other private schools where their children may be taught after a fashion
which they hold to be necessary from their own point of view. Again,
state support is refused to such schools or colleges as may be under
specific religious control, while pension funds for the teachers,
established by generous benefactions, are explicitly reserved for those
who are on the faculties of institutions which formally dissociate
themselves from any religious influence. I maintain that this is both
unjust and against public policy. Under our present system of religious
individualism and ecclesiastical multiplicity, approximations only are
possible, but I believe the wise and just plan would be for the state to
fix certain standards which all schools receiving financial support from
the public funds must maintain, and then, this condition being carried
out, distribute the funds received from general taxation to public and
private schools alike. This would enable Episcopalians, let us say, or
Roman Catholics, or Jews, when in any community they are numerous enough
to provide a sufficiency of scholars for any primary, grammar, or high
school, to establish such a school in as close a relationship to their
own religion as they desired, and have this school maintained out of the
funds of the city. This is not a purely theoretical proposition; after
an agitation lasting nearly half a century, Holland has this year put
such a law in force. From every point of view we should do well to
recognize this plan as both just and expedient. One virtue it would
have, apart from those already noted, is the variation it would permit
in curricula, text books, personnel and scholastic life as between one
school and another. There is no more fatal error in education than that
standardization which has recently become a fad and which finds its most
mechanistic manifestation in France.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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