The Dissenting Tradition in American Education (review)

The central premise of The Dissenting Tradition in American Education is uncompromisingly stated in its introduction: "[T]he public school is the functional equivalent of an established church, buttressed with religious language, expected to embrace all people, legitimating and transmitting an orthodoxy or worldview, and underwritten by compulsory taxation" (p. 4). Beginning with Catholic opposition to the use of the King James Bible in nineteenth-century public schools and continuing through protests against the secularism of contemporary public education, The Dissenting Tradition examines not only challenges to specific viewpoint(s) promoted by publicly funded schools but also opposition to the very notion of state involvement in education.

The authors identify themselves as an evangelical Protestant (Carper) and a Catholic (Hunt)."Despite our differing theological traditions and educational experiences," they write,"we believe that . . . the current structure of public education is incompatible with America's confessional pluralism (citizens embrace different answers to 'first order' questions, such as 'What is the nature of the cosmos?') and our sacred commitment to universal liberty of conscience in matters of education and religion" (p. 5).Through a series of case studies, they demonstrate how America's secularist public-school system arose out of religious differences between Protestants and Catholics in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Faced with the likelihood that a significant proportion of public funding for religious schools would go toward the support of Catholic education, policymakers preferred to allocate tax funding only to state-run secular schools. Moreover, strong popular advocacy of public education as a means of promoting patriotism—most notably by "Americanizing" immigrant children—resulted in restrictions on alternative forms of education, such as parochial schools and home schooling. In recent years, however, attitudes and policies have changed, leading Carper and Hunt to suggest that the time may be ripe for what they describe as "the 'disestablishment' of public education" (p. 9).

At the heart of The Dissenting Tradition lies the fundamental question of the state's proper role in education. Four models are discussed: the state supports only secular schools under its own control; the state runs secular schools while funding other schools, which may be religious; the state runs no schools but provides funds for religious or secular schools of the parents'choice;or the state plays no role in either funding or regulating the education of children, leaving that matter entirely in the hands of parents and religious communities. The case studies through which these alternatives are explored are compellingly presented, intertwining summaries of political and philosophical arguments with accounts of real people to whom they represent not abstract ideas, but a worldview on which the very meaning of life depends.

As a history of Catholic and Protestant efforts to challenge the ideas promoted by public schools and to advance alternative forms of education, The Dissenting Tradition is highly effective. Its weak point is that even as it describes this long-running conflict clearly and cogently, it assumes that the existence of the controversy is, in itself, sufficient justification for "disestablishing" public education in some manner that includes the funding of alternative schooling, including religious education, but is otherwise unspecified. The book does not refute—or even acknowledge—the main points likely to be raised on the other side of the debate; in particular, it scarcely mentions either the political implications of "disestablishing" the public school system or the constitutional issues involved in state funding of religious education. To be sure, supporters of public education may be viewed as self-interested and wrongheaded, and Supreme Court decisions interpreting the First and Fourteenth Amendments may be deemed faulty. Nevertheless, arguing for a dramatic change in the existing structure of the public-school system almost exclusively on the basis of longstanding religious opposition to it is unlikely to persuade anyone who was not already predisposed to agree with that premise. The book presents a compelling history of dissent and a ringing justification...