The issue of federal aid to parochial schools is often approached largely in terms of whether such aid is compatible with the separation between church and state. Yet many other questions of social policy are involved here as well, not the least of which is the effect federal aid could have on American voluntarism in general. We have therefore invited two writers who agree in their estimate of the enormous importance of voluntarism in American life, but who take radically opposing views of how federal aid to private schools would affect it, to argue their cases for the readers of COMMENTARY.
Ernest Van Den Haag, whose article “Affluence, Galbraith, the Democrats” (September 1960) provoked wide discussion, teaches sociology at New York University and the New School for Social Research. He is the author (with Ralph Ross) of The Fabric of Society and Education as an Industry. Oscar Handlin, a veteran contributor to COMMENTARY, is professor of history at Harvard and director of the Center for the Study of the History of Liberty in America. His works include The Uprooted, Chance or Destiny: Turning Points in American History, and Race and Nationality in American Life.
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Ernest van den Haag:
In one form or another, we all support public education with our taxes. If we have no offspring, we are supposed to benefit nonetheless: other people’s children might be more of a nuisance if not kept in school; and there is always the chance that they might learn something useful to us there. (A tenuous justification, but let it go.) Those of us, however, who send our children to private schools pay for the public school they do not use and also for their private school. Is that fair?
Citizens often are taxed for services they spurn: pacifists must pay taxes to support armies they detest, criminals pay to support the police they would rather do without; we are taxed for a bridge even though we prefer to sail across in our own boat. Yet often we can avoid burdening those who do not use the service offered: some taxes are levied only on users or beneficiaries—for instance, amusement or sewer taxes, and various tolls and fees. It would be technically possible to reimburse, or not to tax for the support of public schools, those who prefer private ones; or, we could subsidize private schools at the rate public schools are subsidized—the effect would be almost the same as that of reimbursement. Many other techniques are available to help private education—or those who now shoulder its burden without being relieved of the financial burden of public education. Obviously the issue is not whether we can, but whether we should and do want to help—whether aid to private education is in the public interest, or, at least, not contrary to it.
Taxpayers who send their children to private schools have long been grumbling under their double load. Their dissatisfaction became acute when the Kennedy administration asked Congress to subsidize public education with federal funds, without simultaneously granting a subsidy to private education. This makes the unrequited tax burden of the parents of private school children still heavier—and it aggravates them. The Roman Catholic church, which runs the biggest and fastest-growing private school system in the country, has objected vigorously. Most other religious denominations would benefit less from a subsidy; they don’t support many private schools, perhaps because they are reasonably satisfied with the public schools which, after all, reflect a Protestant ethos, if a little more secularized and Americanized than Protestantism in general. There is no gainsaying the ideologically and historically Protestant background of public education. In turn, the Protestant ethos (including the theistic and enlightenment components and the stress on the individual’s direct relation to scripture) is shared widely within the Jewish community. Many Jews also favor public schools because separate education of religious groups unavoidably awakens memories of the ghetto. Thus, on the whole, religious non-Catholics have championed the administration’s stand. So have many well-meaning people who wish to continue the tradition barring the expenditure of public funds for private schools; some because they favor public schooling, and others because most of the private schools that would benefit from a subsidy would be denominational and the greatest proportion Roman Catholic.
If we turn from motivation to argument, two kinds of questions are raised about public subsidies for private schools: socio-political and moral ones concerned with the development of our culture and the effects subsidies to private and, particularly, denominational education may have; and ones about the constitutionality of a subsidy. Let us first separate the social issue (is it desirable?) from its legal integument (will the courts allow it?).
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“Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The intent of this part of the First Amendment to the Constitution is to guarantee “the free exercise” of religion and conscience by barring “establishment,” the legal alliance of organized religion—of churches—with public authority. Such an alliance might make religion a public rather than a private matter and ultimately restrict freedom of conscience.
The Constitution says nothing about education. When the First Amendment was passed, no public school system existed. (Massachusetts had barely enacted a law making the maintenance of schools compulsory for localities—but attendance was not.) The Constitutional Fathers were not confronted with our problem: shall we support public education only, or private education also? shall we regard church-controlled private schools as mainly educational, or as essentially religious institutions? We can only guess how the Constitutional Convention would have solved these problems. The Supreme Court is in charge of such guessing, but so far it has not been confronted with the issue, so that we can only guess how it would guess.
To be sure, the courts have found unconstitutional the use of public funds for bus transportation of parochial school children and for tuition payments to specific denominational schools. Even these tangential issues remain muddled, though. And, above all, the real question has never been asked: does the Constitution bar a subsidy that would be equally available to private schools of all denominations, as well as to non-denominational and non-religious private schools? Clearly, such a subsidy need not “bring about the legal [sic] ascendancy of one sect over another,” which Jefferson feared, or the ascendancy of religion in general. There is a world of difference between a subsidy which reduces and one which increases choice, between one available only to religious private schools (or worse, those of a particular denomination) and one equally available to secular ones. So far, the cases submitted to the courts have been of the former kind. No one has tested either whether a limited subsidy would be constitutional—e.g. a subsidy exclusively for science and language teaching in all private schools—if none of the money or service goes into fields affected by religious teaching. Bus transportation and tuition payments benefit religious as well as other instruction. A limited subsidy would not.
It is not necessary actually to subsidize private schools. The subsidy could be paid to the students (directly or by tax reimbursement) or, as part of their tuition, to the school in which they enroll.1 The Veterans Administration subsidized veterans directly for their living expenses and paid all their tuition to the schools they attended, whether religious or secular, private or public. There was no constitutional challenge. New York State has just started to subsidize all college students regardless of whether they enroll in secular, religious, private, or public institutions. If all accredited private schools are included, rather than just those of a particular church, and if students (or parents) are free to choose, a subsidy can hardly be less constitutional for primary and secondary than for higher education.
There does not seem to be a constitutional bar, then, against subsidizing private schools in some form if the criterion for the subsidy is purely educational and does not favor religious over non-religious schools, or a particular denomination, and if enrollment in public schools remains available without disadvantage.2 (Else choice may be restricted rather than enlarged.) But if the Supreme Court were to create such a bar tomorrow, it should not be regarded as unsurmountable. In Plessy vs. Ferguson, the Supreme Court declared that “separate but equal” is equal (enough to be constitutional). Fifty-eight years later, in Brown vs. Bd. of Education, the Court found that “separate but equal” is “inherently unequal” and can never be constitutional. In recent times, the Court has often taken much less to change its mind. Thus, should the Supreme Court find all subsidies to private schools unconstitutional—a decision that I would think unjust as well as unlikely—its judgment might delay rather than prevent a subsidy. Let us turn, then, to the decisive social reasons advanced for and against federal aid to private schools.
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The use of public funds for private schools may be undesirable though it be constitutional. Whether it is undesirable does not altogether depend on whether private education is. The justification of support must be separated here from the justification of the thing supported.
If we believe private schooling to be altogether contrary to the public interest, we might prohibit it, or make enrollment financially burdensome. However, if we feel that private schools, though not serving the public interest as well as public ones, are still not contrary to it, we might leave the choice to parents on more equal terms than are now offered. One may disapprove of the choice of parents who send their children to private schools, and yet grant their right to make such a choice without suffering all the financial disadvantages they now suffer. The public interest in public education would have to be weighed against the public interest in equity and free parental choice. And the latter may come to weigh more heavily in the balance than it does now.
Thus, even if private schools be undesirable, there may be philosophical reasons for subsidizing them or reimbursing parents. However, there are more conclusive practical reasons for doing so. Private schools are obviously here to stay, even without public subsidy or tax relief. Now, if we grant that schools need a federal subsidy,3 then certainly private and public schools stand in equal need: most private schools have even less ample financial resources than public schools and as many financial burdens; their pupils require the educational benefits the federal subsidy is designed to yield no less than public school pupils. Should they be punished for what opponents of private education feel is the obdurate wrong-headedness of their parents? Grown-ups, who presumably make their own choices, are subsidized whether they attend private religious colleges or not.4 Why then are children—who do not make their own choice—to be deprived? One might oppose the creation of private schools on principle, yet, once they have been created, help the children in them.
To be sure, if private schools are an evil, subsidizing them—though mitigating the evil by improving education for the children already attending—may also encourage it by encouraging enrollments. This dilemma is not unusual, though. For example, measures to subsidize illegitimate children raise analogous questions. We may be opposed to child-bearing outside the public institution of marriage; but once children are conceived under private auspices, we subsidize mothers for the sake of their children who cannot be blamed for the parental carelessness which we deplore. Of course, by relieving present and future unmarried mothers of some of their financial burden, the subsidy encourages illegitimacy in some measure. (The case of prolific parents of families already on relief is similar.) However, most of us feel that the advantages arising to the children and thus to society far outweigh the incidental encouragement of the parental behavior we would prefer to discourage.
Willingness to subsidize unmarried mothers for the sake of their children can be reconciled with unwillingness to subsidize private schools (or religious parents) for the sake of their children only if we believe at least one of the following: (1) The motives causing some parents to prefer private schools are worse than those that cause some to have illegitimate children; the former, therefore, should be punitively deprived—even though the children bear the burden of the deprivation; (2) Withholding a subsidy would be a more effective deterrent in one case than in the other; (3) The social evils of private education are worse than those of illegitimacy.
As to the first, I do not think that even the most adamant opponents of private schools seriously feel that it is better to subsidize illegitimate than private school children and thus to jeopardize the latter for the sake of some future social advantage. As to the second, financial pressure is no more likely to overcome social or religious than to overcome sexual deviation5 (the growth of unsubsidized private schools demonstrates as much). And as to the third, there is no evidence for the contention that the social evils of private education are worse than those of illegitimacy; but even if it be true, would not a subsidy help to mitigate the evil? Withholding it surely does not.
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I believe I have shown that the case for subsidies is compelling even if one disapproves of private education. But what reasons are there to disapprove of it?
We have a tradition of public education; obviously this per se is no reason for not changing, but it has emotional appeal—though we had traditions of private before we had public education. Tradition is a grab bag. Historically we did not favor the vote for women until we introduced it. We have been for and against witch-hunting, slavery, prohibition, segregation, divorce, etc. What we have mostly favored traditionally is change, unless, that is, we favored no change (which has happened less often). History cannot tell us whether we should subsidize private—or for that matter public—education. It points, as usual, in all directions, and mainly to the past.
Sometimes it is argued that a federal subsidy to private schools would lead to federal control. Certainly an eligibility standard would be required, and we would have to find out whether it is being met. But this is the case where accreditation is concerned too. Control could be vested in local authorities as it is now. I should welcome standards and controls more demanding and more relevant to educational purposes than those now established for accreditation—e.g., minimal curricula and the requirement that a certain percentage of students pass certain tests as a condition for continued subsidization. These things are needed, but not for the sake of the subsidy: though I prefer not to, one could leave them to local and even private authorities. On the other hand, government power to regulate education does not depend on subsidies, as the courts are busily showing.
Private education is often thought undemocratic. However, in the ordinary sense of the word, there is nothing undemocratic about private, or democratic about public, schools. England—a democracy—has many private schools; the Soviet Union—a dictatorship—has public education exclusively. It is likely that the word “democratic” here is misused to mean “egalitarian” and perhaps also “culturally homogeneous” and “socially cohesive.” So interpreted, the issue raises genuinely important questions: how desirable are egalitarianism and homogeneity per se? And how necessary for the cohesion of our society (which is certainly desirable)? How necessary is public education to achieve any or all of these, and how detrimental is private education? Even a treatise could not answer these questions fully. I must confine myself to a few points.
Egalitarianism, though looming rather large in the minds of many, is of little relevance here: a subsidy to private schools is not likely to increase or spread whatever class distinctions private schooling now involves. It may diminish class distinctions by permitting poorer children to attend schools which now only the richer ones can afford.
Cultural differentiation independent of class—or conversely, the desirability of cultural homogeneity through public schooling—is more important in this context. And it must be conceded that private schools contribute to cultural heterogeneity; at least that often is their purpose. I doubt that a subsidy would materially affect this. Yet, it would give moral approval—at least end opposition—to it. This seems to be the issue. But, even if the case for cultural homogeneity were quite appealing, should we use financial pressure—be it effective or not—to achieve it? Permitting or persuading is one thing, but attempting to coerce people into a public school when they would prefer private ones is quite another matter. But let that go. Grant, too, that public education helped in bringing American culture and society to their present development. (Other possibilities existed to be sure; the Swiss fared pretty well without using a melting pot.) Do we still need that emphasis on cultural homogeneity and these means? Would the generation or perpetuation of some cultural heterogeneity be bad now?
Surely the situation has changed. The very people who oppose help to private schools make the country ring with their complaints about “conformity.” Aren’t public schools fostering it and private schools—if only by fostering conformity to different ideas—loosening it? Shouldn’t we help them because they are different? And if they weren’t, what would be the basis for objection?
The public school played a major, though controversial, role in the acculturation of great waves of immigrants. These waves have passed. (The Puerto Ricans are a minor ripple.) Moreover, private schools as they have developed would not do badly in competing with public ones in this respect today. The danger of insufficient “Americanization” through schooling that stresses “un-American” or “non-American” traditions is hardly serious any more. The secular forces of cohesion in the United States are overwhelming. It seems to me that conservation and support of what diversity of cultural tradition remains is likely now, and ultimately, to strengthen them more than insistence on further homogenization. If there is a weak spot in our cohesion, it is not our heterogeneity but our cultural homogeneity; not our religious differences, but the insufficiently transcendent nature of our cohesion, which is influenced by the American standard of living as much as by the idea of America. This is perhaps more likely to be remedied by private than by public schools.
A number of positive things could be said for private schools. Their very independence permits them to be more various in their methods, less uniform in their curricula, more adaptable to the needs of minorities, and more experimental than public schools can afford to be. And taxpayers will continue to profit financially from the existence of private schools: whatever subsidy is granted them is not going to cover costs—nor do proponents demand this. I have neglected these and other arguments in favor of private schools because I thought it quite enough to show that there is no less a reason to help them than to help public schools. To do this, it is enough to show that objections to them, and objections to subsidizing them, cannot be sustained. This I believe I have done.
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Oscar Handlin:
As this essay is being written, it seems probable that Congress will sustain the President and will refuse to accede to the demand that any share of federal aid to education go to parochial schools. The issue will not then be settled, however. It is likely to be postponed and to rise again and again in the next few years.
The unequivocal ultimatum earlier this year by the Catholic bishops that they would oppose any bill that did not provide some assistance to parochial schools caused widespread uneasiness among many Americans. This ultimatum raised troubling questions about the obligations of the individual to the community, about the pressures of organized political power, and about the constitutional relations of church and state in the United States. Above all, however, the whole issue of federal aid compels us to re-examine the place alloted to voluntary activities in a free society. That is the core of the matter.
A good deal of confusion has been generated by the argument that the failure to give public funds to Catholic schools unjustly subjects Catholics to a form of double taxation. These parents, it is claimed, pay levies to the government to support institutions they do not use and also pay tuition to those their children actually attend. Father John Courtney Murray has given eloquent expression to this contention: “The canons of distributive justice ought to control the action of government in allocating funds that it coercively collects from all people. . . . The solution . . . reached in the 19th century reveals injustice and the legal statutes that establish the injustice are an abuse of power.”
It is worth noting that this was not the point of view of Catholics in 19th-century America, when the claimants upon the governmental purse were Protestant; nor is it a position that is widely recognized in countries where Catholics are a majority or hold political control. It seems rather to be the product of the particular pressures of the present situation.
But were Father Murray’s argument valid, it might well override all other considerations. Yet nothing in the American experience sustains the accusation of injustice. The community has always assumed the responsibility for performing certain functions of general utility, which it supports with income raised by taxation. In this manner, schools, hospitals, and libraries are maintained because they serve the welfare of the whole community, not because they serve those who pay the costs. There are individuals and groups who prefer to use private libraries or to buy their own books, or who elect to enter private hospitals, or who wish to send their children to private schools or colleges. In so doing, they satisfy their own desires or the dictates of their own consciences—and at their own expense. Yet that does not acquit them of their obligation to the community. Nor can they call, in the name of justice, for a share of the financial resources that the government acquires to perform its own functions in the same spheres.
The freedom of the individual to choose the school or hospital of his own preference is conditioned upon the acceptance of his obligations to the whole community. Without this balance our society would confront equally undesirable alternatives. Either each man would be left to find what services he himself could afford, with the poor dependent upon some form of charity; or the state would assume or delegate complete control of any or all services.
The development of the school system, as of similar institutions, has enabled Americans to escape the necessity of accepting either alternative. Loose pluralistic forms have permitted the spread both of public, governmentally-operated services and, in the same areas, of private, voluntary ones. This balance has been an important element in the maintenance of American liberty.
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It does not follow, however, that the public school system of the past hundred and twenty-five years is sacrosanct. This system has not always been a part of our life, but arose in response to historic needs; conceivably, if it outgrew those needs, the people could alter or abolish it. But any change that is made ought to be detemined not by the interests of a single group, but on the basis of larger criteria—political expediency, constitutionality, and the effects of the change upon freedom.
In my opinion, federal aid to parochial schools would be most inexpedient politically. Historians of the future will, I suspect, divide the last fifty years into two periods. From 1910 to 1940 there was a steady, tragic rise in intergroup hostility, in religious prejudice, and in overt conflict. It was unthinkable in 1928 that a Catholic should be chosen President; and it remained unthinkable during the next three elections. During the two decades since 1940, the war and the threat of totalitarianism have rapidly eased these tensions; and the election of 1960 revealed that a majority of non-Catholic Americans no longer feared Catholicism as a monolithic force alien to the nation’s traditional values. It would be heartbreaking if those gains were in the least to be diminished.
Twice President Kennedy has asked why the question of aiding parochial schools should have been raised this year; it was not raised on previous occasions when Congress considered federal aid to education. The President’s query echoes in the minds of many Americans. Were Catholics now to constitute a political bloc which made aid to parochial schools a condition for any federal legislation in the area of education, intergroup relations would certainly suffer.
Considerations of constitutionality are serious, but less decisive. For a century and a half the direction of American constitutional law has been to exclude the government ever more sharply from areas in which faith was involved. That trend could of course be reversed, but such a reversal ought not to be effected without a clear recognition of the consequences.
The framers of the Virginia statute on religious liberty and of the First Amendment to the federal Constitution were groping toward a novel conception of man’s relation to God—as an altogether voluntary matter with which the polity ought not to interfere. But since they could not anticipate all the implications of this idea, there was no clean sweep of inherited practices. Well into the 19th century vestiges of establishment persisted, sometimes in a modified form, and a few persist even to this day—-for example, the chaplains in the armed services and in Congress, the support of Christian missions on Indian reservations, and state blue-laws.
Nevertheless, the main line of development in American constitutional law has moved toward an ever fuller implementation of the conception of religion as properly free of governmental coercion or support. The courts have held that the First Amendment intended to do more than create conditions of equality among the diverse religious groups of the country: it also intended to separate clearly the affairs of the national government from those of the church. With the extension by the Fourteenth Amendment of that wall of separation to the individual states, any doubts about the exclusion of government from the realm of religion were removed. (If the Sunday laws are still susstained, it is under the subterfuge that the state’s police powers permit it to enjoin a day of rest upon all its citizens.)
The consequences of total separation were fortunate. Americans Were no less devout than other Western peoples, perhaps more so. But their piety was removed from open or concealed compulsion. James Bryce, noting that half the troubles which vexed the Europe of his day arose “from the rival claims of Church and State,” concluded: “This whole vast chapter of debate and strife has remained unopened in the United States. . . . All religious bodies are absolutely equal before the law, and unrecognized by the law, except as voluntary associations of private citizens.”
But the Constitution is a living document, subject to amendment, reinterpretation, and evasion. Innovations may be introduced by acts of Congress or by the state legislatures in forms which are not testable by the courts, and even if such innovations were to be tested, the judges might still push the laws in a new direction. Above all, there remains open the possibility of forthright amendment, should enough citizens desire it. If the American people decide that the ideas of James Madison ought no longer to bind them, there are ample means of escape or accommodation. A candid and public discussion of the alternatives, however, would be preferable to the pretense that no alternatives exist.
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The crucial question, therefore, is whether the principle of strict separation—which sprang from a concern with liberating the conscience of man from the rule of force—has outlived its utility.
During the first century and a half of American experience, tightly organized homogeneous communities recognized no distinctions between the sword and the altar. The New England meeting house served both for worship and for government. The Virginia vestry and parish were at once political and religious entities. Everywhere but in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, the churches were established, supported by taxes, and sustained by legal sanctions. Given such integrated communal organization, there could be no distinction between public and private in the sense we now know it. Colleges and philanthropic institutions, as well as churches, depended upon government aid and accepted government control.
To endow religious bodies with absolute autonomy under these circumstances was a monumental achievement, matched in few other societies. It was made possible by the slow discovery that governmental means were not the only ones available for social action. By the 1780’s Americans had learned to work together in voluntary associations which depended not upon coercion but upon the loyalty and willingness of their members to make personal sacrifices in order to attain common goals. That experience was more weighty in establishing religious liberty than formal constitutional guarantees. The churches discovered empirically that the voluntary adhesion of their members was a greater source of strength than the props available from the state. Since the 18th century, Americans have preponderantly believed that the instruments of coercion with which government was armed were inappropriate in matters of the spirit; and as a religious people, they were persuaded that religion could best thrive free of such interference.
In the 19th century, by a tortuous course (the details of which are not yet clear), a line was drawn between public and private institutions, religious and others. At the opening of the century, churches—like colleges, academies, hospitals, and libraries—though controlled by their own governing boards, still had ties to the state from which they accepted privileges. Gradually the ties loosened and the privileges disappeared. For the price of autonomy was to surrender the claim for aid and the resolve to rely completely upon independent resources. The only surviving privilege is the essentially negative one of tax exemption, which can be bestowed without selection or preference.
Now and again, some private organizations have been tempted by easy access to the public treasury. More generally, they have preferred to allow the government to expend its funds through its own agencies, even when these agencies offered competition to the private ones. Yet the growth of state universities, public schools, and municipal hospitals did not damage private institutions. Indeed, one of the great strengths of the American republic has been the latitude of choice it offered individuals: not everything that had to be done, had to be done through the state. The capacity to choose has been an important element in keeping state power within manageable limits and in allowing diverse groups to seek their own ends in their own ways.
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In a period when the growing power of government tends to subdue differences and to subject the individual to total dependence upon the state, it is more important than ever to preserve freedom of action. And nowhere is this principle more important than in education. The issue was fought out over a century ago in New York City when Archbishop Hughes objected to the markedly Protestant character of the society which operated the public schools. The only feasible arrangement was to divorce public education from religious control entirely and to expend all state funds through state institutions, while each sect remained free to conduct its own system at its own expense.
Almost forty years ago that arrangement was implicitly confirmed by the Supreme Court in the case of Pierce vs. the Society of Sisters, which held that the state did not possess a monopoly over the process of education and that particular groups could organize toward their own ends as they wished.
This decision (and similar ones) rested upon two crucial premises. First, the right to conduct schools was not considered to inhere in the particular merit of a private organization such as the Society of Sisters; the Court did not pass upon that question The right emanated from the parents and the pupils, who were held free to choose whatever form of training they considered appropriate, subject only to certain general regulations of health and safety. What these parents could do was precedent for any other group; the status of all private schools, under whatever auspices, thus became identical.
Furthermore, the unexpressed but assumed premise of the decision was that the private school had no financial ties to the state. The rights of the Society of Sisters were a condition of the organization’s willingness to assume the burden of maintaining its own institution.
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Any grant of public aid, in any form whatever, diminishes the private voluntary character of the recipient. It is a well-founded principle, and one that has great merit, that the bestowal of a public privilege brings with it public responsibilities, which can only be defined by governmental authority. This has been held true of museums, housing projects, and trade unions; it would certainly be held true of schools or even churches. It is of the essence of the relationship thus created that the grant establishes the subordination of the receiver to the donor.
Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania, for example, has defended aid to the parochial schools on the grounds that the government is responsible for assuring adequate schooling for all children. But if this is so, who is to set the standards of adequacy? There can only be one answer—the government. The states themselves have already gone far, too far, in establishing requisites of instruction; and the resultant damage has only been mitigated by inefficiencies in enforcement. It would be hazardous indeed to establish a basis upon which our government could begin to define, as totalitarian regimes do, what is true, good, and useful.
This danger is remote, but it is nonetheless genuine. If the federal treasury is opened to religious schools, it must be opened to private secular schools as well. Even if the resources of the government were limitless, some standard of selection would have to be employed and, since that could not rest upon the status of the potential recipients, it could only involve a judgment of what constituted adequate schooling.
We are all too ready to close our eyes to the potential danger here because the very voluntarism which government aid threatens has thus far shielded us from it. We can now operate under the convenient fiction that every bachelor’s degree and every diploma is equal in value, although in actuality there are vast disparities among the thousands of diverse schools and colleges in the country. We could not sustain that useful tolerance once the question of government aid were injected. Decisions would then be necessary as to whether to spread available funds thin among all applicants, to limit them to the best, or to set minimum standards of adequacy. Any choice would call for political judgments about the goals and methods of education and would put pressure on all institutions to conform. It would make necessary unwelcome comparisons among various types of schools and teachers—unwelcome because they would depend upon the application of uniform criteria which are not universally accepted. Finally, public aid would demand the acceptance of governmentally-defined codes of internal organization and behavior. Just as such aid deprives the trade union and the housing project of the freedom to discriminate among applicants and employees, so it would limit the right of the school to set its own admissions policy and to hire its own teachers.
The alternative is far more safe and fully as feasible—to continue to depend upon the loyalty and devotion of those who have thus far been willing to sustain the private and parochial schools of the country voluntarily. The amount the Catholic bishops have requested to meet their capital needs is not out of line with that recently raised by the Ivy League colleges, and the number of potential contributors is far larger. A historian who has studied the 19th-century immigration to the United States is again and again impressed by the ability of humble men of low earning power to dedicate themselves to building institutions in which they really believed. The Irish and Italian and Polish laborers, who gave gladly of the little they had, contributed to an impressive achievement, and in doing so, also expressed their identification with the Church in a totally meaningful way. Is it too much to expect that their affluent grandchildren could do the same and achieve spiritual gains in the process?
Above all, religion in the United States has remained most faithful to its own nature and purpose when it refused to employ the instruments of the government. It has best been able to dedicate itself to the salvation of the individual when it has abjured that power which is the essence of the state. Armies, police, and tax collectors diminish rather than extend the authority of religion, for religion grows only by conversion, by the inner dedication of men to it. Thus religion would be making a poor bargain indeed to pay for some new buildings with the loss of some of its precious old freedom.
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1 Since I favor more strenuous competition between public and private schools, and more freedom of choice for parents, I should be inclined not to subsidize private any less than public schools: the amount it now costs to keep children in public schools would be paid out to any school—public or private—in which parents enroll them provided that scholastic standards are met. But this, though desirable, is not logically implied in discussing a partial federal subsidy, and it calls for more argument than can be presented here.
2 I forgo discussing minor dodges which I think are unnecessary, such as leasing buildings or services to private schools.
3 I am unconvinced of this need, but here I am concerned only with the distribution of the subsidy between private and public schools.
4 The Veterans Administration and New York State pay regardless of whether the college attended is private or public, religious or secular.
5 That tolerance of sexual deviation has increased more than tolerance of educational deviation suggests a displacement of secularized religious zeal.
