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The Trouble with Vouchers
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 “The
main fact about education,”
G.K. Chesterton observed, “is that there is no such
thing.” He meant that we tend to speak of teaching  in the
abstract, without reference to what is actually being taught.
Chesterton’s
words are timely now, when so many
people want to break up the government monopoly of education. Not only do
many public schools fail on their own terms; even if they were successful,
they are, in essence if not always in practice, totalitarian. They are based on
the assumption that it’s the state’s business to decide what
children should know.
One popular
— or seductive — current alternative to the public education
monopoly is of course the voucher, a tax grant to parents that would be
used for tuition at the schools of their choice. Archbishop Charles J. Chaput
of Denver argues for this approach in the Wall Street Journal
in the name of “diversity” and “choice.” And he
argues that Catholic schools could achieve the goals of public schools, if only
they were enabled by vouchers to do so. They have high minority enrollment
and produce high achievers at comparatively low cost per student.
“My point
here is not that Catholic schools should replace government-run
ones,” Archbishop Chaput writes. “They aren’t designed
to.... However, Catholic schools already do an outstanding job of serving the
poor and minorities, and they’re eager to do more.”
But the primary
purpose of Catholic schools is to teach Catholicism, isn’t it? And
isn’t all the rest a byproduct? The idea behind Catholic education is
that the Catholic faith is true and that it must be inculcated in children.
Education is instrumental to salvation. This means that religion is the central
subject, and other subjects, whatever their secular value, must be taught in
the light of Catholic truth.
In other words, the
main criterion of a good Catholic school is not whether it does what the
public schools do, only better; it’s whether it conduces to the
salvation of children’s souls by teaching them such habits as adoring
Christ, praying to the Virgin Mary, and obeying the Church.
![[Breaker quote for The Trouble with Vouchers: Dispersing thought control]](2007breakers/070102.gif) This
is a far cry from the secularist, divinity-free education whose success is measured in
SAT scores. It’s hard to find a useful common denominator between
two kinds of teaching whose purposes and contents are so radically
different. Nothing in the concept of education can tell you which kind your
child should receive.
What does the
government think of all this? That shouldn’t even be an issue. The
state has no authority in religion and should have none in education, which is
inseparable from religion — not to mention the danger of having the
state in the general business of thought control.
Education, after
all, is largely thought control. Unthinking people who merely repeat
clichés will tell you they are all in favor of the one and absolutely
opposed to the other. But it’s precisely because schools do control
what children and adolescents think that the power of doing so, like most
forms of power, should be dispersed in private hands rather than
concentrated in the state.
The trouble with a
voucher plan is that it would leave the state in charge of all schools, which
would need its approval in order to qualify for vouchers. The correct
approach is to get government out of the education business altogether.
Education isn’t free unless schools can define success on their own
terms rather than the state’s.
The virtue of truly
Catholic schools, for instance, is not that they teach what state schools
teach, only better, but that they teach what state schools — and other
schools — don’t teach at all. Yet we see Archbishop Chaput
edging away from this obvious fact. He wants to justify Catholic schools in
secular terms, suggesting that they beneficially duplicate the efforts of the
public schools.
If Catholic
educators really think that way, it’s likely that vouchers would subtly
lead them to filter anything distinctively Catholic out of their schools —
which already happens too often even without vouchers. The only sound
approach is the total separation of school and state.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2007 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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