Education: Parochial Puzzle

Roman Catholics have the fastest-growing educational system in the country. Catholic grade and high schools have nearly quadrupled in 50 years to 4,700,100 students—one out of every eight U.S. school children. But parochial schools get no direct tax support: the First Amendment, as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court, forbids direct aid to church schools. Meanwhile. Catholic parents (as well as Protestant and Jewish parents who send their children to church schools) are taxed for public schools while their own growing schools need money. What should the U.S. do?

Last week four experts grappled with the question in a new Fund for the Republic report. Religion and the Schools. What emerged was a topflight summary of familiar views, and a sharp breach among the experts. Against aid for parochial schools: the one agnostic, Economics Professor Robert Lekachman of Barnard College, and Rabbi Robert Gordis of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. For aid: Catholic Layman William Gorman, onetime associate director of the Institute for Philosophical Research, and the Rev. Dr. F. Ernest Johnson of the (Protestant) National Council of Churches of Christ.

Open Mind. Much of the discussion concerned the basic question of what role religion should play in tax-supported schools. Nobody was entirely satisfied with religious "lessons" by secular teachers. Rabbi Gordis decried handing over the work of church and home to public schools, which might develop a "religion-by-rote." Agnostic Lekachman agreed: "I consider religion to be much too important in human history to see it reduced to a patriotic exercise in the classroom."

Then what of church schools that keep high academic standards and teach religion as well? Agnostic Lekachman warmly supported the right of churches to maintain them, and just as warmly opposed tax aid for them. The public school has "primacy" in a free society, he felt, because it is "an ally of social tolerance, class fluidity, and the open mind." It is the one agent that may postpone choices "until they can become the acts of adults rather than the reflexes of children . . . The public school is too valuable to encourage alternatives to it." With much of this Rabbi Gordis agreed: "One can scarcely expect American society to help underwrite the cost of parochial education, the merits of which may be freely granted, but one of the results of which may well be the destruction of the public school system . . . Parents whose loyalty to their church leads them to send their children to parochial schools are not on that account freed from the obligation to support the public schools."

Full Conscience. It is not that simple, suggested Catholic Layman William Gorman. In his view, there is a good case for an "adjustment" in aid if nothing else. Gorman's reasoning is that parents in a free society have a prior right in the education of children, who are merely on loan to the school as surrogate. Though society guarantees that the school may be of any persuasion, if it meets public standards, Catholics are penalized for exercising this guarantee. "It is radically unjust and in violation of the abiding spirit of constitutional government," wrote Gorman, "to allow a reasonable exercise of parental and religious liberty to entail a burdensome inequality before the laws."