- Ethics
in a Pluralistic Society: the Need for School Choice
by Quentin L. Quade
A dominant fact of American K-12 education is educational finance monopoly (EFM). That is a funding method in which all education-dedicated tax dollars are assigned via governmental bureaucratic structures at state and district levels. Its opposite funding method is school choice without financial penalty, in which parents assign some or all of school tax dollars. EFM produces many destructive effects on both public and private schools, and choice can cure them. (See, e.g., my 'The Automatic Benefits of School Choice,' The Blum Center, 1994.) One of the worst results of EFM in the U.S. is its encouragement of ethical relativism in the public schools. This essay will focus on that problem, how and why it occurs, and how school choice can overcome it.
But first let us remind ourselves of the appropriate objectives of educational policy which, in the United States, may be summarized as follows: first, to empower and liberate individuals so that they can exploit their own capacities, including their moral and judgmental capacities, to the fullest possible extent; second, to ensure that society as a whole will be a beneficiary of such general educational achievement and the socialization which accompanies it; third, to see to it, as well, that individual and social workplace needs will be a major consideration in designing specific curricula and educational structures.
With such ends in mind, we have lessons to learn from certain sad American experiences. Lesson number one: perhaps the most important policy decision has nothing to do with educational or pedagogical issues, but with financing methods. Will educational funding create a finance monopoly behind which educational ends will be subordinated to educational means, and the energetic tail will consistently wag the mesmerized dog? Or will funds be distributed in a way to encourage alternative schooling methods to compete and be compared in terms of their ability to achieve appropriate ends, thus ensuring that educational policy objectives always govern the alternative means thereto? Lesson number two, and the central proposition of this paper: in the United States, the educational finance monopoly besetting us contributes directly to an ethic of the lowest common denominator, then to ethical relativism, and finally to a moral vacuum in the educational environment. And such vacuums tend to be filled by transient secular trends, thought legitimate by some because not religiously-derived, but clearly as value-laden as any religious creed.
Because of educational finance monopoly, the great bulk of American students are economically forced by it to attend public schools (for ethical purposes, peas-in-a-pod public schools). This sets in place several dynamics which contribute to ethical relativism. First, there is a correct and virtuous realization that if you force people of many different types into a common circumstance, and remain liberal and humane in your view of them, then you should not impose on them someone else's values. I am not here referring to simple civic virtues — "It is good to vote" — which society may well urge be commonly observed in most common environments to protect the social fabric. I am talking about particular values, often religiously-derived and family-inculcated. Liberal and humane attitudes clearly say: do not impose such values on the unsuspecting. Thus there is, in a common school framework set within a greatly pluralistic society, a righteous reason to avoid imposing partial, rigid values on captive audiences. The problem with that virtuous avoidance, however, is that it results in an inevitable if unintended void, a kind of vacuum. Specific rules of conduct and guidance, germane to youngsters' upbringing, tend not to be propounded.
Second, in the United States this problem is greatly aggravated by the fact that many of the concrete solutions to vexing issues about what can and cannot be taught have been arrived at by judicial fiat rather than legislative give and take, even though in the latter prudent compromises have a better chance of success. As a result, the common public schools increasingly have been closed to any expression of religious value, as individual claims have been permitted to drown out majority and community interests. "Don't make my son pray in public school" becomes "no prayer can be offered in public schools, not even voluntary ones." Such policy excesses in the United States, rooted as they are in the uniquely over-extended American practice of judicial review, wherein courts become surrogate and innately defective legislatures, are less likely to develop in Europe, for example.
In describing the inadequacy of ethical teaching and guidance in American education, I am not talking about good guys and bad guys, or character defects. I am not talking about public school teachers or administrators being less ethically sensitive than other people. I am talking rather about structures and policies which make it difficult or impossible for even good guys with sterling character to be effective ethical teachers and guides because of the underlying arrangements which give tone and direction to American educational experiences. The President of the American Federation of Teachers, Albert Shanker, a tireless defender of the finance monopoly from which his members benefit, tried to defend their ethical capability and, in so doing, perfectly described the inadequacy they confront. He said AFT members "...have always been strong proponents of teaching and of modeling universally accepted values in our schools...." (The Wall Street Journal, September 18, 1991, emphasis added.) In a modern, free, pluralistic society, universally-held values are few, they are generic, and they do not provide a firm basis for rigorous ethical guidance. In the American context, then, I would describe educational choice without financial penalty as a cure for ethical deficiencies in K-12 education. It would be a cure because it would enable parents with particular ethical views to seek out schools compatible with those views; and because, if the public schools saw an exodus for such reasons, we can assume they would work harder to re-establish their own ethical capacity and credibility by opposing today's often bizarre policies. If we were in a state of nature, by contrast with our real situation in late-Twentieth Century America, educational choice could be thought of as preventive medicine to insure that unintended ethical relativization would never occur.
Three Fundamental
Realities
There are three foundation stones underpinning my contention that educational
finance monopoly encourages an ethical void and educational choice without
financial penalty can help cure or prevent it. The first is my understanding
of how we do ethics at all, how we do ethical reflection, and how we do
ethical instruction and guidance for the young. Purely empirically,
I observe that the whole of life is a life of choosing, differentiating
among optional actions precisely on value grounds. This seems to
me to be the central characteristic of human existence as contrasted with
any other life form with which we are familiar. We see things in
terms of ought and ought not, and aim to "do good and avoid evil," as Aquinas
said. We will not act effectively on that inclination, and rigorously
distinguish among things in terms of ought and ought not without solid
and specific ethical norms and starting places. It is not true that
we do ethics in general. We do ethics in specifics. "General
ethical disposition" is rather like C.S. Lewis' description of general
or "mere" Christianity: it is "a hall out of which doors open into
several rooms." Getting to the hall is vital, crucial — but insufficient,
for "...it is in the rooms [the specific credal churches], not in the hall,
that there are fires and chairs and meals." (Mere Christianity, 1952
edition, New York, Macmillan, p. 12)
So with ethics: while we can, even must, recognize the general nature of man as a valuing creature, when we want to talk about, evaluate, and recommend ethical behavior we call upon specific norms from specific ethical sources, religious or otherwise. These sources provide the sanctions for the norms. "Who says so?" is more than a childish question.
Such are the norms to which we call people back when we judge them to be erring in their behavior. But though serious ethical evaluation and admonition require specific, shared ethical foundations from which to operate, that does not mean that those ethical foundations and specifics have to be socially divisive or disruptive. American Catholic schools, for example, while sharply distinguished from public ones by deep religious roots, have consistently produced citizens at least as dedicated to the common good as any other social group, and that is not surprising. To begin with, we legitimately surround the different ethical communities in society with the demands and expectations of social order and reminders that the jungle is social order's alternative, thus limiting any disruptive potential such communities might have. But quite apart from that, most major ethical systems, religious and philosophical, have benevolence close to their core. Certainly that is true in the Judeo-Christian traditions. Moreover, much of the most powerful argumentation for natural law rests on the fact that, though starting from greatly different places, men and communities often converge at the point of policy and practical judgment. (See, e.g., Jacques Maritain, Man and the State, Chicago, 1951, Chapter IV, pp. 76ff.) We realize, thus, that though ethics requires specific starting points, that need not mean warfare. It simply means that we do not stand on general grounds, but on particular ones, when we begin our ethical choosing and teaching. If we do not have those kinds of relatively vital and special ethical beginnings, then we tend either to have a vacuum of ethical perception, or the vacuum is filled by the imposition of someone else's ethical views as if they were universally accepted. And that, it seems to me, is the natural tendency of common schools protected by monopoly financing in free and multiplistic societies.
The second bedrock on which my core contention rests is that we naturally expect families to provide the first and crucial nurturing for the child, and such nurturing is expected to attend to intellectual and moral formation as well as the child's physical needs. If that is true, then there is also a natural desire, even expectation, that the educational environment into which the young will proceed will be compatible with the family value structures that the youngsters have already experienced. I say compatible, meaning neutral at the worst, supportive at the best, but in any case not at war with or subverting the family's value structure. For if the schools undermine the family's ethical framework, they are weakening basic family authority and moral credibility, and the self-restraints and positive directions the youngster can draw from pride in and respect for his family. A child whose education, intentionally or otherwise, seriously diminishes the moral credibility of a loving family is, in effect, being cut adrift with no compass, and no North Star.
Ultimately, of course, the values proffered by the family must be affirmed, or perfected, or perhaps even rejected by the youngster as that youngster matures and takes on his own identity. I am not talking, in other words, about imprisoning children in value structures imposed upon them by their parents in some rigid, and prison-like fashion. As I often say, the child is free — but the parents are not. The parents are obliged to make a moral offering to their children, which offering will be sorely missed if not present. They would be very poor parents, indeed, who did not see their responsibilities to encourage a sense of the ought and the ought not, and to inform that sense with specific moral guidelines from their own experiences and most profound convictions. And the point is not to turn the youngster into an automaton, but to fill out one of the crucial aspects of that youngster's development. By contrast, schools formed to reflect a non-existent and illusory universality, such as those which grow up behind an educational finance monopoly, disrupt the family's natural desire and responsibility to provide a nurturing ethical context for the child's education. (For fuller discussion of this key issue, see my 'The Family's Values and Educational Choice,' The Family in America, Vol. 7, No. 3, March, 1993).
And the third basis for this essay's central proposition is that democracy as a political form naturally gives rise to social pluralism, which pluralism will reflect the multiple values and value-systems evolved by free peoples. That freedom is a virtue to be cherished, obviously. But it also has certain negative potentials, or traps, which must be understood for political and educational purposes. If, for example, democracy's natural tendency to invite pluralism causes us to support only common places, because we do not want one group's values imposed upon other groups, then in these common places there will be no sharp values, only generic ones. If there is pluralism, and we insist on common structures only, there will be a void likely to be filled by secular trends reflected in prevailing law or opinion-leading media. This is the process which, in the United States, has led to school-based efforts to declare "normal" certain behavioral patterns judged aberrant by most parents. Or, if we insist on only common structures, and there is a dominant element within our pluralistic society, we may end up with imposition. That is exemplified by American experience in which the Protestant ethic in the last century was quite thoroughly adopted in the common structure of public schools. This was repugnant to American Catholics, and helped prompt the separate American Catholic system. The nuns gave American Catholics educational choice without serious financial penalty, but the system they created is now under drastic strain from the finance monopoly that surrounds the public structure the Catholics were alienated from.
The second trap which flows from democracy's natural encouragement of pluralism, and which has direct pertinence to educational policy questions, is that if we permit pluralism to be transformed from being the natural result of democracy into being an objective of democracy, then we in fact are calling upon ourselves to relativize our values, because we are saying that we who stand for specific things should not just tolerate but promote other things contrary to our own principles. That has a necessarily relativizing influence on our own values. It is an emptying out which really needs to be avoided at all costs. Both these traps are wrong responses to the social and ethical pluralism which democracy naturally nourishes. Tolerance and benevolence are the best we can offer those with whom we differ, if we seriously hold serious values. (For more on this, please see my 'Pluralism vs. Diversity,' Freedom Review, Vol. 22, No. 2, 1991, and Current, No. 334, July-August, 1991.)
School Choice as
Cure or Prevention
Now, if we ask about educational choice as cure or prevention for the moral
vacuum proposition that I have developed, what do we see? We see
that educational choice naturally extends parental influence beyond the
home and into the educational environment, state-run as well as private.
What educational choice means is providing parents the opportunity, without
financial penalty, of selecting an educational environment which they judge
to be superior for their child's purposes, including his ethical purposes.
In this way, educational choice obviously supports parental values and
the ethical foundations on which the youngster can stand as he or she begins
developing toward adulthood.
Educational choice, even as it acknowledges and makes room for a common core of civic values and teachings, provides for the naturally pluralistic social and ethical forms which evolve in a free, democratic community. It does not insist on an illiberal homogenization. In this, it precludes the ill effects of an artificial commonality which can create an ethical vacuum, invite secular trends to dominate, undermine the family's values, and make important ethical pedagogy and guidance extremely difficult. Instead, educational choice encourages educational frameworks supportive of or truly neutral toward core family-based values. In turn, that makes morally-defined behavioral expectations, standards and norms possible in a way that a generic context for educational work simply cannot provide.
These are the reasons which make it clear to me that the choice of educational finance policy — finance monopoly, on the one hand, vs. parental allocation and choice on the other — impacts directly on the ethical strength and sensitivities which a society can be expected to manifest. The prevailing conditions in the United States, reflecting not ethical inadequacies of personnel, but the very often unintended effects of injurious structures and policies, are in fact contributing to a kind of ethical juvenility, egocentrism, and lack of self-restraint on the part of American youth. Because of the unfolding logic of educational finance monopoly in a modern pluralistic society, those young people are cut off in substantial part from the natural progression of ethical nurturing, teaching, and guidance which can occur when schooling proceeds from, or is at least compatible with, the home and family. Educational choice without financial penalty, by enabling parents to select the educational environment for their children, gives them rights equivalent to their responsibilities. They should settle for nothing less.
In a Nutshell
Simply because most parents, most of the time, deeply want their child's
welfare, the family is the natural locus for child nurturing, including
introduction to the ethical life of valuing and choosing.
Such ethical nurturing will reflect the family's specific values, not generic ones.
The natural way to see the school is as an extension of or aid to family interests and responsibilities.
In modern democratic societies ethical and cultural pluralism are the forecastable results of social and political freedom.
In that context, common schools will tend to be ethically inadequate because they will offer either generic and vacuous ethical forms or imposed ones.
Educational choice without financial penalty can avoid both errors, extend family influence, and sustain a rational ground for ethical pedagogy and behavioral norms.
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