It is difficult indeed to find any other explanation for the ridiculous recent parade of conservative commentators bemoaning the Pledge of Allegiance ruling while beating their chests triumphantly over the voucher decision. Have these people forgotten where exactly the Pledge of Allegiance is said? Not in most private or parochial schools, that's for sure. TAP Online contacted every private or parochial school in Washington, D.C. Of those where someone spoke to us, only six of 26 begin each day by saying the pledge. Five leave the pledge to the discretion of individual teachers. And 15 -- the vast majority -- don't say it at all. (And this is the nation's capital. If most private and parochial schools here don't require the pledge, can we expect the statistics to be much better anywhere else?) As I was told when I inquired about the pledge at one Catholic high school, "We say, 'Our Father,' 'Hail Mary,' and that's about it." That may be enough to satisfy the religious right. But do mainstream conservatives who want to replace public schools with private ones really think the Lord's Prayer is an acceptable substitute for the Pledge of Allegiance?
The pledge may be a superficial measure of patriotism, but in this case it points to a serious underlying point: Private schools -- especially religious ones -- are ill-equipped to play the civic role we expect of education in this country. Without a strong culture of military or civilian service, public schools are the only civic institutions in which most Americans -- of all backgrounds -- can expect to spend part of their lives. Conservatives are fond of invoking the Declaration of Independence to explain that God has always held an important place in our national discourse. But we might also remember that Thomas Jefferson, author of the declaration, was a staunch advocate of free, universal public education. He understood that such a system could hold a democratic country together, and he wrote that among the goals of public education was helping each citizen "understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either." That bit of wisdom is even more relevant today than in Jefferson's time. The United States began life as a fairly homogenous republic, but today we are a democracy of immigrants, a pluralistic society that desperately needs institutions to bind us together. Public schools can and should be the most important of these institutions.
That, at least, is the theory. In practice, we know that American public education is broken -- badly. Failing to admit this is where liberals have made both a moral and strategic mistake in the fight against vouchers. I would guess most Americans are intuitively uncomfortable with the idea of disassembling the public-school system and farming out its mission to a host of private schools (that run the gamut from the secular to the religious to the downright kooky). But then they take stock of their neighborhood public school and figure that anything would be better than the current situation. Meanwhile, rather than risk cutting themselves off from the campaign donations of teachers' unions by acknowledging that the tenure system and other anti-meritocratic protections are the biggest impediments to improving our schools, liberals have allowed themselves to become defenders of a mediocre status quo in American education. Given a choice between voucher-worshipping conservatives who want to destroy the public schools and liberals who appear to think nothing is wrong, it is unsurprising that many Americans -- including Democrats -- want to give vouchers a chance.
It is now up to liberals to explain why this would be a disaster and to provide alternatives that seek to preserve public education rather than destroy it. (Declaring a public war on teacher protections that privilege seniority over competency would be a bold first step.) In failing systems -- the kind that vouchers are supposed to help -- the primary alternatives to public schools are often religious ones. So the inane logic of vouchers would leave us with a stark choice: Either become a country that pays religious institutions to proselytize to children of other faiths, or become a country that educates children of different religions separately. One option undermines the spirit of the U.S. Constitution. The other undermines the spirit of American patriotism. Conservatives have long clung to the notion of an American melting pot. But what kind of melting pot will our society be if Protestants, Catholics, Jews and Muslims are educated separately in their own schools? If ever there was a sinister way to weaken American patriotism borne of pluralism, this is it.
As for conservatives, no one expects theocrats such as Pat Robertson or Gary Bauer to defend principles of American unity over the interests of religious extremists. And no one expects the Cato Institute to defend patriotism over the religion of free markets. But there must be some reasonable conservatives -- and here I am looking in the direction of national greatness conservatives and McCain followers, neither fundamentalists nor libertarians -- who recognize the hypocrisy of rallying around the Pledge of Allegiance while undermining the ability of public schools to serve as temples of American values and ideals. Or have years of unholy alliance with religious extremists permanently blinded them to the fact that America's future depends not just on our ability to be under God but to be one nation, indivisible as well?
