Abstract
Many liberals and secularists believe that religious schooling should not be publicly funded or that it should simply be banned. Challenging those views, I claim that although liberal states may refuse to fund and may even ban certain illiberal separate religious schools, it is impermissible, for distinctively liberal reasons, to completely ban publicly funded religious schooling. I will however argue that providing religious instruction within common public schools is more desirable than having separate religious schools. I argue that providing religious instruction within common public schools (for all religious options with enough adherents) is a better way to balance the educational interests of parents, children and society than (1) banning religious schooling altogether; (2) authorizing it but refusing to fund it; (3) or having publicly funded separate religious schools.
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Notes
I thus follow a well-established distinction between religious instruction and religious education where the former aims at promoting a particular faith whereas later takes a sociological approach to religion and aims at familiarizing students with the phenomenon of religious belief. Many societies have felt the need to introduce pupils to the fact of religious pluralism and to offer courses of religious education (not instruction) with titles such as “Religions of the world”, “Religious culture” or “Science of religions”.
Parental partiality can mean two things. It can refer to the desires and attempts of parents to confer positional or competitive advantages to their children (for instance, paying for a better school) or it can refer to the desires and attempts of parents in trying to influence the development of the character, values and beliefs of their children. See Brighouse and Swift (2014). I am here only concerned with the second meaning of “parental partiality”.
Brighouse and Swift’s main concern, however, is not to defend public funds for religious private schools. They rather aim at explaining why parents need not be absolutely impartial and neutral about the ways of life and values that the education they provide to their children promotes. For a defence of the opposite position regarding parental partiality, see Clayton (2006, 2012).
Brighouse and Swift also provide another argument for parental partiality. This second argument derives parental partiality from the right of children to be raised in families, to be raised by a loving parent or parents. They claim that parents’ legitimate educational partiality is both derivative from parents’ interests and from children’s interests (2006, pp. 84–89, 2014, pp. 149–174).
Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972).
Indeed, the argument that I develop also implies that that parents’ educational choices should not only extent to religious schooling but also to forms of schooling that emphasize secular humanist teachings, sports or arts. It relies on the view that religion should not be treated as being uniquely special in the realm of schooling. I support this claim in “Equal Opportunity for Parental Partiality” section. Laborde (2017) offers the most sophisticated defense of the view that religion should not be treated as special vis-à-vis other substantive commitments.
I follow the usual distinction between neutrality of aim, which prohibits the state from adopting policies aiming at making some conception of the good life more or less successful, neutrality of effects, which prohibits the state from adopting policies that have the effect of making some conception of the good more or less successful, and neutrality of justification, which prohibits the state from justifying its policies on the basis that some conception of the good is intrinsically superior or inferior to others (Patten 2014, pp. 111–114). Patten ads a fourth conception of neutrality: neutrality of treatment, which prohibits the state from being more accommodating of some conceptions of the good than they are for others (2014, p. 115). In “Equal Opportunity for Parental Partiality” section, I explain that my argument is compatible with one of the three strategies for achieving neutrality of treatment discussed by Patten.
A court may nonetheless establish that it is too costly for an employer to grant prayer pauses or room for prayers on a daily basis to all believers demanding it. Establishing that a religious accommodation is too costly for an employer is a legitimate reason to deny the accommodation compatible with justificatory neutrality. Claiming that praying at a specific moment of the day or week is not necessary to fulfil one’s religious duties is entirely different from the point of view of neutrality. See for instance Maclure and Taylor (2010, pp. 100–104).
It could be difficult to assess whether a specific school is moderate or not. How should we regard a school that teaches that contraception is a sin and that God created the world six thousand years ago? One important criteria for moderate religious schooling is that secular teachings must be kept separate and autonomous from religious doctrines. For instance, religious doctrines must not pervade courses of biology, ethics or history and they must not be presented as biological, ethical or historical truths. In such moderate schools, religious teachings are offered in addition to basic instruction, not as a substitute for it.
It is important to note that those authors do not develop a principled objection to separate (ethnic or religious) schools. Kymlicka is inclined to believe that common schools perform better than separate schools to promote the integration of children from ethnoreligious immigrant minorities. Callan claims that common schools provide better conditions for the establishment of deliberative settings which fulfil the dialogical task of schooling. The idea is not that separate schools are necessarily unjust (although they are when they treat children as ethical servants), but that they are less likely to advance the legitimate aim of creating reasonable citizens equipped with the tools required to understand and respond respectfully to the claims made by citizens with whom they profoundly disagree.
The position I am defending here could therefore be seen as compatible with the evenhandedness approach to neutrality of treatment, see Patten, Equal Recognition, pp. 119–123.
I distinguish religious instruction from religious education: the former aims at promoting a particular faith whereas latter takes a sociological or anthropological approach to religion, aims at familiarizing students with the phenomenon of religious belief and is often done under labels such as “Religions of the world", "Religious culture" or "Science of religions".
On the hands-off approach and the even-handed approaches to diversity, see Carens (2000, pp. 1–20, 77–87); Cf. Patten, Equal recognition, pp. 119–123.
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Acknowledgements
I have presented draft versions of this paper at different workshops, seminars and conferences at University College London, Université Laval, University of Montreal, and KU Leuven. I am especially thankful to Félix Aubé Beaudoin, Aurélia Bardon, Harry Brighouse, Andrée-Anne Cormier, Helder De Schutter, Marc-Antoine Dilhac, Valéry Giroux, Sarah Hannan, Eszter Kollar, Will Kymlicka, Cécile Laborde, Jocelyn Maclure, Félix Mathieu, Gina Schouten, Antoon Vandevelde, Daniel Weinstock, and Danielle Zwarthoed for valuable critical feedback and discussion. Any flaw in my argument is my entire responsibility and not theirs.
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Boucher, F. Should Liberal States Subsidize Religious Schooling?. Stud Philos Educ 37, 595–613 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-018-9620-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-018-9620-9