Supporting Alternate Lifestyles for betterment of society

The Garage
#21

I’m not sure about the Catholic schools where you live but the local catholic primary schools around here accept students from all religions (as well as children of agnostics and aethiests) and do accept students with disabilities that they can access disability funding for (which public schools get by default).

The only requirement that I’ve heard of is that people may not proselytize views contrary to those held by the school or the Catholic church whilst in school, at school related functions and events or on school related social media.

The problem with withholding funding because you don’t agree with the views of a group is that you then disenfranchise the children, they will still be attending those schools, just with even less equipment and facilities and you run the risk of creating a disenfranchised and angry group of adults down the track.

I agree with the views you espouse around these issues but I also believe that our society should strive to be inclusive, even of those who aren’t inclusive in return (maybe they’re even the most important people to be reaching out to).

#22

Catholic schools where I live, Tokyo, tend to be almost secular due to national standards. My own Catholic schools in America in the late 80s-mid 90s were… Not that. Like @Oldmacs I consider myself both queer and still Catholic, but I haven’t seen the change I want to see. Catholic schools in America have become a bit more open to students, less open to their parents, and not open at all to teachers who don’t toe the Vatican line, even privately. High profile firings for queer teachers or umarried teachers or teachers on birth control etc is still quite common. That said my schools were excellent on the issue of class and race. As you’d expect jesuit schools to be. Less so on sex.

And then there are the Evangelical Christian Academies which popped up in the 60s and 70s, partially due to ideology, but also partially to avoid desegregation in the south. These have also popped up in Australia, and I am warning you, don’t let them get their hooks into your systems, Aussies. They’re driving the voucher and whatnot programs and it’s bad news.

Ultimately I don’t believe in public funding for any private or parochial school. I strongly believe I’d rather pay more in taxes so every child has a high quality public education. And while Catholic schools may be serving a need in Australia, especially rural Australia, that isn’t something worth celebrating. It means that we aren’t doing enough to fund and build a comprehensive public education system. There should never be any need to get a private education. Ever. I don’t consider religion or ideology or class-based decision making a need. If a real need exists, it means we have failed as a society and we need to do better.

#23

The problem is that there are just so many things wrong with the educational system. ie, some parents send their kids to catholic schools because it is the only affordable alternative to a public school. What is the solution to that?

It gets to a point where throwing mine at the problem doesn’t fix it.

Then there is the problem that we have religions who do discriminate. I don’t see a problem with parents wanting their kids to get an education based in their religion, theoretically that should be fine, but it gets complicated when discrimination slips in because as you say it

There are so many flow on effects into the educational system, and I believe the entire educational system is broken. We don’t pay teachers enough, education isn’t valued by many, some schools get too much money and waste it, some schools don’t get enough money. @Geoff3DMN’s point about every school needing its own funding is so true.

Society is very fundamentally messed up and given who we just voted back into government, its not going to get much better anytime soon.

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#24

I don’t believe funding should be according to what type the school is. It should be the student that gets the funding, and they then give it to the school of their (or parents, really) choice.
Heck they could keep most of it and home school if they want.

#25

Hard disagree. Public funds for public schools, because public education benefits everyone, even if you don’t have children, or if you no longer are a student. Public education is social infrastructure. Like roads and bridges and dams. Comprehensive education makes an entire society better and stronger. Voucher systems, which you describe, don’t work in practice because how do you compel private or parochial schools to take students they don’t want to take for ideological, religious, classist, or worse reasons? What if they use pretexts to avoid whatever laws or policies you set up to supposedly stop this (this is why I absolutely oppose voucher systems in America, they end up discriminatory). In the end you start putting public dollars into private schools for the benefit of the same folks who could likely have afforded it without those public dollars, while taking away those public dollars from the social infrastructure of a comprehensively educated society regardless of means, religion, race, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity, sex, etc.

You’re not paying taxes to provide for public education because it benefits your children, at least not as individuals, you are paying taxes to provide for public education because it benefits all children, all families, all communities, all nations, and indeed, hopefully the entire increasingly globalised interconnected world. If you want to remove your children from the public system wherever you are, that doesn’t absolve you of your social responsibility to provide for social infrastructure. So no, you do not get to take those dollars with you when you pull your kids out of public school. You want your kids to get some super special education for some super special reason? Don’t harm others in the process–pay the additional cost.

#26

Well we will definitely have to disagree there. The guarantee that each child is adequately funded is for the government to fund every child equally. The only variation is perhaps means testing.
I don’t give a rats about whether it is public or private. Why would that matter? It is the quality of the education, that a well rounded child that can read, write and add up that really matters. The best they can be. All the rest is just socialisation. I don’t want my children to be a cog in the machine.

I went to a state school. Most of the teachers there were time servers. Two of them had and still have my respect. The rest no.

I have a special needs child. He gets much better support from his private school than he would have received at the state school his sisters go to. It doesn’t matter if it is public or private, it is the quality of the teachers and the program at that school. The student is all.

Your support for public education is ideological, and I really, really don’t agree with the platitudes about the holy public school system. I don’t see how on earth a voucher system could prevent your goals of “You’re not paying taxes to provide for public education because it benefits your children, at least not as individuals, you are paying taxes to provide for public education because it benefits all children, all families, all communities, all nations, and indeed, hopefully the entire increasingly globalised interconnected fusing is still public” blah blah. The funding would be the same, so I don’t see why it would directly threaten the public system.
I guess the independent schools like the catholic system would become mostly free, which would definitely create some competition for the public system. Maybe that is what you fear. The high fee profits schools would still stay high fee of course.

#27

If you don’t believe public education is a social goal because it is social infrastructure, just say so. Or maybe you did somewhere in that. The idea that you would think I, of all people, would want any child to be a cog in the machine shows just how little you understand WHY I support comprehensive public education as social infrastructure. I oppose the idea that the purpose of education, especially and specifically public education, is to create little workers for the capitalist class. And more importantly, how little you understand about why I became a teacher in the first place.

It matters whether a school is private or public because of what those words mean. If private schools are open to anyone, at all times, regardless of means and without discrimination of any kind, and are supported by public dollars, then they are not private schools, are they? Then they’re public schools. But if they are public schools, receiving public funds, accepting all students publicly, then they should also be subject to public oversight.

In the case of parochial schools, I attended Catholic schools where many children received scholarships or subsidised tuition. As I have stated, they were particularly good about racial/ethnic and especially class diversity. Which is very much in-keeping with the Jesuit messaging around education and Catholic social justice oriented activism more generally. I had a tough time, as I am sure @oldmacs probably did, because I was obviously queer. I would love for the Vatican to release its centuries hoarded gold to provide the various Diocesan and Order schools with the ability to take every student who shows up. How could you suggest I’d be against that? However, I will say, if we had a comprehensive public education system where that was already true, there would be no need for these schools to fill. I don’t understand why that’s hard to grasp. In the case of your special needs child, it is a damning condemnation of the public school system as it is currently set up and funded that he isn’t able to receive the support he needs. How does one turn this into support for private schools rather than a vociferous, outraged demand that the public school system be fixed? That’s my reaction to your situation. Anger on your behalf that the public school system has failed you. Anger that society sees this as tolerable. It’s infuriating.

I have met many a time server in every school in which I have been a student, which is why I became a teacher. I am a fierce advocate for adolescents/teenagers specifically, and that was because I had precious few advocates of my own. I have had drag-down, knock-out fights with time server coworkers and myopic administrations in public and private schools in which I have worked. These folks, many of them who power-trip on their control of students, who do not see their charges as real and already complete humans, should not be in education. You are right that it is the quality of the teachers and the programs at a school, and those teachers and programs should be provided to every child, everywhere, at no cost to themselves.

To quote Aaron Sorkin, via Sam Seaborn:

#28

That assumes that there actually is social responsibility to provide for social infrastructure and not everyone would agree with that (as it happens I do but the fact is many do not).

So… yeah… you’re going to be looking at a situation where it comes down to how many people end up on each side of the debate as to what ends up happening.

#29

True, libertarians exist, but I’ve met very few who have any desire to take their libertarianism to its logical conclusion. In 2019, it is almost impossible to maintain a modern lifestyle without access (even if that lack of access is genuinely desired and sought) to public infrastructure, which is often as much social as it is physical. Not to mention that the way land has been controlled and still is means you cannot just run off into Country and set up your own independent homestead. Not only are there likely traditional owners (and that applies to my own New Mexico, with its traditional owners being Navajo, Apache, or Pueblo people as it does to anywhere in Australia, or many places in Japan, especially in regards to Ezo/Hokkaido or Ryuukyuu/Okinawa), but there may already be registered corporate rights. Earth is too small and humanity too populous for anyone but the very lucky or the very wealthy/powerful (often both) to divorce themselves of social responsibility. Even if you managed to create a colony ship and move to an Earth like planet around and sol type star, and it didn’t require any terraforming (let’s just presume life survives best when it is like it is on Earth, and turns out carbon based DNA eventually evolves everywhere, them’s the rules) any such colony is going to require social infrastructure and the colonists practicing social responsibility or everyone will die.

So you’re right, people CAN disagree, they have that ability and that right. They are also wrong. And I have seen no historical evidence showing otherwise, and have read no political/economic framework that comes close to convincing me otherwise. The closest might be the work of Michael Z. Williamson but even his work assumes 1) a colony planet like the one discussed above 2) social and cultural rules everyone generally agrees to and generally practices, thus genuinely leading to ultra competition and yet very little actual wealth and power disparity, high standard of living, and ample social freedom.

We don’t have 1, and we are centuries or millennia from being able to establish 2 without law and the state. But if you can find me a way to do that and get everyone to agree and produce equitable outcomes for all students with some or even no public schools, I’ll be all for it. I just don’t think it exists. Happy to be proven wrong, but the standard of evidence I will demand will be high.

#30

I probably didn’t express myself clearly, I wasn’t so much talking about true libertarians but more about the tendency of some conservatives to ‘game’ the political process in such a way as to create libertarian(ish) outcomes with the consequent disadvantages that the rest of us then have to deal with.

And I’m not trying to say that you are wrong, nor am I saying that people should be able to ‘take their money with them’.

However I believe that a more inclusive approach would be to regulate universal school requirements that would require religious schools to provide mainstream education and mainstream access and to increase the strength of regulations to protect not only students but also parents and teachers from discrimination. Doing it this way would create a generation of mainstream educated religious students instead of a sub culture of religiously indoctrinated resentful students who blamed the ‘system’ for subjecting them to unsupported schooling.

And I take your point about only the rich and powerful, it is notable that New Zealand (arguably one of the more remote and safer locations on earth) has a disproportionate amount of retreats and emergency shelters and similar facilities belonging to the uber rich and powerful on it’s shores (generally locked away from local public scrutiny).

#31

I’m for any and all improvements to the current situation. Japan applies its national standards to private schools, included parochial schools, which means in my experience as both student (public) and teacher (public and private) in Japan in six areas of the country (Kyoto, Fukuoka, Gunma, Saitama, Tokyo, and Chiba) I can say with pretty strong confidence that it has the system you describe. However I also feel it has generally been hostile to evangelism (any, not just Christian, my MA thesis is on Japanese ultra radical nationalism, and the state coopted Shinto, Shinto didn’t coopt the state). So chicken or egg territory. Which came first?

My goal, call it philosophical or even ideological if you must, is a comprehensive, universal, yet individually responsive public school system. But I’ll take anything that moves us closer to every child having a quality education, and that includes stronger oversight of private schools.

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#32

I’m not saying that the regulatory approach would work everywhere, clearly it has been reasonably effective in Japan and with an increasingly secular population in Australia I believe it could work here also. I strongly doubt it’s an option in the USA.

In Australia there is increasingly a divide between the very religious and the completely secular with the middle moderates shrinking in number. And evangelistic religious schools are increasing in numbers (a worrying trend). They’re not the type of schools (nor are the parents generally the types of parents) who would withdraw their students simply due to funding cuts.

It is my honestly held belief that the only way many of those children get a good education is if the government legislates at a national level a national curriculum.

But… this is a jigsaw puzzle and I’m only suggesting a single piece in a remote corner of the jigsaw.

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#33

I’m not saying that the regulatory approach would work everywhere, clearly it has been reasonably effective in Japan and with an increasingly secular population in Australia I believe it could work here also. I strongly doubt it’s an option in the USA.

Not anytime soon, no. But as said, Japan has always sort of been religiously tolerant via equal opportunity religiously intolerant. Even under the heyday of State Shinto and the Empire, there was a great deal of religious freedom if you didn’t publicly question the divinity of the Emperor or otherwise disturb the kokutai (国体, literally the subject of my thesis and difficult to translate, but it might be something like “the fundamental soul of the nation which is immutable,” distinct from the seitai 政体 which is the political form of government or society in a nation at any given time). Evangelism, whether Nichiren Buddhism (yes, evangelist, even militant, Buddhism exists) or Christian, was stamped out. Alternate forms of Shinto were eradicated and subsumed into State Shinto, so your evangelical Shinto was not welcome either. Despite a post-war constitutional framework that allows evangelism in Japan (Nichiren, Mormonism, and Jehovah’s Witnesses are the most prominent), they are largely ignored by most of the population.

In Australia there is increasingly a divide between the very religious and the completely secular with the middle moderates shrinking in number. And evangelistic religious schools are increasing in numbers (a worrying trend). They’re not the type of schools (nor are the parents generally the types of parents) who would withdraw their students simply due to funding cuts.

I’d say this is true in the US too, unfortunately, due to the way our Congressional system works, small populations (especially in our Senate) can influence policy substantially. We’re rapidly heading towards a perpetually divided Congress, as liberal secular states continue to pick up House seats due to growth from both births and immigration (transplants from other states or new residents/citizens from overseas). Places like Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Montana… as secular folks (believers or non-believers) leave to go to your Californias, your New Yorks, or my own overtly Catholic yet staunchly liberal politically New Mexico, those who are left are increasingly represented by more powerful Senators who answer to these small and increasingly extreme populations. If current trends continue, we will see a Senate which is always Republican, a House which is always Democratic, and never shall the twain meet. We’ll likely head towards a need for constitutional reform, something the founders envisioned only in a very broad sense. This particular issue is outside of their predictions, except perhaps for Hamilton, and even Hamilton believed industrial cities in each state would balance out rural homesteads of the country. Jefferson didn’t even imagine that, falsely believing Americans would just move throughout all of North America setting up family sized plots leading to equal representation in both bodies. He got that one so wrong it often makes me giggle.

It is my honestly held belief that the only way many of those children get a good education is if the government legislates at a national level a national curriculum.

Agreed.