Praying for Education

Yesterday the President attended the “White House Summit on Inner-City Children and Faith-Based Schools.” I found his speech while looking for some information about the disintegrating line between church and state, not in reference to him in particular, but this is a great example.

While this is Bush’s speech, this is not just his personal issue. This is a belief that is held by many people. While it is significant that it is his speech, it is the principle that is critical.

I believe wholeheartedly in freedom of/from religion. I believe every person on the planet should be free to practice their beliefs, theist or atheist or whatever, in their own way as long as no one has to tolerate someone else’s beliefs in order to enjoy the rest of their civil rights and liberties. If you want to pray before you eat your school lunch, good for you. Shoot, if you want to hand me a religious pamphlet while I’m pumping my gas, I’ll say thanks, but no thanks and hand it back so you can reuse it. My life isn’t less because of it.

However, no one should have to pray for a good education.

In his speech the President discusses ways to improve education for children, specifically poor inner city children. Even with No Child Left Behind, he admits many schools are unable to provide quality or even adequate education. He seems to think, that investing in a new, primarily faith-based school program will be money better spent than investing in the existing schools with reform, innovation or just plain funding. He says that in faith-based schools, educators can carry out their “mission of training children in faith,” children who don’t share the religious tradition of the school. He adds that at faith-based schools, children can learn the value of discipline and character. Religion has the market on Discipline and Character.

The point of the summit is to discuss different ways to keep faith-based schools in business and how to increase the number of children who attend them.

The President suggests a few ideas. He mentions philanthropy and tax credits for commercial donations. Primarily he believes in abolishing the Blaine Amendments so that federal, state and local tax money can be used for grants, scholarships or to set up a voucher system. He says the Blaine Amendments are an antiquated act of bigotry against Catholics and that this “discrimination continues to harm low income children.” I’m sure it is not accidental that he uses words like “bigotry” and “discrimination” when the majority people who would be served, in theory, would be African Americans who could be sensitive to those words even if not used about them.

Bush makes a point of saying that we use tax dollars to help charities with religious ties, like the Salvation Army, and he says we use tax dollars in grants to pay for higher education, which a student could choose to use at a religious school. He uses this as a precedent for funding the faith-based schools. There is active debate about whether those programs should be funded in this way as well.

I very much believe that the funds he wants to spend on faith-based schools should be going to public schools. If public schools are beyond repair alternative forms of education might be the right answer. The charter schools in New York are a great idea, where schools provide an option of having a particular focus on top of regular education; however, if tax dollars are paying any portion, the law is clear that the education needs to be fully secular.

You can read his entire speech here.