PaAC: I've had an idea.

[velvetpage]

I was discussing the homeschooling debate with my dad just now, over steeped tea and donuts at Timmy's, and he pointed out that Canadians who want a religious education have an alternative to secular public schools, in the form of the Catholic school board. (At least, they do in most provinces.) We discussed alternative schools within the boards of education, and I had an idea.

It is quite common now for school boards to offer alternative or magnet programs within the public school framework. That is, a school will be geared towards high-level athletes, or towards the arts, or towards science. These schools are generally opt-in; that is, there is no real catchment area other than living within the confines of the school board itself, so no one is forced to attend these schools because of what street they live on.

Why not offer a magnet school for mainstream Protestant education? That is, an opt-in school, under the public umbrella, that gives kids the religious education they would otherwise be homeschooling or charter schooling to obtain. It would be staffed by teachers within the school board who followed the same creed, and those teachers would have all the same employment standards as their counterparts in the rest of the public board. The one and only difference would be the Christian focus.

In some areas, particularly the Bible Belt, you'd probably end up with two separate systems under one umbrella. That would be fine, as long as the public, secular schools continued to operate and were reasonably located to service the population who attended them. It would give parents and students a choice within the public system, so it would no longer be necessary to go outside the public system to get a religious education. The key here is that it has to be opt-in. So long as students and parents have a choice, it doesn't violate any rights. It's only when that choice is denied that there is a violation.

Thoughts?

Comments

[paka.livejournal.com]

It would still be a public institution, paid for by the public though? I have no interest in being taxed for the privilage of having my own faith ignored and locked out of the public sector. This is a particularly bitter point given the Bush Administration's faith-based initiatives.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

If you lived in an area where there were enough of your own faith, you could realistically have a magnet school of your own.

This would have the potential to solve the "Prayer in public schools" debate. Those who wanted it could have it, and those who didn't want it wouldn't have to. Any group big enough to warrant its own school population in a region could get its own magnet school.

[paka.livejournal.com]

I dunno, that still sounds undemocratic. I mean, how large do you have to be to merit a magnet school? Isn't leaving the only [fill in blank with name of practice] family out, an injustice?

And while "Catholic" is a moderately unanimous block, "Moslem" could be Shi'ia or Sunni, "Jewish" could be Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, or Reconstructionist, and "Protestant" has how many iterations that might not be completely in agreement?

Admittedly, I'm pretty dead set against something as important and deeply personal as religious faith being administered by a public school system.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

It seems to me it would be more democratic. Democracy means the majority rules. We've put limits on that so that no one's individual rights would be trampled, and rightly so. But if it is possible to cater to many groups with a public service, without diminishing the efficacy of that service, that seems to me to be more democratic than a take-it-or-leave-it approach to that service. The real question, then, is: should education be representative of the population being educated? If education is to be democratic, then I would argue that it should be representative.

BTW, a UN tribunal agrees with me in one respect. One of Canada's Protestant groups took the province of Ontario to court over discrimination, and the decision was that our funding model (Catholic and Public schools, but no funding for anybody else) was discriminatory. We should be funding either everybody or nobody. The judges didn't force the province to recitfy the situation, though several other provinces took it upon themselves to eliminate the Catholic system as a result.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

The judges didn't force the province to recitfy the situation, though several other provinces took it upon themselves to eliminate the Catholic system as a result.

The latter seems the reasonable and ethical choice to me.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Oh, and there's an argument to meet your second point. Most Protestant denominations have a set of core values they all espouse. There are a second set of almost-core values, of which there are three or four broad sets. After that it breaks down considerably, but it would be possible to group them together to form some broadly similar ideas, and teach those. Then you either leave out the parts where they differ, or you teach the differences side by side and let the kids choose. There's also the argument that most of Christianity believes almost the same things when you get down to brass tacks, and the public education could focus on those and leave out the nitty-gritty. You'd still get the prayer in schools, and the "what would Jesus do?" type emphasis. That's basically how the Catholic schools here handle it. (Yes, I've seen them from the inside - I taught in one as an assistant for a while in university.)

[athelind.livejournal.com]

If you lived in an area where there were enough of your own faith, you could realistically have a magnet school of your own.

And if you don't, to heck with you. Why aren't you living with your own kind, anyway?

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

It's more representative than the take-it-or-leave-it system that's currently in place. And the secular schools are still available.