A profound clash of values is being played out in our public schools. Specific battles revolve around religion, creationism, sex education, values education, vouchers, school-linked health clinics, and educational reform. The broader battle focuses on the role of the public school in assuring a balanced, open curriculum that provides for a free exchange of ideas. At issue is how a school district can maintain intellectual freedom while simultaneously guaranteeing the parent's and community's right to be heard.
Public schools have generally operated under the premise that tolerating various community viewpoints has value. But the tolerance level is being strained. On one side, Robert Simonds, president of Citizens for Excellence in Education, writes that “we can take back our public schools from the hands of atheistic humanistic manipulators.” On the other, Americans United for Separation of Church and State write that “anti-separationist leaders are on the scene rallying the troops and whipping up pro-voucher frenzy.... Forcing citizens to support sectarian education is imposing a religious tax.”
Local control of education, a privilege with substantive political resonance, is easily exploited by those who would suppress materials or ideas that they find objectionable. At the same time, many parents accuse the school establishment of intolerance for not teaching religious doctrine nor allowing prayer in the classroom. These differences in perspective reflect not only the growing vocalism of the Far Right and Fundamentalists, but also a backlash against an educational reform movement that to some personifies an attack on traditional values.
In fairness, terms such as Far Right and Fundamentalist do not adequately reflect the depth of the cultural wars being waged over our schools. Labels are too easily applied to characterize any citizen who may have some beef with the public schools, and they may limit our ability to understand the dynamics of public school opposition and to seek a valid community consensus. To be sure, a powerful and effective movement is building that would like to subsume for itself community decision making in education, but the picture of community decision making is far more complex than that.
Many who seek change in the public schools are not unbalanced troublemakers, but sincere people who are concerned that school materials or programs will corrupt their children. They feel that their values are not incorporated in the current definition of the “common” school. There are times when the interests of the school may be incompatible with the values of some parents. Problems arise, however, when parents seek to deny the entire school community the use of certain materials, programs, or educational opportunities because they believe they will corrupt all children. Finding the fine line between a parent's right to be involved in his or her child's education versus the exploitation of that right by a few parents with special interests requires adept leadership.
Public speech that is intimidating, untruthful, or intolerant by any special interest group, either from the Right or Left, should be followed by more and better speech from those of us who believe in open community forums. Parents and community members concerned about attacks on the free exchange of ideas must be prepared to act on their convictions.
Special interest groups take advantage of their audiences in a number of ways. One is through the doublespeak of anti-public school theology, which often confuses rational debate. Parental involvement comes to mean control; equal time, to mean inclusion of religious instruction in the curriculum; secular humanism, to mean anything except the views of the special interest group; back to basics, to mean imposing Christian values on everyone else; and values education, to mean the teaching of one religious doctrine to the exclusion of teaching about all religions.
Another advantage special interest groups press is the threat of an organized campaign. Even the threat of such a campaign may have a chilling effect on the decisions made by boards of education. Boards wishing to avoid conflict may subtly restrict academic freedom by approving materials that are noncontroversial or by bypassing existing material selection and complaint policies in an effort to placate parents who wish to ban certain material from the library or classroom.
Special interest groups present many school battles as a test of religious faith. While the religious faith of no one should be questioned, the error of these groups is often not one of religion, but of policy. God has taken no position on school-linked health clinics, or psychological tests, or condom distribution. Although religious values cannot be excluded from every public issue, not every public issue involves religious values. Each school district has an obligation to teach those values that are held in common—honesty, citizenship, patriotism, cooperation, tolerance, democracy.
These controversies challenge those of us who believe that tolerance should be institutionalized by school policy. We can come out looking as though we support the status quo because we oppose opening the school curriculum to conservative ideology, even though in some cases it may present its own intolerances of race, class, and religion. A case in point is the Far Right's fear of federal government control of public education but its strong support of an amendment to the current HIV/AIDS reauthorization bill that would ban federal monies to fund condom distribution—in effect removing the decision to distribute condoms from more than 14,700 school units. The support by conservative organizations for local community decisions breaks down when communities may differ with far right positions. Such anomalies tax the tolerance levels of public officials in their roles of mediating various cultural conflicts.
The debate over tolerance, however, conceals a much more devious issue—who controls the institutions of culture and value transmission. Our commitment to tolerance in developing public school policy and programs is desirable in developing a common school agenda responsive to changing public attitudes, mores, and needs. We must, however, be prepared to limit our tolerance when it could lead to the creation of intolerant policy. It is not persuasive to argue that a single group should be able to “take back the public schools” because we believe in tolerance.
If we believe that the progress of an educated citizenry depends on the freest possible expression of diverse points of view, then we must feel that we have come to a sort of halting place in American history. We, the American people, with a revolutionary tradition of independence and toleration, find ourselves enmeshed in battles of doctrine and uncompromising demands. Will toleration emerge as a critical national value in the midst of an increasingly diverse and intolerant population? The results of this debate will have an impact on how we, the people, live with one another. When we hear people speak of respecting others' viewpoints, we will know that the principle of toleration continues to establish what is common among us and is not simply being manipulated by those groups wishing to impose their own views on our schools.
