Monday, March 26, 2007

First Science, Then...?

One of my concerns with both the exodus of religious conservatives from schools and the fight for vouchers is the impact this trend will have on public schools.

First, public school will become a place for those with no options. The better off, more motivated and anti-secular parents will resist funding schools they do not support or intend to use.

What is worse, we will end up with many students graduating from alternative schools that leave out important information - civil rights, important lessons of history, facts about the natural world - resulting in the formation of minds hostile to a secular democracy, cultural pluralism and scientific literacy.

Rather than teaching common values and a shared view of how the world works, we may end up with balkanized groups of students, each with their own distorted view of the world, and each with a parochial view of the world that makes it difficult or impossible to understand people different from themselves, let alone get along with them.