Should parochial schools receive government financial support? This issue has been debated throughout our history. In recent years, as many public schools have been seen as providing an inadequate education, there's been increased support for the idea of giving public funds to private and religious schools. Iowa and Minnesota already have laws to provide such support and other states periodically consider it.
Opponents of public support for religious schools have argued that such aid violates the constitutional separation of church and state and that citizens should not be forced to pay taxes to religious groups and to schools that the public does not control. (Some religious groups also oppose government financial support. They fear that it would eventually deprive their schools of their independence from government regulation and control.) Opponents have also argued that aid to private schools could benefit political, religious and racial extremist groups.
In spite of these arguments, many people often compare inadequate public schools with nearby religious schools and feel that the private schools merit public aid. And they dismiss the argument that many parents would send their children to schools sponsored by "way out" groups. For those leaning in the direction of support for private schools, the current controversy in the United Kingdom should clarify the issue.
The U.K. has no separation of church and state. In fact, it has an established church. The government may, and indeed does, provide financial support for Christian and Jewish schools, but is not required to do so for all groups. Private schools may apply to become "voluntary aided" (publicly funded); it's up to the government to decide whether the request should be granted.
In addition, a recent U.K. law has created an additional category of publicly-funded schools outside of public control. Parents of children in a school may vote to have the school "opt out" from the local education authority (board of education), run the school themselves and still receive public funds thus creating a kind of government-funded private school.
In recent months, still another group has applied for government aid for their schools -- British Muslims. But, because of the Salman Rushdie affair, their application has suffered a severe setback and raised a difficult issue: should public funds go to private schools that might teach values that clash with the fundamental values of the nation?
According to a London Times Educational Supplement (TES) editorial of 2/24/89, "The basic fact is simple: it is one thing for a religious leader to attack a book and excommunicate its author. It is quite another to incite Muslims everywhere to track the writer down and kill him. It is even more intolerable to offer the successful killer both a martyr's crown and a million dollars ...
"All this makes it clearly necessary to know what a Muslim school which is seeking aided status intends to teach children on these matters. Does it intend to teach children that what the Ayatollah has done is right? If the answer is: Yes, it is right, then there is no good reason for subsidizing such a school from public funds. If the answer is equivocal - as most of the official Muslim responses have been during the past week -- it must also be unacceptable ....
"The aided school principle has proved a useful way of providing a degree of autonomy for denominational schools, but it pre-supposes a sufficiently broad base of shared values to make this acceptable. Are the shared values sufficiently sturdy to support the notion of Muslim aided schools? Not unless the Ayatollah is effectively repudiated."
A news story in the TES that day noted that several British Muslim spokesmen have argued that it is unreasonable to fear that pupils in a Muslim school might be urged to carry out an execution order, such as, that issued by Ayatollah Khomeini. A member of the Muslim Educational Trust said, "'The pronouncement does not have full authority in this country. This is where we live and will abide by its laws." The spokesman also pointed out that the Ayatollah is a member of the Shia sect, while the vast majority of Muslims are Sunni and do not accept the Ayatollah as an infallible authority.
The chancellor of Muslim Educational Services said that "Mr. Rushdie's offense was on a level with high treason for which the death sentence still applied in [the U.K.] 'We would point out that this was the penalty in Islamic law which applied in Mr. Rushdie's case but we would not say, Go and do it."'
The Rushdie incident has increased internal and external pressures on the British government to resist including Muslim schools in its aid-to-religious-schools policy. Some members of Parliament are also seeking to regulate the new "opt out" policy to prevent extremist groups from taking over local schools or to forbid schools "to teach the kind of thing the Ayatollah Khomeini is preaching." Consequently, the British Government is now in the unenviable position of barring aid to all Muslim schools ( and being accused of unfairness and discrimination) or deciding which schools can be safely supported and which cannot. Who is to decide? How?
The Rushdie affair has now raised questions about the general wisdom of government aid to religious schools. As Andrew Rowe, a Conservative member of Parliament, quoted to the TES, "The existence of {government-aided} schools which present doctrinal material, including Roman Catholic and Anglican schools, was probably a mistake ... 'I now think we are paying a heavy price for sectarian schools."'
The price would be even heavier in the U.S., where once the doors are open to public aid for religious and private schools, all sects would have to be treated equally no matter what they taught children. The public should not be asked to support schools that do not accept the shared values of our society, and only public schools can be relied on in the long run to do this. The dispute in the U.K. shows the great wisdom of our Founding Fathers in keeping church and state separate.