The late American philosopher Richard Rorty (d. 2007) in describing his assessment of the role of university professor wrote:  “When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures.  Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization.”  The re-education imperative is one that he, “like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.”  Rorty explains to the “fundamentalist” parents of his students:  “we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable.”  He helpfully explains that “I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.”

The sociologist Alvin Gouldner in his book The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class set forth a number of the historical developments that were decisive in the formation of the revolutionary intellectual class.  Among the factors is the process of secularization which de-sacralizes authority and enables challenges to theological traditions.  Another factor was the extension of non-church public schooling.  The colleges and universities in particular generate “dissent, deviance, and the cultivation of an authority-subverting culture of critical discourse.”  And the school teachers at all levels conceive and fulfill their tasks as representatives of (the abstract) society as a whole (whatever that is), thus distanced from and with no allegiance or obligation to the values of the parents of their students.  A related factor is the structure of the new educational system:  “increasingly insulated from the family system,” thereby situated to serve as “an important source of values among students divergent from those of their families.”  In both form and content (which are not so neatly divisible, by the way) the state educational enterprise has been leveraged to missionary ends, further undermining parental authority and replacing its formative function. 

Law Professor Samuel Levinson has with welcome candor revealed that it is not due to his sympathy for certain religious students that he prefers that public grade schools grant limited exemptions to those students with conscientious objections to portions of the curriculum.  Rather, such measures are calculated to mollify those religious students, thereby keeping them in the secularizing environment of the government school where they are likely to have their views transformed.  With just enough solicitude for such students’ interests, they may be convinced to stay put, and thus be “lured away from the views—some of them only foolish, others, alas, quite pernicious—of their parents.”     

To push these [Christian] students from the public schools . . . will assure that they will in fact be educated within institutions that are, from my perspective at least, far more limited, and indeed, “totalitarian” than anything likely to be found within a decent public school.  My desire to “lure” religious parents back to the public schools thus has at least a trace of the spider’s web about it.

And there’s more than a trace of irony in his assigning “totalitarian” levels as he plots means to manipulate the worldviews of children by coaxing them to remain in institutions designed for that very purpose.  Spider’s web, indeed.

The proselytizing purpose and effect of herding the kids into secular formative venues to ensure they don’t turn out like their parents is celebrated by Stephen Macedo.  “[W]e should accommodate dissenters when doing so helps draw them into the public moral order. . . .  Will the refusal to accommodate religious complaints about public schooling drive religious families out of public schools and into Christian schools?”  If that would be the result, “then we have a powerful pragmatic argument for accommodation.”  Macedo is refreshingly forthcoming about “the transformative ambitions of liberalism.”  Acknowledging that the children of “Fundamentalists” are future participatory citizens, he sees the importance of exercising leverage over their moral and intellectual development to deliver them from family influence and impose a new outlook.

If parents want their children always to be guided solely by sectarian religious teachings—both in politics and elsewhere—then their view of good citizenship is at odds with the liberal one. . . . We have good reason to hope that there will be fewer families raising such children in the future.

We should, therefore, preserve liberal institutions, practices, rituals, and norms that psychologically tax people unequally, for if that has the effect of turning people’s lives—including their most “private” beliefs—in directions that are congruent with and supportive of liberalism, thank goodness it does.

Thus does he insist that we “should not be concerned to make it equally easy for Fundamentalist Protestants and modernist Protestants to pass along their beliefs to their children.”  And he later concludes:  “The extinction of many of the communities that pose truly radical alternatives to liberal democratic political principles is to be welcomed.”  Of course, not only to be welcomed, but be an aim of our transformative liberal social order. 

The monopoly authority to centrally influence how young people understand the world is quite a prize.  As we have explored in past posts (see, e.g., here and here), the idea of the religious neutrality of secularism is a myth.  Secularism is a rival religion.  But the myth of its non-religious character secures its governing role in our system, due to the constitutional interpretation which hands civic control exclusively to the “non-religious.”  (It’s all in the categorizing, you see.)  From that position of authority it is uniquely empowered to fulfill its own Great Commission to go and make disciples.  Its control over the State Church of Education gives it a tremendous competitive advantage.

Indirect methods of censorship are often government officials’ most effective means of speech control.  Because such restraints on speech are not formally directed to interfering with the speaker’s message (only having the effect of doing so), it allows for both better public relations (“we aren’t intending to censor you”) and the resulting likelihood of diminished resistance from the affected speaker.

At the University of Michigan, the student group Students for Life hosted a public lecture by Dr. Alveda King (niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) in which she spoke in defense of preborn human life and against the scourge of abortion.  Because certain students were less than enthusiastic about Dr. King’s points of view, they announced in advance that they would appear at the event bearing messages of protest on their shirts.  The university Department of Public Safety determined that this presented grave safety concerns, and—notwithstanding the contrary wishes of Students for Life—assigned five or six police officers to the event, and billed the group over eight hundred dollars for their presence.

Now.  Conservative student groups on state university campuses are not known for being flush with cash.  For such groups to be billed hundreds of dollars to speak because their messages are not happily embraced by all hearers ensures they will have no (or significantly fewer) public presentations on campus, thereby depriving the community of their input, and the speakers themselves of effective means to address their peers.

Students for Life contacted ADF.  We then wrote to University of Michigan officials, explaining  that the Supreme Court has made clear that the government may not charge speakers for the security costs driven by listeners’ hostile response to that speech.  “Speech cannot be financially burdened, anymore than it can be punished or banned, simply because it might offend a hostile mob,” the Supreme Court has ruled.  Because the university’s security cost imposition depends on its “measure of the amount of hostility likely to be created by the speech based on its content,” the result is that “[t]hose wishing to express views unpopular with bottle throwers” are stuck with higher costs for speaking.  This is forbidden.

Furthermore, such a policy as UM applied to Students for Life contains no restraints on university officials arbitrarily imposing fee burdens in a way that encourages some views and discourages others.  That form of policy, enabling the disguise of viewpoint censorship, is emphatically disallowed under well-settled First Amendment case law.

The University of Michigan has responded favorably to ADF’s intervention, and agreed to cancel Student for Life’s outstanding invoice.  We commend the officials involved for this remedial turn, and trust that the policies at that institution will in the future conform to constitutional standards.

It is a reigning deceit in our national consciousness, a lie on which innumerable social and institutional practices and expectations are founded, that religion can and should be merely an optional component of individual private life.  This thesis further maintains that barricades can and must be erected to keep religion from influencing public policy in order that a fair and impartial government may be operated.  This narrative offers that the former, unfortunate day when religious allegiances governed the polity is behind us; we now operate from neutral principles of value shared across the ideological spectrum, uninfected by provincial religious tenets.  And we are told that a realm cleansed of religion is freed to be objective, scientific, and democratic, instead of subjective, dogmatic, and theocratic.  This is a definitional coup.  It is flatly wrong on all counts.

One of the principle errors in this project of defining lies in its analytical placement of religious beliefs as if they were ancillary to the basic views that we all uniformly share.  Or to employ a metaphor, the assertion is that religion is an optional side-dish available to supplement the universal main course:  some select that side-dish, some don’t.  This proposal is fundamentally mistaken, and serves to hide the fact that the theistic view of life which it marginalizes is precisely like any other competing view of life, in this respect:  such worldviews organize and set in place all other ideas, facts, and values.  There is no approach to life that eludes authoritative presuppositions about the nature of reality.  It is, for example, inevitable that the government is going to organize itself and take official positions based on some conception of moral precept, of its own authority and legitimacy, and so on.  And this process is made sensible only in terms of a certain network of premises about reality—i.e., a religion (theistic or not). 

The question, then, is simply:  which reality-defining standard will govern?  It is not whether a conception of life will be established in a privileged position in a polity.  Only which will enjoy the dominant and defining position.  Modern liberal societies obscure the partisan nature of this ordering process by deceptive naming conventions:   the excluded are called “religious,” and the ruling outlook is called “secular.”  The former is biased, the latter neutral.  Sure. 

Thus when the government through compulsory education laws takes children for 12 formative years and subjects them in government schools to a functionally atheistic, naturalistic education, imposing on them what the Supreme Court calls the “inculcat[ion of] fundamental values necessary to the maintenance of a democratic political system,” our enlightened class calls this neutral and eminently constitutional.  Secular catechizing is praiseworthy.  But when a rebellious legislature dares pass a law that throws a crumb allowing for one minute of silence at the beginning of the school day before the beginning of the “inculcation of fundamental values” (from which God is banished) in order to give students a fleeting opportunity to pray to the Deity-in-exile, this is condemned as unconstitutional state support of religion.  The requisite “neutrality” requires entire elimination of divine acknowledgment while young minds are being regimented. 

So the State may spend years—at taxpayer expense—giving children a comprehensive view of the world, explaining its (and their) meaning, intricacies, and operations, and foisting on them all the values ostensibly necessary for America to flourish (which usually requires a great deal of instruction on contraceptive methods), just so long as it does not suggest that God is necessary or relevant to anything that can be taught or learned. 

This principle is applied across the board.  Thus while we observe the government pursue social engineering through the omnipresent threat and application of force, and the redistribution of multiple billions of dollars, we are to take comfort in knowing that these efforts derive from a neutral outlook shared by all reasonable people, and are accomplished without any official reliance on the precepts of Christianity.  Thereby is liberty and scientific fairness maintained.  Indeed.

Please, love, let us do away with this fiction that the exclusion of Christian precept from government voice and mind constitutes “neutrality.”  Government policy is nothing other than instantiated value judgments.  The state necessarily must choose between competing visions of justice, of what is the appropriate design of community, and so forth, as it legislates and regulates through incentives and coercion.  There will always be a prevailing view of the good, which is itself derivative of a factional, comprehensive worldview of some sort.  James Madison in Federalist 51 mused, “What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” 

No realm of cultural endeavor or significance is immune from similar assessment. 

We either submit to God or replace Him with a rival.  The Position is never unfilled.  Authority is inescapable.  Neutrality is a myth. 

The design of an organizational system—like a university—matters a great deal.  It both reflects and perpetuates the outlook motivating its configuration.  Forms or structures are never neutral; they grow from and have embedded in them the concepts behind their design.  Henry G. Manne penned an essay in 1972 entitled “The Political Economy of Modern Universities,” in which he observes that the prevailing organizational scheme for operation of the modern university is the model of political systems.  It is highly bureaucratized, inflexible, and its design is an impediment to innovation or change.  He writes:

Since any new idea is potentially destabilizing, everyone presently satisfied with his condition opposes any change.  This is especially so if the innovator suggests that existing departments or individuals give up any resources in order to finance a new program.  Consequently, any new program must be supported by entirely new funds which will be given expressly for that purpose and not to the university at large.  This possibly explains the large number of so-called “institutes” in European schools and the increasing number in America.  It becomes nearly impossible in this system for a university to react to changes in market demand or new circumstances without wild and disruptive fights. 

This entire arrangement is bolstered by arguments about academic freedom, which is the American version of the pseudo-sovereignty enjoyed by European universities.  In either case, it is most often a claim for power without responsibility. 

 One last implication of this arrangement might be noted.  The people who survive and prosper in this system will tend to be those with the characteristics most adaptable to this environment.  That signifies a low level of innovation, and by indirection strong aversion to risk.  There is no reason to believe that people with these characteristics will not reflect them in their doctrinal views.  In other words, it would be highly surprising for a large population which has established its suitability for a bureaucratic, non-profit oriented, political environment to advocate market solutions to any problem. 

Thus it may be that the university world today naturally attracts people who inherently favor collectivist, statist, nonmarket attitudes.  The entire university world then becomes a massive device, heavily financed by taxpayers, for propagating a point of view which, while perhaps not illogical for those espousing it, excludes the fair consideration of any other doctrine.  The real costs of having non-profit educational institutions may, in this sense, be vastly greater than we have generally recognized. 

 Yet we are not without hope of repair.  The exponential growth in information technologies and the accompanying future of free, quality e-learning opportunities presaged by such models as Kahn Academy and MIT’s open courses, in conjunction with the revolt of families from the unaccountably high tuition costs and the looming bankruptcy of the public coffers on which our behemoth-budget educational institutions depend, will in time change dramatically the educational landscape.  Reality will overcome institutional friction and accomplish a significant reordering of higher education (and lower, too).

In the meanwhile, the institutional structures of learning will continue to facilitate the doctrines implicit and integrated in their organization.     

1.

Our contemporary educational protocols have their antecedents, and it is enlightening to survey contributing sources now gone from view.  One such figure from America-past with a pivotal and influential contribution to education theory and practice is Lester Frank Ward (1841-1913).  Never heard of him?  Sixty years ago, historian Henry Steele Commager identified him as a peer in the company of William James, John Dewey, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, formatively influencing twentieth-century America.  A review of his contribution allows us to better understand the authoritarian methods of pedagogy which we have become unfortunately familiar.

Ward was, among other things, a sociologist, and a pioneer in applying Darwinian evolutionary theory to the social sciences.  Ward championed the idea that man, rather than being a mere passive subject of evolution, could now actively control the evolutionary process and thereby engineer social progress.  Not surprisingly, Ward gave substantial attention to the enterprise of education, which he viewed as the “great panacea,” and “the universal remedy for political evils.”

Ward drew from evolutionary theory the idea that our environment essentially designs us.  Accordingly, if that environment could itself be carefully manipulated by man, he could thereby transform the persons subject to the formative influences of that environment.  In such way, and in the context of mass compulsory public education, human consciousness could be redesigned by the benevolent government at the controls.

Consider carefully his method.  Ward (in his Dynamic Sociology) defined education as “a systematic process for the manufacture of correct opinions.”  This manufacture is accomplished, he explains, by the “method of exclusion,” viz., the elimination of access to data upon which undesired opinions are constructed.  He explains:

since opinions are rigidly the products of the data previously furnished the mind, such opinions can not exist, [when] no data for them have ever been received.

While conceding that employing direct coercion to forbid opinions already formed is doomed to fail, Ward insisted that success in manufacturing right opinions is guaranteed by controlling the learning environment so that only that data upon which the preferred opinions may be formed is accessible.

[F]ew intellects can distinguish the chaff from the wheat, at least in youth, when the deepest impressions are made.  An artificial system for assorting impressions, for causing their systematic presentation, for precluding the introduction of false ones, and the drawing of erroneous inferences, is therefore absolutely necessary to the successful creation of progressive states of the human mind.

To those with experience with state educational institutions, all of this may ring eerily familiar.  Ward’s influence continues beyond his life, and even his memory.  Commager writes that Ward “inspired a whole generation of scholars and reformers to believe that it was possible to remake society along happier lines, and a new generation that did not know him worked with his tools and fought with his weapons.”  These adopted methods to shield students from exposure to any data that might allow them to achieve disfavored points of view.

Alan Bloom is less than enthusiastic about this sort of approach, which he calls “tyranny”:  “The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.”

2.

Even though our contemporary communicative milieu is less than the pristine and cordoned-off environment Ward preferred, his methods are fastidiously employed to great effect by influential institutions shaping the public mind.

One significant instantiation of this methodology attends the Supreme Court’s command that all compulsory, tax-funded education in government schools be conducted entirely on non-theistic terms.  The elimination of God as a consideration from all academic pursuits, for all of the formative years of a child’s education, constitutes a relentless (if implicit) indoctrination in God’s irrelevance to matters of civic participation and academic competence.  As Professor Michael McConnell put it, the schools’ “[s]tudious silence on a subject that parents may say touches all of life is an eloquent refutation.”

The same message is conveyed outside the classroom by the social, legal, and media conventions that impose “secular discourse” requirements, by which theological premises are defined as non-rational and publicly irrelevant.  Such systemic restrictions by the institutions that mediate reality to us are powerful in orienting the public mind, now denied use of or exposure to a theistic frame of reference.  Its plausibility thus evaporates.

This helps us understand why an advocate of hegemonic liberalism like Steven Macedo can be content even though American law does not directly outlaw all private religious speech and exercise.  He understands that the exclusion of theological reference from public bodies and civic discourse not only trains the broader community into safely agnostic mental habits, it also creates a social environment leading religious adherents themselves to gradually doubt the objective truth or public relevance of their marginalized beliefs—due to the persistent, subliminal argument embedded in dominant social practice.  Such a tamed religious community is no longer a threat to the liberal secular order.

The Supreme Court and many in our enlightened intellectual class call this regime “neutrality.”  Ward’s phrasing—“method of exclusion”—is preferable for its honesty.