No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
JUSTICE IN EDUCATION AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 December 2014
Abstract
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2014
Footnotes
*
For comments on an earlier draft, I thank the other contributors to this volume. Thanks also to helpful comments and suggestions from Carmen Pavel and David Schmidtz, and an external reviewer.
References
1 Meira Levinson discusses a number of these in her recent book, No Citizen Left Behind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). For an account of inequalities based on race, see Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (New York, NY: Random House, 2006).
2 Greenawalt, Kent, Does God Belong in Public Schools? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).Google Scholar
3 Two authors who defend preferential treatment for religious values are Martha Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience: A Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2008) and Kent Greenwalt, Religion and the Constitution: Volume 2: Establishment and Fairness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). Those who reject this view include Brian Leiter, Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012) and Barry, Brian, Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
4 See for instance Harry Brighouse and Gina Schouten, “Redistributing Education among the Less Advantaged: A Problem for Principles of Justice,” this volume.
5 Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 85–107.
6 In this sense I side with those who favor an adequacy approach to justice in education. See for example, Satz, Deborah, “Equality, Adequacy, and Education for Citizenship,” Ethics 117, no. 4 (2007): 623–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 Koppleman, Andrew, Defending American Religious Neutrality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).Google Scholar
8 Lambert, Frank, Religion in American Politics: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).Google Scholar
9 Amanda Fairbanks, “At One Year Turmoil Persists at Arabic Themed School,” New York Times, June 20th (2008).
10 Kozol, The Shame of the Nation; Levinson, No Citizen Left Behind.
11 The relevant clauses are, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . . ” The United States Constitution: http://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_Am1.html.
12 Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972).
13 Kitzmiller v. Dover, 40 Case No. 04 (2005).
14 For a good overview of these developments, see Anderson, Elizabeth, “Equality,” in Estlund, David, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 40–57.Google Scholar
15 Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience, 141.
16 Justice Douglass wrote a partial dissent in which he expresses concerns about whether the Court is striking the right balance between parental authority and the educational interests of children.
17 Yoder, 4.
18 I thank a reviewer for a helpful suggestion on how to present this point.
19 Joel Feinberg, “The Child’s Right to an Open Future,” in William Aiken and Hugh LaFollette, eds. Whose Child? Children’s Rights, Parental Authority, and State Power (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), 124–53.
20 Okin, Susan Moller, “Mistresses of Their Own Destiny: Group Rights, Gender, and Realistic Rights of Exit,” Ethics 112, no. 2 (January 2002): 205–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
21 I consider some additional objections to Yoder in “A Democratic Equality Approach to Religious Exemptions,” Journal of Social Philosophy xlii, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 305–320.
22 For a good discussion of this view, see Rob Reich, “Equality, Adequacy and K–12 Education,” in Danielle S. Allen and Rob Reich, eds., Education, Justice and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 43–61.
23 For reasons convincingly presented by Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift, adequacy should not be presented as the sole basis for an account of justice in education. “Educational Equality versus Educational Adequacy: A Critique of Anderson and Satz,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2009): 117–28. My claim here is that adequacy can help address many of the issues that are central to this paper.
24 Providing an education that enhances the employment prospects is one of many aims of a public education. For a good discussion on why education policy should not be guided solely by concerns about the employment prospects of students, see Jennifer Morton, “Cultural Code-Switching: Straddling the Achievement Gap,” Journal of Political Philosophy (forthcoming).
25 Martha Nussbaum defends Yoder in Liberty of Conscience, 145.
26 Anderson, Elizabeth, “Fair Equality of Opportunity in Education: A Democratic Equality Approach,” Ethics 117 (2007): 595–622.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
27 Some ideas defended in this section are adapted from an unpublished coauthored paper by Bruce Glymour, Amy Lara, and Jon Mahoney, “Darwin and Democracy.”
28 Cited in Kitzmiller v. Dover, 1–2.
29 The Establishment Clause is one central part of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ” The United States Constitution, http://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_Am1.html.
30 Kitzmiller v. Dover, 3. The relevant portion of the Pennsylvania Constitution states: “no man can of right be compelled to attend, erect or support any place of worship or to maintain any ministry against his consent; no human authority can, in any case whatever, control or interfere with the rights of conscience, and no preference shall ever be given by law to any religious establishments or modes of worship.” Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, http://sites.state.pa.us/PA_Constitution.html.
31 Lemon v. Kurtzman, 304 U.S. 602 (1971), cited in Kent Greenawalt, Religion and the Constitution: Volume 2: Establishment and Fairness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 45.
32 Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987).
33 Expert testimony was provided by philosopher of science Robert Pennock, and geneticist Kenneth Miller, among others. Each made compelling arguments undercutting the claim that “intelligent design theory” is a scientific research program.
34 Kitzmiller v. Dover, 112.
35 Pennock, Robert, “Can’t Philosophers Tell The Difference Between Science And Religion? Demarcation Revisited,” Synthese 178 (2009): 177–206.Google Scholar
36 Sean Carroll, The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution (New York: Norton, 2007).
37 Kenneth Miller, Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul (New York: Viking, 2008), 214–15.
38 Ibid, 214.
39 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Mariner Books, 2008).
40 For an excellent discussion, see Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010).
41 Phillip Kitcher offers an excellent account of how value judgments intersect with scientific claims in the context of public policy, Science in a Democratic Society (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011). As Kitcher points out, the value judgments that matter to debates over public policies that are designed to be responsive to scientific evidence, include religious, political and cognitive values, such as the commitment to subjecting one’s claims about the origins of life to a public scrutiny by natural scientists, 58–62.
42 For a provocative defense of this claim see Bruce Glymour and Scott Tanona, “Communicating to Overcome Value-Based Resistance to Science: The Value of Framing,” in Jean Goodwin, ed. Between Scientists and Citizens (Ames, IA: GPSSA, 2012): 141–50.
43 Thanks to Harry Brighouse and Paul Weithman for helpful comments on this point.
44 Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2012).
45 Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow (New York: Farar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011).
46 Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt.
47 Thanks to Harry Brighouse and Paul Weithman for helpful comments on this point.
48 Koppleman, Defending American Religious Neutrality. Koppleman argues for the claim that the state should be neutral between religious values while also affirming the importance of religious values.
49 Nussbaum supports the legal decision in United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163 (1965), cited in Liberty of Conscience, 171–73. The Court ruled that although Seeger did not self-identify as religious, his moral and philosophical convictions against killing other human beings is consistent with the legal ideal of liberty of conscience expressed in American law.
50 Leiter, Why Tolerate Religion?
51 Barry, Culture and Equality.
52 In his words, “If there is a special reason to tolerate religion it has to be because there are features of religion that warrant toleration, and these features are either . . . features that all and only religious believes have . . . or . . . features that other beliefs have, or might have, but which in these other cases possession of the features would not warrant principled toleration.” Why Tolerate Religion, 26–27.
53 Ibid, 33–34.
54 Ibid, 34.
55 Ibid, 26–47.
56 Ibid, 52.
57 This is clear for instances in reviews of the book by Robert Merrihew Adams, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (Jan. 6th, 2013) and Susan Mendus, Political Theory 41, no. 5 (2013), 766–69.
58 Leiter, Why Tolerate Religion? 34.
59 St. Augustine, Enchiridion: On Faith, Hope, and Love, trans. J. B. Shaw (Washington, DC: Regenery Publishing, Inc., 1961), 8.
60 This is a point of disagreement between Leiter and Nussbaum. On Nussbaum’s view, government should endorse the value of religion by conferring appraisal respect. On Leiter’s view, government should tolerate but not endorse religious values in this way. Leiter defends the right view on this point.
61 Purported evidence that cannot be reconciled to methodological naturalism is not appropriate in science courses that are designed to meet reasonable adequacy standards.
62 Kitcher, Science in a Democratic Society; and Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt.
63 Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom.
64 Curren, Randall and Blokhuis, J. C., “The Prima Facie Case Against Home Schooling,” Public Affairs Quarterly 25, no. 1 (Jan. 2011): 1–19.Google Scholar
65 The landmark legal case here is San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1 (1973).
66 Title 1 is a designation used by the U.S. Department of Education for schools that have especially high numbers of students from low-income families. http://www2.ed.gov/programs/titleiparta/index.html.
67 Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom.
68 Brighouse, Harry, School Choice and Social Justice (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000), 112–13.Google Scholar
69 There are very good reasons to worry that school choice programs will further increase racial and class divisions within an educational system that fails to remedy inequalities. In their 2008 study, Mickelson et al. report that there are four reasons that help to explain why school choice programs do not enhance diversity, including racial diversity: 1) many choice programs are designed to provide education to selective student populations, such as the gifted or special-needs students; 2) choice programs formally and informally allow schools to select students, thereby including some youth while excluding others; 3) there is a scarcity of interdistrict choice options that could capture the diversity in larger metropolitan communities; and 4) parents exhibit preferences for schools with student bodies similar to their own backgrounds. School Choice and Segregation by Race, Class, and Achievement (2008), http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/school-choice-and-segregation-race-class-and-achievement.
70 I have learned the most on this topic from many conversations with Bruce Glymour, Amy Lara, and Scott Tanona.
71 For a good account of how educational opportunities are distributed unequally by race under the current “No Child Left Behind” programs, see Levinson’s No Citizen Left Behind.