Separation of church and school.

The Founding Fathers, looking back on an old world where religion and politics and been incestuously intertwined since the dawn of civilization, fought hard to get the principle of separation of church and state into the American Constitution, which has been much a model for liberal democracies since. The fact that our own politicians can't actually put it into practice these days - tell anyone you're a Buddhist, a Muslim, an atheist, or anything but a Christian and your political career in this country is dead - is sad, but at least the principal remains written in there and other countries now get to practice it.

What is not so cool is that a loophole or outright omission allows people to send their children to religious private schools. We pay tax money so our government can fund an education system from kindergarten through graduate studies and try very hard to see that the evil tentacles of religion don't sneak in (do kids still have to say "one nation under God" when they say the Pledge of Allegiance? Why do they have to say that thing at all? Isn't it a bit like the old films of Nazi Germany indoctrinating their children to the Nation via morning pledges to the swastika?). There are heated debates in backward areas like the Bible Belt and have been court cases in Kansas early in the 20th century and Pennsylvania early in the 21st over such contentious issues (only to religious morons) like evolution, but nevertheless science hasn't yet been brought to its knees in the public school system, nor has education in theology been instituted except as an elective study at the collegiate level, so things seem to be working out pretty well.

Except that religious adults can simply send their children to a religious school and not a public school. A child's mind is at stake, and yet in my free, local "family" newsletter (whatever that means) there appear to be dozens upon dozens of Christian academies, charters "for Christ," "Jesus-oriented education," as well as New Age and disproved, outmoded holistic hippy schools all masquerading as legitimate educational systems. This offends me. First of all, I seriously doubt the scientific method and the subjects of biological evolution and cosmology are being taught skillfully and fairly in schools like these when the School Police are not in town for an audit. In fact, I happen to know they are not because I attended a Lutheran school for a time, and was rebuked by my teacher for writing a paper about mysterious phenomena such as the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and ESP. No matter that the paper was skeptical about the existence of such things; the mere fact that it mentioned evolutionary mechanisms as possible explanations for some such phenomena was enough to get me called to the teacher's office and "corrected" in my thinking by a short sermon on Genesis. I didn't push the issue because I still got a good grade on the paper and wasn't as much of a troublemaker then as I am now.

The point is, kids, who are not born religious but may be surrounded by religious vermin where they live, cannot always look forward to their time at school as being an oasis of reason, a "flicker of candlelight in a demon-haunted world," to use Carl Sagan's phrase. Instead, many of these poor kids have to hear the same nonsense in class as they do at home and everywhere else they go, are severely discouraged from thinking rationally and encouraged by in-school Mass or Chapel to accept the doctrine of Faith, surely as nonsensical a philosophy as there can be, and must in their minds tie all these character-molding forces in with their ABCs and their arithmetic. This to me is just as insidious as allowing prayer in public schools or letting Presidents declare war on foreign nations because "God told him to do it," or any other such lunacy. It may be worse, in fact, because religion is being taught as fact by the same people who are also teaching them real facts like geography and spelling. How much harder must it be to reject only part of the message of these teachers while retaining the useful bits than it is to simply, say, not go to church or synagogue or mosque?

What happened to the idea of separation of religion and secular matters altogether, which after all is what the whole Constitutional fuss was about in the first place? It wasn't meant as a mere obstacle to be slalomed around by having a "wink-wink" political system where only Christians can realistically be elected to any form of higher office, and where our children can legally be taught, as long as the school is a private one, that Noah's Ark and a 6,000 year-old Earth are realities, while biological evolution and the Big Bang are hotly-debated "theories" (they aren't). Why don't ALL children have to attend rigidly secular public schools, and then if their parents want to send them for additional religious studies in the evening or on weekends, they can. Let's see how that colors children's opinion of religion, actually getting multiple viewpoints on the subject.

Most people would say, more than 200 years now from its founding, that the USA is a resounding success. I would strongly equivocate with that view. Churchill once said of democracy that it was the worst form of government "except every other which has been tried," and I tend to think of the USA in these terms as well. Yes, there are a lot of rotten places in the world one could live and living in America is for the most part nice and comfortable. But viewing it by the stricter measuring stick of tolerance toward racial, sexual, and religious/philosophical minorities, of having stuck to the letter and the spirit of secularism and personal freedom its founders imbued it with, of heeding their warnings against "foreign entanglements" rather than spread our disease of vacuous materialism all around the globe, I'd have to say that so far we're barely cutting it, trying to raise that "D" to a "C-" so that we can continue on without being held back a semester.

The ironic thing is that so many of the countries from which the original Americans freed themselves, and which then turned about and adopted similar constitutional democracies after their own populations saw how good an idea it was, are now much freer and more tolerant in many ways that the USA is. No country or union of countries will ever be perfect, but I'd give Western Europe a "C+/B-" right now on that same report card that we are so ashamed to bring home to our Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and the rest of their crew would, in my estimation, be quite alarmed by how America is being run, and perhaps not so unhappy with the way certain other, newer democracies have started out. Of course, freedom tends to unleash those most virulent forces in human nature - forces like greed, oppression, sloth - which can in turn destroy the very system that allowed them out of the human psyche. It remains to be seen whether a liberal democracy is a truly stable form of government, or whether all countries who go that route end up with the same kinds of problems that America has at around the same time in their development.

It seems like quite an intractable problem to me, personally. Hand power to the masses to allow them to decide what is best for themselves. But the masses don't know what's best for themselves as a whole, only individually, so they squabble over the power like 250 million monarchs instead of a handful, and the poor, the wrong-colored, those with unpopular beliefs, and the man who is unwilling to kill for his share still end up at the bottom of the heap, stoned by the masses rather than hanged by a king's court, but at the bottom nonetheless. Surely there must be a better way. A genetically-engineered endless series of benign dictators, anyone?