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Calvinism Lite

Fresno Man Seeks Separation of School and Government

BY CHRISTOPHER ZEHNDER

On New Year's Eve, 1999, we met in a small Mexican restaurant in Pixley. Though made famous by the television series Green Acres, this San Joaquin Valley town might seem an unlikely place for a discussion on the nature of education. The farm town, surrounded by fields and almond groves, looked decayed and depressed; the restaurant, with its faded linoleum floors and yellowing walls, its two television sets assailing diners with soap operas and hourly updates of millennium celebrations from round the world (scenes of Paris, Berlin, and Pope John Paul punctuating "Days of Our Lives") was not conducive to our conversation.

Marshall Fritz chose Pixley, 40 miles north of Bakersfield, between my town, Tehachapi, and his city, Fresno, whence he has led a crusade against government controlled education. A big man with a prodigious capacity for conversation, Fritz held forth on his notion of education and his organization, the Separation of School and State Alliance. I left the restaurant five hours later with a packet stuffed with documents -- and a promise to continue the conversation by phone two days later.

The fundamental principles espoused by the Separation of School and State Alliance are found in the proclamation that Fritz asks supporters to sign. "Parents," says the proclamation, "have both the responsibility and the right to provide for an education for their children." State financed schools -- even those that are "well funded and staffed with talented, caring teachers -- cannot address the differing expectations parents hold for their children, and ... assumption by government of parents' financial responsibility and consequent undermining of their authority leads to weaker families and social decline." Further, since in government schools "the politically strongest factions inevitably use schools to shape attitudes and control the content of children's minds," and finally, since "it is clear that reform of state schooling will not solve the education crisis," therefore there must be an end to government compulsion in education funding, attendance, and content."

A radical statement? Well, according to Fritz's literature, the proclamation has been signed by Charles Rice, professor of law at Notre Dame University; Kimberly Hahn; William K. Kilpatrick, professor at Boston College and author of Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong; and Steven W. Mosher of the Population Research Institute in Fairfax, Virginia, among others. Fritz also has a letter, dated November 12, 1997, written by Father John A. Hardon, S.J., saying that "anyone who believes in a personal God and sees the devastation caused by state monopoly in education must conclude that separation of school and state is necessary for the very survival of religion in our country."

The notion that the government not control schools might seem unusual. It has long been thought axiomatic that an educated populace is necessary to a republic or a democracy -- an aspect of the common good. I asked Fritz about this, and developed the proposition -- since education is of the common good, should not government provide for it? Fritz, who is a Catholic, replied that such a question must be answered in the light of the Church's principle of subsidiarity, which holds that higher levels of social organization not usurp functions that can aptly be provided by lower levels. One must "give some evidence that government needs to be involved [in education]," said Fritz, "that the people seem incapable of doing the job without the coercive force of government behind them."

Fritz at first denied that education was a right. "I think that's a fake notion. It's a fake right," he said. However, when I pointed out that Pope John XXIII, in his encyclical Pacem in Terris, spoke of "a good general education" as a "natural right" of man, Fritz concurred. However, he noted "a distinction between having a right and it being government enforceable. Children may also have a right to love and tenderness," he said, "but that hardly says that the government should be having love and tenderness examinations of parents." Fritz noted that, as far as he knew, the Church has made no explicit statement that the government itself should provide education. The Church, he holds, says that society has a "secondary responsibility if the primarily responsible people, the parents, are unable to fulfill their obligation. But to the best of my knowledge, no one has made the statement that society equals political government."

The popular notion that, before government took over education in the United States, illiteracy rates were high arose, said Fritz, from "the pleadings of apologists of government schooling." Literacy rates, in fact, said Fritz, were high. "From the 1620s to the 1840s, in the Northern part of the United States, virtually all children were taught to read and cipher; many of them were also taught to write -- schools would deliberately teach children to read and not teach them to write. Roughly, before government took over schooling in a large way in the 1840s and 50s, what you had was literacy in the 90s in the non-slave states and in the 80s in the slave states -- that excludes slaves, which the government forbade to read! Though the definition of literacy is somewhat sketchy, the case can be made that we had a far more literate society prior to government take-over of education, than afterwards."

"It's a false part of the conventional wisdom that poor children could not go to school," said Fritz. "There were provisions throughout the United States, particularly in the non-slave states, for poor children to have access to schooling long before the government took over. America's black legend is that we needed the government to take over the schools so that we could have literacy and preserve the democracy. The truth is that we birthed the republic in the late 1700s, a full generation or more before the government took over the schools -- and now after six generations of government schools, there is a question whether we are going to be able to maintain the republic."

"The reasons," said Fritz, "why government took over schooling in the mid-19th century, are "difficult for historians to sort out. It would be easier to say what the motives of the people were who pushed for government schooling." From the late 18th century and into the early 19th century many, particularly in New England, abandoned conventional Calvinism for Unitarianism and Deism. "You had, especially in Massachusetts, an attempt to come up with 'Calvinism-lite' where you maintained the nice white church on Sunday morning, but you got rid of that awful God and original sin. The Unitarians were, in a sense, the secular humanists of the day. For maybe fifty years or more the Unitarians and the Deists said that we can get children together in school and teach them just the biblical values; what we believe in common, we teach in common; the sectarian beliefs we teach at home and in church." However, conventional Christians, said Fritz, demurred.

Matters changed in the 1830s, however, with the large in flux of Irish Catholic immigrants to the United States. Then a "deal was struck," said Fritz, between conventional Christians and the Unitarians. "In different language than this," said Fritz, "Horace Mann said, if we have a common school we can protestantize the Catholics, because we can get them in here to read the bible, but we won't have their priests and pope telling them what it means. As a cover story we'll just say were trying to be fair." This served the Unitarian common school proponents, said Fritz, because if what was taught was what Christians and Unitarians held in common, schools would abandon what was specifically Christian. In effect, then, the common schools would be de facto Unitarian schools.

While the Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Lutherans went on to found their own schools, the "low church" Protestant groups (including the Methodists and Baptists) went along with Mann's suggestions.

The anti-Catholic spirit of the time is represented by the Philadelphia Bible Riots of 1844. When, said Fritz, the archbishop of Philadelphia petitioned the school board to allow Catholic children to read the Douay version of Scripture instead of the King James (which was on the Index), the school board agreed. Several Protestant ministers in Philadelphia, however, "preached very vehemently against this, vehemently enough that they were able to raise a mob which went and burnt down a Catholic Church. Catholics responded by burning down a Protestant neighborhood, Kensington. In the ensuing melee, about 20 people were killed." And this was not all, said Fritz. "Children were beaten, flogged in Maine for refusing to read the King James Version. The textbooks that they were required to read in the government schools would refer to the Catholic Church as the whore of Babylon."

The silence of the government education system on its own origins, said Fritz, demonstrates "how you cannot get the truth from them." This is really the crux of his contention; having government set up schools is like have it "come up with newspapers, call them Truth, tax everybody so that they would be able to be provided free to everybody -- how many of us would believe what we read in that newspaper? Now what makes you think that when they have the children for 13 years they are more adept at telling the truth there?"

But historical questions aside, does not Fritz envision that the disestablishment of schools would result in making them simply the domain of the rich and middle classes, with the poor having no other recourse? "Quite the opposite," he said. "This is a key, even maybe the key. The poor taking back the genuine parental responsibility of providing an education for their children is a necessary condition to helping the poor get out of their spirit of poverty and their lack of hope. Once they've done that, we'll see poor children going to far better schools than they're going to today. If I for a second had a thought that this would be hard on the poor, I would immediately stop and rethink everything through, because I would know it was wrong."

Fritz does not support school vouchers or charter schools, which, he believes will allow government to co-opt private schools. He proposes schooling under a free market situation, which, he says, will give everyone, including the poor, "better schooling than we have today, and is going to cost from about half to a tenth of what the government is now paying for schooling." With the end of government control of schools, the 300 billion dollars the government currently spends on schools, said Fritz, will be returned to the people in the form of a tax cut. Because most of this money will go to the middle and upper classes, they will be able to afford paying for schooling costs that, at the low end, will be $500 to $600 a year, and the high end, $2,000 to $2,500 a year. Fritz envisions that it will take $60 million a year to pay for the tuitions of the upper classes, $40 billion to pay for the middle classes, and $30 billion for the lower classes.

"So, what you have is a need for raising 30 billion dollars for the poor to send their part of the population, 15 billion children, to school," said Fritz. "What you are going to see, I believe, sliding scale scholarships: for the orphan that's five years old, a hundred percent scholarship, and for some of the children of the working poor and the lower middle class, you're going to see 50 or a 40 percent scholarship -- that is, mom and dad are going to be expected to pay ten or $15 dollars a week per child, and they are going to be able to afford to do it. Yes, it will be a sacrifice, but the upshot is that the poor can pay ten billion of the thirty billion for school, and they might need as much as twenty billion in charity."

But will Americans donate the $20 billion a year of the $200 billion they will have after the tax cut and paying tuition for their own children? "One way to estimate that," said Fritz, "is to compare the amount of money Americans are already giving. They give well over $30 billion a year to colleges, and something like $175 billion a year to various churches and non-profits -- and that's before a $300 billion tax cut with a $200 billion net savings. So, while I fully expect them to pay most of that $200 billion on more delivered pizza and ski vacations to Colorado and other nice hedonistic indulgences, just as they do today, I have yet to meet the person who says he is looking forward to a society where we have an illiterate, unschooled underclass."

Though replete with theories about education in this country and plans to change it, does Fritz realistically think he can convince Americans in Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta -- and Pixley? "It's in God's hands," he replied. However, said Fritz, "it's conceivable that it can be done in less than a decade. If you ask everyone you talk to in airplanes, the people you stand next to in line at the supermarket, somebody who is filling his tank next to you at the gas station -- things I do literally hundreds of times per year -- you get a sense of the discontent with government schooling. About a quarter to a third of those I meet are ready to do it right now; about a sixth think it is a totally appalling idea, and about half ask legitimate questions. What we are sitting on here in America, and don't know it, is a disgust and distrust of government schools that's far deeper and more pervasive than the mainstream media and mainstream educators give credence to."

One may contact the Separation of School and State Alliance at: 4578 N. First #310, Fresno, CA 93726; phone, (559 292-1776; internet, www.SepSchool.org

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