By: Robert K. Vischer
This symposium is premised on the belief that questions
surrounding religion and education in this country can best be
answered by straightforward engagement with the views on education
espoused by our various faith communities, and that these views are
presented at their most authentic through the lens offered by the
understanding and experience of the community’s own members. The
robust articulation of the various strands of religious education,
in turn, facilitates more meaningful exploration of modern
liberalism’s expectations. The exercise is not premised on the
presumed validity of liberal norms, but on the importance of
understanding the relationship between liberal and religious
educational norms.
Seen in this light, the essays in this symposium are best seen as
part of a broader conversation aimed at deepening our common
understanding of education’s aims. The conversation ideally will
multiply the points of connection across our red-blue divide, but
short of that, value is to be found in a richer, more nuanced
disagreement. Rather than talking at each other from afar in
language unfamiliar, often unrecognizable, the participants in this
symposium have brought their distinct worldviews to bear on a
single task: articulating—in a normative, aspirational sense—the
relationship between religious education and the liberal state.
The symposium centers on the work of James Dwyer, whose
skepticism toward a reflexive embrace of parental rights has opened
up new fronts in the debate over religion and education. Building
on a Rawlsian understanding of liberalism, Dwyer has constructed a
theoretical framework for the proposition that the state must take
a more aggressive role in protecting children’s well-being, and
that such well-being must embody certain universally applicable
ideals of human flourishing, regardless of the religious
convictions that may hold sway over child-rearing decisions in a
given family. Unlike many liberal theorists, Dwyer welcomes—indeed
demands—the widespread implementation of school vouchers, as he
recognizes their potential to improve the quality of the secular
education provided at the many religious schools that currently
lack adequate resources. Dwyer also sees the regulatory strings
accompanying vouchers as playing a valuable role in ensuring that
children are not precluded from meaningful self-development simply
by the accident of their birth into a family that rejects the
educational promises of modern liberalism.
Dwyer’s proposition, of course, has not been met with open arms
in all circles. Critics insist that Dwyer’s vision threatens to
elevate a distant, faceless state bureaucracy over the intimacy and
immediacy of parental love as the locus of child-rearing authority.
Others claim that Dwyer’s secularized conception of a child’s best
interests reflects an eviscerated understanding of the human
person, and that his argument that the healthy formation of
children is compromised in some religious traditions emanates from
a caricature of religious education. The symposium’s participants
now have the opportunity to supplement Dwyer’s portrayal of
liberalism’s expectations of religious education with their own
understandings of religion’s expectations of education.