Symposium: Religious Education and the
Liberal State
By: James G. Dwyer
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.
Dwyer responds to these religious perspectives by revisiting his
call for certain non-negotiable educational norms to be articulated
and enforced by the state. He focuses his attention on the
absence of compelling justifications for allowing parents’
religiously shaped preferences to deprive children of the tools
necessary to develop their own autonomy. Emphasizing that his
approach does not call for transforming children into “creatures of
the state,” Dwyer recasts parental authority as a fiduciary
relationship akin to stewardship, rather than an absolutist
exercise of constitutionally protected power. At the boundaries,
parental authority is checked by state authority. The
objective, in Dwyer’s view, is not to produce generations of
state-approved, cookie-cutter children, but to ensure that children
have the opportunity to define and pursue their own conceptions of
the good.