Michael W. McConnell on religion and educational choice

Michael W. McConnell is Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, a former federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, and a conservative scholar of Constitutional Law. He is also a supporter of school vouchers and choice. Here are his thoughts on the matter, as expressed in the 1991 University of Chicago Legal Forum:

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Despite insistent demands by minority groups, principally Catholics, but including Jews, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists, for equal funding for their free schools, the common school movement soon achieved a monopoly of public funding. Many states even adopted constitutional provisions barring state funding of religious schools, and a federal constitutional amendment to that effect was narrowly defeated in Congress. The opposition to particularistic private schools grew to the extent that, in the early twentieth century, some states passed laws forbidding the education of children in languages other than English and banning private schools altogether. These efforts were promptly overturned by the Supreme Court, on the ground that "[t]he fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only." (Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1925)
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The leading elementary and secondary school textbooks virtually neglect any mention of religious influences or ideas in history, ethics, or social studies. Thus, the "public values" inculcated by the public schools are not, in fact, the values held by the large majority of the American public, but the values held by a secular minority.
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It is not possible, practically or theoretically, for public schools to be "neutral" with respect to contentious questions of morality, politics, and religion. The more the school attempts to be evenhanded, the more it will appear to endorse a position of relativism, or worse, cynicism.
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No shifts in constitutional doctrine governing the conduct of the public schools can solve this problem, because it inheres in the nature of things. The Supreme Court can alter the character of public education, making it more religious or more secular, but it cannot make public education genuinely more pluralistic. A common school is a common school. That is its blessing and its curse.
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While fears of church-state constitutional problems are often cited by opponents of educational choice, those fears are groundless. Whatever may be the flaws in the educational choice idea, it should be debated on its merits and not rejected on spurious constitutional grounds. In fact, far from offending the First Amendment, an educational choice plan is much more consistent with the pluralistic vision of the First Amendment than is granting secular schools a monopoly of public funds.
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The common school movement now teaches our children, unintentionally, to be value-less, culture-less, root-less, and religion-less. It can no longer achieve its crowning purpose of providing a unifying moral culture in the face of our many differences.

Michael W. McConnell
--"Multiculturalism, Majoritarianism, and Educational Choice: What Does Our Constitutional Tradition Have to Say?," University of Chicago Legal Forum 1991.

(Ed. note: This post originally appeared on my general blog in June 2008.)

The case for reading good books

A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.
--Arthur Schopenhauer

Regular encounters with great thinkers and great ideas can give us perspective. They can remind us that our personal experiences, unique though they may be in the particulars, have much in common with the experience of other human beings throughout the world and across the centuries.

By reading, we can expand our understanding and our empathy, and we can begin to see that some experiences – the joy of love and sex, the fear of death, the struggle with belief – are universal. This realization helps to alleviate our loneliness and increase our sense of empathy and solidarity with distant individuals and communities.

Reading widely can also help us to distinguish between what is trivial and what matters. For instance, the descriptions of society gossip in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the description of the glamorous parties of the aristocracy in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and the descriptions of the emptiness of a wealth-obsessed life in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt or Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman all serve to educate our sense of what is important.

If you are serious about self-education, reading should become a regular, major part of your life. There are alternative ways of learning, and some would-be self-educators may find reading – especially reading difficult material – to be a frustrating experience. Others will simply prefer other methods. But America’s most highly-regarded schools, the best college-prep high schools and elite universities, usually place a premium on broad, deep, challenging reading. In addition, the vast majority of the great thinkers of history have shared a passion for and dedication to reading and writing. By reading the works of important writers past and present, anyone can take part in a conversation about human existence that has gone on for over two millenia.

But this often requires walking past the tables of flashy, attractive, hardcover, fresh-off-the-press bestsellers and into the more forbidding and intimidating sections of literature and philosophy. It requires the reading of the "Great Books" (or "classics") that have stood the test of decades and centuries. The authors of these books dealt with the very same problems and questions that the men and women of today face, and they brought a level of profound understanding to their subjects that most of the popular writers of our day can only hope to approximate.

What's more, the language, vocabulary, and concepts writers like Plato and Shakespeare used to discuss ideas profoundly shaped our understanding of those ideas; they shaped the way we think and talk about human life. When we think through an idea or express our feelings, we are usually acting within the parameters set by the imaginations of our greatest writers: we think in their terms without being aware of it, because in many cases they are what we know - their work changed the history of ideas and thereby changed the conceptual, cultural, and political world we inhabit.

Our media is filled with references to our “21st-century” society and its unique challenges: globalization, technology, progress, the Internet, nuclear arms, genetic manipulation - all of these, we are told, signify that we are part of a world fundamentally different than that of our ancestors.

But it turns out that people in every age have felt their generation to be different from all who came before. In War and Peace, Tolstoy addresses this view. People of “limited intelligence,” Tolstoy writes, “imagine that human characteristics change with the times.” But War and Peace, like Hamlet, Paradise Lost, the Iliad, and the Bible (among many others), continues to speak to modern readers precisely because the differences and changes in human life across societies, cultures, and generations are outweighed by the continuities, the common human experience.

Birth and death, fear and hope, friendship and loneliness, belief and mythmaking - these are present everywhere and at all times. It would be intellectually crippling, therefore, for someone who hopes to be learned or well-read to ignore the classics because they are “old.” Their themes are timeless. If a book is still being read twenty, fifty, five-hundred, or two thousand years after it first appeared, all of those generations of readers who kept it alive must have found some value in it.

I am a firm believer in the value of putting the classics at the core of an education, but I also think it would be a mistake to stop there. More and more diverse writers are putting their thoughts on paper than ever before, and a few of them are producing some excellent literature. I try to keep up with Poetry magazine, for example, and I thoroughly enjoy the contemporary poetry I find there. Last year, I was blown away by Per Petterson’s novel Out Stealing Horses, which I picked up after reading a glowing review of it in the New York Times. Contemporary novelist Jim Harrison, a native of my home state of Michigan, is able to speak to me more immediately and directly than Plato or Shakespeare can because he is writing about places that are very meaningful to me. Resources such as the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, Rain Taxi Review of Books, and The Second Pass are great places to find reviews of contemporary literature. At the end of the year, these and other reviewers often create lists of the “Books of the Year,” and these are worth reading.

In short, if it is wrong to advocate doing away with the traditional canon of Western literature for whatever reason - because it is underinclusive and "politically incorrect," or because contemporary students supposedly cannot connect with it - it is equally hubristic to argue or imply, as do some of the most fervent advocates of the "Great Books" (Mortimer J. Adler, Harold Bloom, etc.), that little of value has been written since the mid-20th century. We live in unusually fertile intellectual and artistic times. Again, it bears repeating: more people from more places and backgrounds are writing and publishing than ever before, and we have more access to their work than ever before.

Setting literature aside for a moment, it is clear that natural science and the social sciences require that we give a great deal of weight to contemporary materials. The discipline of international relations, despite its roots in the ancient writings of Thucydides, has only existed in its current form for less than a century. In the realms of math and science, it seems reasonable to learn about biology and mathematics from the most comprehensive and up-to-date textbooks rather than directly from Darwin and Newton. And, in my view, no one should consider himself or herself educated who is fully ignorant of contemporary history and the basic conditions of the modern world, and these are things that can only be learned by becoming a regular reader of or listener to high-quality news sources.

The bottom line, however, is that no matter what your interest, becoming a serious and disciplined reader is the surest path to educational growth. Your local library should have a copy of Mortimer J. Adler’s classic How to Read a Book and Clifton Fadiman’s The Lifetime Reading Plan, both of which contain detailed lists of “the classics” and make a strong case for focusing your reading on them. A website run by Robert Teeter at http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/greatbks.html is a fantastic resource: it contains the Adler and Fadiman lists along with many others, including non-Western canons.

Internet tools such as LibraryThing, Facebook (each profile has a "favorite books" section), and Amazon.com are good sources of recommendations, and countless syllabi from university courses covering every subject under the sun can be found by searching Google and various online syllabi databases. Subscribing to newspapers and journals in your areas of interest will give you access to current book reviews and advertisements.

And, finally, you should not be shy about soliciting book recommendations directly from readers you admire, as well as those who work with books and ideas for a living: journalists, librarians, booksellers, graduate students, professors, lawyers, teachers. The book that turns one person’s worldview upside down may hold little interest for the next person, but whatever your interests, by doing a bit of research you can easily find books from which you can learn a great deal.

A few of the things you can do in a great university

I believe that one way we can get more high schoolers interested in college is to give them more information about what college is and what possibilities it holds. The fact that they will probably make more money and have more career options if they go to college can only be one argument among others, and not necessarily the most important one. We should be giving students college marketing materials in 8th or 9th grade - and never mind the fretting about kids "growing up too fast" - in order to make the idea of college more real to them, and to help them understand that there is a relationship between the way they approach high school and what their future opportunities will be.

To that end, I offer an incomplete list of things that can be done in great universities. I believe that what we teach kids in high school should pave the way for them to have the opportunity to do the sort of things listed below.

Things you can do in a great university

-Spend a summer, semester, or year learning a language - any language - and living with a family in a country thousands of miles away. When you get home, the experience will have transformed you, and your knowledge of another language and culture will be something you carry with you for the rest of your life.

-Discuss some of the greatest books ever written with professors and graduate students who are devoting their lives to understanding these books.

-Take advanced courses in art, film, literature, or music, and never look at these in the same way again.

-Learn to do, and actually do, research in a field that interests you. In addition to learning things that others have figured out and written down for you to memorize, you'll be a participant - in labs and seminars - in the creation of knowledge.

-In the four summers before you graduate, travel, volunteer, read voraciously, or get internships doing important work that you will remember and learn something from. Don't get a "job" over the summer - get an experience and an education.

-Learn Chinese, Arabic, Ancient Greek, or Egyptian hieroglyphics. Take four years of classes in a language; when you are done, you may be able to read newspapers, letters, and literature in that language, and an entirely new world of people, communities, ideas, travel opportunities, and careers will be open to you.

-Develop your own voice and the voice of others by joining or starting a publication as a writer or editor, or hosting or participating in an art exhibition, play, or concert.

-Build your focus, physical capabilities, maturity, and self-discipline while making lifelong friends by participating on an athletic team; if the team is on the varsity level, you will also be able to travel and compete around the country. (Many club teams travel as well, of course).

-Increase your literacy and reading fluency as well as your ability to write persuasively by taking four years' worth of classes in the humanities and social sciences.

-Do independent study work with graduate students and professors who are brilliant people and experts in their field.

-Attend lectures by experts in every field, politicians, judges and lawyers, writers, and others.

-Discover the complexity and importance of politics, and learn to think beyond the headlines. Discover your political voice.

-Attend concerts, museums, and exhibitions that include work by some of the most talented artists and musicians in the world.

-Learn to create professional computer programs, websites, or documentary films.

-Have access to the resources of enormous research libraries and cutting-edge research technology.

-Surround yourself with some of the brightest and most creative people of your generation.

-Graduate and have the freedom to choose your career - including the most desirable careers in the world. Have access, through your alumni network, career center, skill set, and educational background, to practically any social or professional network in your field. Be a credible and desirable job applicant with economic opportunities around the country and the world.

-Enjoy four years of relative freedom - a time you can easily squander, if you wish to do so, or an opportunity, if you will seize it, to become an educated person. It can be four years of throwaway job-training or four years of stimulating and unforgettable intellectual experiences.

If students want to make the most of their school years in general and their college years in particular, they must take ownership of their education and elect to do what is difficult. The alternative is to take an easier, clearer, purely pre-professional path - a path that is all-too-often paved with banal classes and textbooks, and that often doesn't actually do much to prepare you for your first job (the pre-medical track is a significant exception). You can work toward entering a profession while getting a great education along the way.

On language learning textbooks

Over the years, I've accumulated a decent library of world language textbooks and readers. Even those I do not get around to studying usually yield some benefit - I can get a feel for the sound and structure of each language with only a few hours of reading, and such kernels of knowledge can often serve as bridges and conversation-starters with native speakers. And then there is the physical presence of the books: the diversity of the languages represented is a reminder of all the things I hope to study and places I hope to travel.

I have also learned something from the texts about the many ways foreign languages can be taught and how teaching methods have changed over time. The improvement in recording technologies has revolutionized language learning; it is difficult to imagine, but many earlier students of world languages had to study without ever hearing their target language spoken. Today, the primary (and, in my experience, most effective) method of instruction is to have the student listen to and memorize conversations carried on by native speakers in various contexts (the train station, the post office, the dinner table, etc.). Grammar is learned intuitively; one comes to understand the workings of the past tense by hearing a voice actor discuss his or her day at work. It’s a long way from the older methods, still used in the most widely disseminated Latin and Greek textbooks (Wheelock’s and Mastronarde’s), of memorizing paradigm after paradigm and carrying out drill after drill.

Language textbooks are invariably infused with knowledge of the cultures where the language is spoken. For instance, Latin is learned through readings about the orations of senators and the deeds of heroes and gods; Norwegian is learned by listening in on the conversation of tourists in Oslo who are admiring the sculptures in the Frognerparken; and Italian is learned through texts about the history of coffee or the many courses of an Italian dinner. Most dialogues in contemporary language textbooks have settings - some are universal, but many are specific to a particular time and place. It’s hard to imagine an elementary Russian textbook that does not teach the reader how to ask for directions to Red Square.

The experience of learning how to find one’s way around the Kremlin, and “asking” directions during the lulls on the audio track provided for that purpose, with soft voices and the sound of traffic in the background to add authenticity, is qualitatively different from the experience of reading about Red Square in a history book or travel guide. In secondhand accounts, the reader is one more step removed from the experience of physically being in Moscow. The language learner, however, can to some extent simulate that experience. And if one’s attitude when reading secondhand accounts of another place’s history and culture is one of looking upon a culture from “above,” one’s attitude as a language learner is much more humble. Even the cows of ancient Greece understand Attic Greek better than we ever will, someone once quipped. There is some truth to that. The student of languages is a student in the fullest sense of the word; his highest aspiration is to speak a language as well as a native speaker - any native speaker, regardless of age or station. He may believe, consciously or not, that there individuals in his home culture with whom he has nothing to discuss and from whom he has nothing to learn - but abroad he is stripped of that elitist attitude, because everyone reads, writes, and speaks better than him.

I continue to learn a lot and derive a great deal of pleasure from my library of language textbooks, and I’ve become a collector almost by accident; the collection is a byproduct of two of the things I love most: languages and books. By letting go of the dream of ever mastering all the languages represented in my collection, I have given myself a freer hand to purchase the old Russian text with “Printed in the Soviet Union” stamped in red ink on the frontispiece, and the grossly outdated handbook of Japanese grammar written to assist American servicepeople in the postwar occupation of Japan. Even if these are all but useless as instruments of language study, they serve a different purpose by providing that pleasure of owning something rare that is the province and privilege of the collector.