We’re back from vacation and facing the consequences of the August 7th primary election. Missouri doesn’t allow early voting, but we voted absentee on July 23rd because we anticipated being in Wisconsin on election day. Among other votes I cast a vote against a Missouri ballot initiative hyped as the “prayer amendment” and am disappointed that it passed by an overwhelming margin.

Among those who voted for the amendment was Senator Claire McCaskill, who has attempted to deflect criticism of her vote by claiming that the amendment merely affirms what is already in the state constitution, cavalierly saying she is all for prayer and adding:

I hope everyone is praying for me, I’m going to need a lot of prayers between now and November. I’m not kidding.

McCaskill faces a popular conservative opponent in the general election, and she may need more than prayers if she is to survive that test of her popularity; but I very much wish she had not voted for this ballot initiative, which read as follows:

Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to ensure:
• That the right of Missouri citizens to express their religious beliefs shall not be infringed;
• That school children have the right to pray and acknowledge God voluntarily in their schools; and
• That all public schools shall display the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution

I wrote about this proposition in a recent post. It is (I think, intentionally) broad and vague. And I’m sure there will be orchestrated attempts in the Missouri public schools to establish religious exemptions from standard school assignments. Initially, I thought this amendment was just about Darwin, but I fear I was wrong. Here’s some language from the platform of the Texas Republican Party that explains why:

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

Years ago I attended a service club meeting where the speaker talked about the controversy that eventuated in Wisconsin v. Yoder, the United states Supreme Court Decision that allowed Amish children to finish their education at the eighth grade.

I had attended this service club meeting with a friend who was also my priest at the time. I said to him, “Why don’t we just let these harmless people do as they wish?” His answer surprised me. He said, “It depends on who you think is the citizen.” The cognitive dissonance between my question and my priest’s answer informs my thinking about matters of this sort to this day. The Amish won their case, as I then thought they should have done, but my thinking has changed. Back in the early nineteen seventies I wasn’t paying sufficient attention to what I have termed public reason in a recent post.

My thinking then was something like this: the Amish do no harm (at that time I had no idea how much good Anabapbists, Amish and Mennonites, do; I just thought of them as benign), and since they do no harm, why must we seek to control how they educate their chiildren? My priest had brought me up short by reminding me that all children in the United States of America have a certain birthright, which one could claim is the right to be educated for citizenship, as human individuals; and that this right supersedes all claims on their attention made by merely cultural factors, religion, parental authority, loyalty to a social class or ethnic group, etc. It’s the rock-bottom claim of American public education—that the truth will make you free. Additionally, this is the fundamental assumption of Brown v. Board of Education, that all children, equally, have an entitlement to learn. Justice Douglas made this point as part of his dissenting opinion in Wisconsin v. Yoder:

While the parents, absent dissent, normally speak for the entire family, the education of the child is a matter on which the child will often have decided views. He may want to be a pianist or an astronaut or an oceanographer. To do so he will have to break from the Amish tradition.
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It is the future of the students, not the future of the parents, that is imperiled by today’s decision. If a parent keeps his child out of school beyond the grade school, then the child will be forever barred from entry into the new and amazing world of diversity that we have today.

Unfortunately, we have extended (and still extend) this entitlement rather crudely, by generally requiring that all children attend school until the age of 16, and more recently with laws requiring bussing and other measures designed to promote equality of access. Still more recently we have added a crude (some would say mindless) emphasis on standardized testing to the enforcement mix in response to growing demands for school accountability (so called). Thus the entitlement to learn has morphed from a right that belonged to students as individuals into a cultural imperative enjoined upon schools and teachers that students must succeed in ways that are statistically measurable.

Still, the ideal of universal education is something Americans seemed more or less in agrement about over time, until fairly recently. What has changed is that public education is now widely regarded as part of a liberal establishment that has been partially undermined by postmodern academic critiques of science and evidence based thinking, particularly rhetorical critiques such as that of Stanley Fish, and that has come to be portrayed in popular culture as effete, elitist, and self-serving by creationists, opponents of global warming such as George Will, antifeminists, opponents of gay rights, religious fundamentalists, and others. This is a vast oversimplification, but I think it’s a fair claim that a now substantial backlash against the liberal establishment of the modern era is in full swing.

This backlash is not so much conservative as it is anti-liberal. Texas Republicans, and now the citizens of Missouri, however much they may look nostalgically towards parts of our history we would do well to forget (i. e. the Texas republic and the antebellum south), are now on the march against what Justice Douglas called “the new and amazing world of diversity that we have today,” using the language of individualism and the guarantees of the first amendment, as Paul Ryan frequently does, to deny legitimacy to the fundamental impulses behind those guarantees.