INCLUDING US OUT.

Diversity and Distrust
Civic Education
in a Multicultural Society
Stephen Macedo
Harvard University Press, $45, 343 pp.

Catholic schools are often praised as models of educational excellence in the face of the violence, declining test scores, and bureaucratic incompetence of the public schools. Political philosopher Stephen Macedo sees things differently; he thinks Catholic schools are a threat to liberal democracy. His latest book also goads libertarians, fundamentalist advocates of school prayer, ACLU liberals, and multiculturalists. He is an equal-opportunity dissenter.

What's at stake in Macedo's work is nothing less than our understanding of liberalism itself. Against critics on the left and right, Macedo defends the role of public schools as inculcators of "liberal civic ideals." The relationship between American public education and "civic ideals" has, of course, a checkered past. Nineteenth-century common-school advocates like Horace Mann and Josiah Strong combined a desire for creating a liberal democratic citizenry with xenophobia, anti-Catholicism, and nativism. Macedo's avowedly revisionist history tries to disentangle "legitimate civic purposes" from the uglier passions of public-school proponents. That's fair enough. Unfortunately, a similar feel for historical complexity in characterizing Catholic views is absent. For example, "centuries of often quite effective opposition to the basic tenets of liberal democracy" on the part of the church may partly explain resistance to public schools, but the self-consciously Protestant, assimilationist overtones of common schools did little to allay Catholic fears.

In making his case for public schools that embody a strong civic agenda, Macedo champions "liberal public reason" and outlines certain ideal conditions--reasonableness, reciprocity, mutuality, tolerance--to which religious communities must subscribe in defending their values. If religious groups deserve the right not to be disproportionately and unfairly burdened by public-school curricula (the "enforced secularism" of which many today complain), they in turn must set forward their religious convictions in ways that subscribe to the tenets of liberal public reason. However, Macedo ignores how this "bargain" already stacks the deck on the side of a liberal public reason that many experience as oppressive. Indeed, ready declarations of the sovereignty of liberal public reason like Macedo's can help explain why religious groups often confront public life with what the author calls "prickly sensitivity."

Macedo stresses the role public schools can play in counteracting prejudice and the potentially repressive sway of families, churches, or other moral communities. He is dubious about Supreme Court decisions like Wisconsin v. Yoder that grant broad parental control of children's education. However, this focus on Old Order Amish, Christian fundamentalists, and Catholic opponents of public schooling yields a skewed sense of the problem. Religious communities are not the greatest threat to the sort of civic community Macedo rightly longs for. Gross disparities between suburban and urban public school systems, for example, have a much greater impact on the development of tolerance, mutual respect, or a sense of a common civic life. Tied to geographical districts (and locality to social class and race), public schools are often provincial and segregated environments that reinforce racial and class distinctions. If we truly want to foster habits of tolerance and mutuality among different groups, the case of wealthy parents pulling their children out of public institutions is at least as problematic as the obstinacy of religious fundamentalists. Moreover, as advocates of mandatory civil service and civic education suggest, there are more direct means of forging civic ideals than striving for the kind of "liberal" control over public school curricula Macedo advocates. Actual experience of, and interaction with, other peoples and cultures is crucial.

In short, there are better ways to advance "liberal public reason" and core liberal values than by further inhibiting the actions of parents and religious groups. Without denying for a moment the lamentable prejudice and narrow-mindedness of many Americans, it is important to step back and consider whether the tolerance, openness, and critical reflection Macedo emphasizes are sufficient. Tolerance, though essential, is only one side of the civic equation. Shouldn't schools also teach virtues like patriotism, loyalty, and respect for law and legitimate authority? These values are obviously vital for maintaining liberal democratic institutions, and are little encouraged by contemporary market society. Catholic or parochial schools may in fact do a better job of promoting such civic virtues. By assuming a necessary convergence between the values of public institutions and those of civil society, Macedo misses one of the paradoxes of democracy: ostensibly "illiberal" institutions like the family, church, and parochial schools may offer just the values that liberal democratic institutions themselves are incapable of providing. Perhaps the greatest irony of this work is that Macedo's "civic ideals" seem less "civic" and intended more to maximize the autonomy of private individuals.

Many self-identified liberals will also wonder if Macedo's "civic liberalism" and "liberal public reason" are really liberal at all. Neither ACLU liberals nor multiculturalists will readily concede that the public school ought to have any role whatsoever in inculcating something as potentially oppressive as "civic ideals," even the modest version outlined here. Others more amenable to community will complain that the author's prescriptions do not go far enough. Marginal cases like the Amish or Catholic and evangelical homeschoolers notwithstanding, the nation's more conspicuous problem is a secularism that denies any public standing for religion whatsoever. In advancing his robust version of "civic liberalism," Macedo fails to account adequately for the ways in which religion historically has been, and still is, a friend and wellspring of political liberty.

Richard Boyd is a graduate student in political philosophy at the University of Chicago.