I have not yet read Os Guinness’ The Case for Civility. However, some statements given in an interview with  byFaith Magazine are worthy of consideration:

I’m curious, how would you evaluate Christians’ involvement in American public education?

I think Christians are careless about public education because we forget where it came from and what it was intended to do. All we do is look at the crisis today, and then reject it and walk away. The public schools in America, if you read Thomas Jefferson or Horace Mann, were not just free universal education. They were free universal education that taught the American unum, the unity, the American first things. You had the unum that would balance the pluribus; a unity that would balance the diversity of social class and spiritual creed. The American motto of e pluribus unum is not just a motto; it’s your greatest achievement. If you lack civic education, that will break down. And that’s the tragedy of where America is today. So many Christians are right in saying the public schools are in a mess, but they’re wrong to callously walk away from them. They’re incredibly important in the way the American republic has been designed.

I think Christians should see a strong place for the public schools. And we should encourage Christian teachers who have a strong calling to go there. You know there are more Christians who are teachers in public schools in America than there are Christian missionaries from America. And yet many of [the teachers] are demoralized because everyone praises the Christian schools and attacks them as if they’re faithless for going to the public schools. We should appreciate both.

I agree with Guinness that we should not demonize teachers employed in public schools. I believe Educators possess a unique talent to nurture and develop others and it is right for them to pursue that calling.

What is unfortunate is that Mr. Guinness appears to accept the poor social theory that was pushed by some in the infancy of our democratic republic: that without a public institution of education, the citizen would have no way to learn how to be civil.  Our democratic republic would be in peril!  We would lose our unity!

The fallacy of this theory is evident: Our national unity arose out of colonies NONE of which had public education!

History reveals the truth: the argument for the civic necessity of public education was an expression of Enlightenment’s radical individualism and a cover-story for the radical hatred for all things authoritarian, especially sectarian doctrines.   Rather than promoting a public space in which those doctrines could have been debated and undergone reform, individuals who were unwilling to have their particular views (in the case of Jefferson: Deism and in Mann: Unitarianism) tested in public “marketplace of ideas,” instead sought to have them enshrined.  They therefore adopted an alarmist strategy that worked to shape educational institutions which sought to exclude a minority view, one the majority deemed dangerous to their own and their vision of America (in Jefferson’s case: anti-Protestantism, in Mann’s: anti-Calvinism, in future public education advocates, like Blaine: anti-Catholicism).

Let us not embrace the Myth of the Common School, Romanticizing the History of American Education.

Later, in the interview, Guinness says:

So, when I look at the present situation, I see two extremes: You’ve got what’s called the “sacred public square,” which is advocated by those who would like one religion to be preferred. At the other extreme you’ve got the “naked public square,” which is advocated by those who would like all religion cleansed from public life.

I would argue for a third vision: a “civil public square,” in which everyone of all faiths is free to engage in public life based on their faith. That’s freedom of conscience. But—and here’s a big but—within an agreed political framework of what is just and free for everyone. If it’s all right for a Christian, it’s all right for an atheist, a Mormon, a Muslim, a Scientologist … . The mark of a free society is that the smallest community and the least popular minority know that their rights are respected. Now that entails certain implications, like we persuade not coerce, that we respect the so-called three Rs: rights, responsibility, and respect. There’s huge confusion over all those things today. We need to get these back into American civic education.

You’ve also got three nurturing institutions in a free society: the family, the faith community, and the schools. The trouble in America is not only do we not have any civic education, but all three of those nurturing institutions have broken down. Families and faith communities are weak, and the schools are in crisis. So America’s in deep trouble, and it will take some doing to restore civic education and the habits of the heart. But we cannot defend freedom by law alone.

Mr. Guinness seems to contradict himself.  It is true that The Family and the Faith Community are institutions in which individuals can engage their faith.  But Public Education has never promoted an honest engagement with Faith (not in America, anyway. One must be mindfull of the Schoolstrijd). While Family and Faith Community are sectarian, Public Education in American has always been radically anti-sectarian.

As such, Education fails to be faithful to its creational ordinance.  It therefore cannot be nurturing.  What Mr. Guinness does not realize is that when the mission of education is primarily civic, it actually works not as a compliment to the family and faith communities, but against them.   The breakdown of Family and Faith Communities is in direct correlation to the expansion of the “civic” public educational institution.

This need not, however, be the case.    But perhaps nurturing is not the best way to evaluate institutions.  Why not, instead, ask if an institution is faithful and how best to love it?  We need not a Civic Faith to unify us, and we need not a Civic Education to teach us.  The reality is that the History of American Public Education is one of Institutionalized Incivility, and is need of Reform, down to the root.

PHOTO:  Fountain Square in Downtown Cincinnati Is a Public Square That Works for the City and Its People in a Myriad of Ways: Noontime Performance by the Elder High School Band, a Catholic School Celebrating Its 50th Anniversary 05/1973 from the U.S. Archives via Flickr.