Religion, Schools, and Deja-vu

As expected, French lawmakers have worked out their differences on the bill to ban overtly religious clothing and accessories from public schools. The actual vote will take place next Tuesday, but it appears to be a done deal. Once enacted, Islamic headscarves, Jewish yarmulkes, Sikh turbans, and “large” Christian crosses will all be verboten in state classrooms. Small Christian crosses will still be permitted because, well, um…, because the legislature is overwhelmingly comprised of Christians or the descendants thereof. Vive la double-standard!

Most Frenchmen and –women are in favor of the bill because they believe that keeping the public schools forcibly secular will preserve social peace. These folks would do well to learn from the experiences of a country that suffered generations of conflict because of religious regulations on public schools. And that country is, uh: France.

For the better part of a century after the French Revolution (1789), the country was alternately ruled by republican revolutionaries, Catholic royalists, and the odd emperor. (Admit it: that whole hand in the shirt thing was pretty odd). Like many governments before them, all of the above tried to use the schools to shore up their regimes. For the republicans that meant yanking the Bible out of students’ hands, and for the royalists it meant jamming it down their throats. Lo and behold, this did not bring about social harmony.

One of the Big Lessons of the 2,500 year history of schooling is that compulsion, not diversity, is the key cause of education-related social unrest. Free education markets have consistently done a better job than monolithic government school systems of avoiding “school wars.” That’s because free markets have allowed parents to obtain the educational services they’ve wanted for their children without forcing their preferences on their neighbors.

Further reading:

A few years ago I summarized the international evidence on this point in an essay titled "Market Education and the Public Good." Steve Arons wrote a book covering the American perspective called Compelling Belief.