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Arguments are presented for extending diversity in education, with specific reference to the issue of religion, and taking the example of the USA. The arguments advanced also work for other liberal democracies that include immigrant societies and at least several religions, although they do not where religious identity is tied to national identities. The case is argued for religiously diverse public schools, and the growth and importance of the many parochial schools in the USA is acknowledged. The question of financing parochial schools is addressed. Three ways are discussed as a means of extending diversity: cooperation between public and parochial schools (but without direct funding of parochial schools); the achievement of multiculturalism in public schools by fairly including religious students and perspectives; and the accommodation of religious beliefs in public schools by such means as offering alternative assignments.

This chapter concludes the examination of the school question by tracing the secularization of the concept of nonsectarianism. It discusses the ongoing Protestant-Catholic conflict over Bible reading and parochial school funding, the events surrounding the Blaine Amendment (an attempt to resolve the school question through constitutional amendment), and the subsequent decline in Bible reading in schools in the closing decades of the century. It ends with an examination of the leading Bible reading legal cases to demonstrate how judicial attitudes toward legal secularization had evolved by the end of the nineteenth century.

Evaluates existing Church–State decisions from the point of view of the interpretation of the First Amendment as a single mandate against the exercise of government jurisdiction in religion. It deals with Church property disputes, government assistance to parochial schools, and government promotion of religion. It also examines claims for exemption for the sake of conscience and how the Court has dealt with these. It shows how the Court can bring its decisions into harmony with an historical understanding of the First Amendment and remedy the disparity that currently exists between the Court's reasoning and the actual decisions it makes.

This chapter considers the funding side of the School Question up to the Civil War. Using the New York Free School Society as an example, it traces the development of the rule prohibiting the public funding of denominational and religious-based schooling. It discusses the first significant conflict over efforts to fund Catholic parochial schools that arose in New York between 1840 and 1842. It also discusses how the no-funding principle developed into a legal/constitutional rule. The chapter examines the development of express provisions in state constitutions prohibiting the funding of religious schools, and it concludes with an analysis of the impact of anti-Catholic nativism on the School Question.

Chapter 5 shows how, by the 1920s, public policies had forged a regulated educational marketplace in American cities. Catholic students frequently transferred between public and private schools. Effectively managing these shifts in school attendance required public officials to establish the standards, rules, and procedures to facilitate parental choice between the two systems. Public regulations standardized the diffuse curriculum and teaching practices of public and private schools. Parents transferred their children from public to private schools with the understanding that the latter fit within the state’s minimal education standards, and that their choice would not result in their child suffering academic or professional harm. New regulations tied public and parochial school governance together in ways unthinkable during the nineteenth century. Catholic school administrators and parents largely embraced these new laws, viewing them as essential for raising the status of Catholic education.

Chapter 4 addresses the wave of compulsory attendance legislation, passed in the 1880s, that transformed the relationship between schools and the state. Laws requiring school attendance introduced new dilemmas for school administrators and parochial school authorities. If states required children to attend school, how would public officials define adequate schooling? Ultimately, public officials relied on private schools to achieve public ends, believing that their continued growth was key to limiting public expenditures and attracting Catholic votes. Local officials refused to enforce compulsory attendance laws that would close down Catholic schools and place undue burdens on already overcrowded public school classrooms. When politicians did venture to enact or enforce policies hostile to parochial schools, Catholics mobilized their political power against local and state incumbents, successfully defending private education. As a result of these close ties between public officials and Catholic schools, private schools continued to grow in the early twentieth century.

This chapter demonstrates how national parishes and their parochial schools were among the societal institutions that most effectively fostered the integration of European immigrants and their offspring. Attitudes of forced assimilation can lead to frustration and thwart newcomers' desire to integrate. Yet church congregations and organizations remain a refuge for many emigres and can help them and their children and grandchildren adapt to life in the United States. While across generations English language use and other influences of the U.S. milieu are inevitable, the relative success or failure of Latinos' incorporation into the U.S. Catholic Church enhances or inhibits that process. Within the Catholic fold itself, the progression from hospitality to homecoming remains a daunting challenge that many Hispanic ministry leaders concur has only begun to be addressed.

John Fitzpatrick was the third Roman Catholic bishop of Boston. A Boston native and the son of Irish immigrants, he attended public schools, including the prestigious Boston Latin School. He enjoyed acceptance by the best of Boston society but seemed to fear causing offense to the Yankees while serving his struggling Irish immigrant flock, many of whom came to America in the wake of the Potato Famine. Although he privately supported efforts by others in the diocese, such as Father McElroy and the Sisters of Notre Dame, to open parochial schools, he took no action himself to establish a system of parochial schools as an alternative to the Protestant-run public schools. As such, the development of Catholic schooling was neglected in Boston during these years.

This chapter traces the evolution of nonsectarian education, Bible reading in the schools, and the funding of religious schools in the years following the Blaine Amendment. It discusses the impact of the Blaine Amendment on state constitutional provisions prohibiting religious school funding and the gradual secularization of public education in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It concludes with an analysis of the early decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court on religious school funding and religious instruction in the public schools (1947–1963). It demonstrates that the Court's decisions built on legal principles that had developed during the nineteenth century.

In 1907, William Henry O’Connell, the Massachusetts-born son of Irish immigrants, was appointed bishop. He had huge churchly ambition and won designation as Cardinal Archbishop of Boston. However, his attempts to develop a complete parochial school system in the city met with limited success. This chapter explores the reasons for the discrepancy between O’Connell’s rhetoric and the reality. The major factors are the Irish community’s lack of a tradition of attending parochial schools, the small numbers of Catholics in Boston from ethnic groups that did support public schools, and the fact that most Boston Catholic parents and parish priests had always attended the public schools and emerged with their faith intact.

This chapter examines and analyzes the five-year journey of Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District (1993) from the federal district court in Tucson to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to the U.S. Supreme Court. William Bentley Ball, the Zobrests’ attorney, and John Richardson, the school district’s attorney, clashed over whether the Establishment Clause permitted any government aid to a Catholic school. Many religious and civil libertarian groups—but just one national deaf association—filed arguments to sway the court. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who wrote the majority decision favoring the Zobrests, misunderstood the complicated function of a sign language interpreter to permit what he regarded as incidental parochial school aid. Rehnquist maintained the aid was permissible because the plaintiffs and their deaf son were its main beneficiaries.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the Catholic Church enforced a hierarchical religious culture that emphasized the virtue of obedience of authority, rather than skepticism of it. In postwar New York City, parochial schools socialized students from an early age to respect religious, parental, and civic authority and to view the world as naturally hierarchical. This chapter examines the divergent views between the city's Jews and Catholics with regard to authority. It considers the dual themes underscoring Catholic education during the period: a concerted endorsement of social, political, and religious authority and an explicit correlation of morality and religion. It also discusses corporal punishment as the most extreme manifestation of the Catholic school system's overarching emphasis on discipline and social order.

Chapter thirty-five recounts Hodge’s time as Moderator of the General Assembly in 1846. While Moderator, the Assembly addressed the key issues of slavery and Presbyterian Parochial Schools. In 1847, as the outgoing moderator, Hodge preached on the need for a denominational Sustenation Fund.

Even though Cardinal O’Connell believed that Catholic schooling was the only adequate answer to the education of Catholic youth, he did not come close to fully implementing this conviction. Events in Boston largely took schooling out of O’Connell’s hands. By the 1910s, Irish Catholics had taken over the Boston public schools. Simultaneously, Irish politicians took over the city and a majority of Irish Catholics now controlled the Boston School Committee, appointing an Irish Catholic educator as the city’s school superintendent. By at least the 1920s, the public and parochial schools had taken giant steps toward one another in theory and practice under the leadership of the Catholics who presided over both systems. Though Cardinal O’Connell and his circle continued to preach the need for Catholic children to attend parochial schools, parents, most of whom had attended public schools themselves, knew that the public schools would not undermine their children’s faith.

The Boston-born son of Irish immigrants, Bishop John Williams concentrated his energies on building up the purely religious as well as the charitable activities of the Boston diocese during his forty-year reign. Despite his proclivity for Roman Catholic separateness, he never became an active advocate of parochial schools. His stance on the school question may have been determined by his failure to grasp the profound social changes that had taken place in his lifetime and his belief that Catholic families could remedy any deficiencies of the Protestant public schools. At the same time, a small network of local “schoolmen” pastors developed a nucleus of parochial schools. Ambitious Irishmen began emerging from the local wards as powerful Democratic Party politicians, even winning seats on the powerful School Committee and the mayoralty.

In the 1950s Mexicans moved into Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, which had thirteen mostly Slavic parishes. The ensuing ethnic succession challenges the expected narrative of “white flight.” Catholicism offered common ground: the desire to maintain parish structures explains European Americans’ willingness to live and worship with Mexican newcomers. Mexican Americans and immigrants faced slights in the pews and at parochial schools, but parishes transitioned from exclusively European American ethnic enclaves to shared congregations. After 1960 some priests added Spanish Masses and celebrated the Virgin of Guadalupe’s feast day, opening the way to Mexican religious devotion. Mexican laypeople, bolstered by Cursillo training, worked with those clergy who acknowledged their distinct needs and strengths. Together they made the parishes Mexican.

This and the following chapter track the experiments of reformers (mostly members of the Leadership Roundtable) as they improvise solutions to the financial, managerial, and human resource problems facing the church. The Roundtable's push to spread administrative best practices has inched forward, impeded more by lack of interest than outright opposition. The Roundtable has put considerable effort into gathering cross-denominational support for Catholic elementary and secondary schools. The program confronts political suspicions that public support in the form of vouchers or tax credits, which many Roundtable analysts are convinced are necessary to effect significant transformation, would violate constitutional principles about the separation of church and state. This obstacle has motivated some to concentrate on reinforcing the religious identity of the schools, in effect banking on the support of private philanthropists rather than public funding to keep them afloat.

This chapter shows that most white residents of Boston, and particularly most white parents of schoolchildren, were overwhelmingly antibusing in some way. Some fought the court orders in the ranks of ROAR or by acts of individual resistance. Some fled, putting their children in parochial schools or anywhere but in the Boston public schools. A few left the city. Many more during the first two years tried to give desegregation a chance by sending all or some of their children to the public schools. Hundreds of parents did more than just send their children to desegregated schools. Judge Garrity had provided that a Racial-Ethnic Parent Council be established in each school throughout the city, as well as a Citywide Parents' Advisory Council, formed entirely by parents.

This chapter contrasts the philosophies that governed language instruction when Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy were growing up. When McCarthy said that “every word” Hellman wrote was a lie, “including ‘and’ and ‘the’,” she provoked a fight about language itself. In a basic sense, their differences stem from the ways they learned languages as children. Language lessons in public and parochial schools shaped their worldviews, and the chapter tells the story of their formative years, and of how Americans have thought about childhood and language acquisition more broadly. In their work, Hellman and McCarthy often reflected on how to teach languages and on the instruction they received as children. Examining historical attitudes toward education also indicates how language lessons in America have been related to shifting ways of understanding the private lives and public responsibilities of teachers.