On the day after Labor Day [1997] Asheville's first ever public CHARTER school will open its doors. It is named the Francine Delaney New School For Children. Seven teachers and 98 students in grades K-5 have signed on.

With 35 such privately managed, publicly accountable charter schools about to open, the State of North Carolina recently mounted a series of regional training workshops with the theme, “Another Choice...Charter Public Schools.”

I went to the workshop held Friday July 11th [1997] at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. It was an admirably informative event, with virtually no audience. Founders of charter schools in Asheville, North Wilkesboro and Rocky Mount were on hand. They brought real charter schools to life and made us like them.

Like all public schools in the United States, the newfangled charter schools are neither churches nor synagogues, mosques or temples. Bluntly, they are not instruments of religion. In recent decades public school managers have, however, managed to alienate American parents because too many teachers refuse to discuss religion at all. Indeed, some critics say that government-run schools actively promote a counter-religion called  either secularism or secular humanism. But secularism is distinctly not the religion of most American parents. They therefore  are actively looking for schools which  reinforce values taught in the home and which do not drive wedges between children and parents.

Reinforcing values of the home is dead easy if you school your own offspring in your own home. If, furthermore, you are free to send your children to any school you please, then the odds are also great that you will find a private secular or private religious school whose administrators and teachers think along your lines. That is why the movement for states and localities to fund by vouchers all compulsory education wherever the secular basics are well taught is so strong. Empower parents, really empower them with hard cash, to choose where their children shall be educated (even at home), and you make them owners of schools.

Would traditional public schools survive real parental choice?  Survive parental empowerment via vouchers?  Many parents and taxpayers do want the current brand of public schools (admittedly a far cry from the legendary purely local entities of yesteryear) to survive and to flourish, and they expect that more choice, up to and including vouchers, will  motivate public school reform.

If, however, public school managers want their institutions to survive, one item on their agenda must be how better to present formal, organized religion. It is  hard to find sensible people advocating Christian mathematics or Jewish basketball or Buddhist engineering. When I add 6 and 7 and come up with 13, I  am not formally worshiping God or, per se, probing the mystery of being or showing “ultimate concern.” I can, most certainly, add that dimension to any secular activity if I want to, and this is encouraged in religious schools everywhere. But religion is only a part of life, not its totality. Plenty of people agree that getting things right with God is the most important reason for being alive. But not all of what is learned in school (even religious schools) need or should be formal religion.

Still, religion’s impact on human history is huge. Bigger than even driver’s education or sports. Religion provided  much of the impulse behind evangelization and colonization of the New World and is one reason why so many ground down Hindu untouchables converted to egalitarian Islam. Religion is part of the pyramids of Egypt, the cathedrals of Europe, the music of Bach, Palestrina, Mozart and Haydn. Religion drove the artistic work of Michelangelo and Dali. Religion is honored in the novels of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh and in the plays of Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot.  All such objective or “secular” facts and truths and many more about religion can and should be made known in public schools. Sensitively, of course. With nuance and understanding, you bet!  But with apologies to none. If the public schools will but do that seemingly small thing, then they will surely survive.

Back to the July 11th Charter School Workshop in Asheville . My notes record with pleasure an assurance given at 1:50 p.m.  by a moderately senior official of the NC Department of Public Instruction. Essentially what he laid down with firm authority is:

“Of course you can teach religion in a charter school, just as you can in any public school.  That is, you can teach about religion as a fact of history and life.  You just may not advocate it, inculcate it, attack it or propagate it.”

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for Asheville TRIBUNE