Former Attorney General William Barr scoffed at the idea that education can avoid religion, saying the former “inherently” touches on the latter.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Barr said people “have to come to grips with and acknowledge that … the whole educational enterprise … inherently deals with concerns of religion” and that religion cannot be avoided.
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“There’s this strange schizophrenia, where … people will … persuade themselves that education is technical skills or vocational training and that somehow, you can hermetically seal off education from moral and religious considerations,” Barr said. “On the other hand, the very same people, at other times, will recognize that education, by its very nature, involves moral questions and teaching of character and values and so forth.”
“The Left acknowledge that education does have that dimension,” he continued. “But they seem to argue that you can deal with those moral issues in a purely secular way and somehow keep religion out of it. We have to come to grips with and acknowledge that education, the whole educational enterprise, inherently deals with concerns of religion. You can’t avoid it. And because of the current ideology of those involved in public education, they are definitely indoctrinating children with secular ideas versus traditional religious belief.”
Barr’s comments built on a speech he gave Tuesday at the Education Law and Policy Conference jointly hosted by the Defense of Freedom Institute and the Federalist Society.
In his remarks to the conference, Barr noted that public education had a decidedly religious component for a significant portion of U.S. history but that efforts beginning in the 1960s sought to secularize public schooling by “trying to strip away every vestige of traditional religion from the schools.”
“This was secularization by subtraction, stripping away all vestiges of traditional religion,” Barr said in the speech. “But expunging religion does not result in religious neutrality. Instead, the net effect was to elevate the most aggressively secular viewpoints while suppressing any religious views. The problem is that public morality in the United States is still predicated on the Judeo-Christian worldview. If you take away the Judeo-Christian foundations of morality, you are left with a void. There is no belief system which explains to people why they have to behave or shouldn’t behave in a certain way.”
The education of children, he explained, is an interest of the state but is ultimately the responsibility of the parent.
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“The idea that the state has this general jurisdiction to indoctrinate children with what it thinks is best is wrong,” Barr told the Washington Examiner. “The state has to have a very specific, compelling interest to require that people be taught certain courses. They can require that people learn mathematics, but they can’t require that people learn socialism or be inculcated with socialist values … Parents ultimately have responsibility for the education of their children.”
