Aid to Church-Connected Schools?

Parochial and private schools have hard sledding nowadays, though all this century they have been increasing in number and in proportion of the nation’s pupils they educate. Tremendous local and state taxation to support public schools strike at their sources of tuition and endowment, while federal income tax diverts to Washington much money that once was spent privately or locally. Any direct federal grants to public schools, let alone parochial and private schools, now appear highly improbable. Propaganda for “federal aid” appeared as special pleading in most social studies textbooks for high schools, until recently; but in this year’s editions, these exhortations are absent or modified. The NEA, in fine, knows it cannot win federal subsidies at present, particularly since the case for such grants (fairly strong at the end of the Second World War) has grown weaker as hundreds of thousands of new classrooms have been built in recent years. And the NEA has made it clear, repeatedly, that the professional educationists would rather have no federal aid at all than have to divide subsidies with parochial schools.

Kirk

RK

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Russell Kirk

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Parochial and private schools have hard sledding nowadays, though all this century they have been increasing in number and in proportion of the nation’s pupils they educate. Tremendous local and state taxation to support public schools strike at their sources of tuition and endowment, while federal income tax diverts to Washington much money that once was spent privately or locally. Any direct federal grants to public schools, let alone parochial and private schools, now appear highly improbable. Propaganda for “federal aid” appeared as special pleading in most social studies textbooks for high schools, until recently; but in this year’s editions, these exhortations are absent or modified. The NEA, in fine, knows it cannot win federal subsidies at present, particularly since the case for such grants (fairly strong at the end of the Second World War) has grown weaker as hundreds of thousands of new classrooms have been built in recent years. And the NEA has made it clear, repeatedly, that the professional educationists would rather have no federal aid at all than have to divide subsidies with parochial schools.

Kirk