Whether Horace Mann in the nineteenth century or John Dewey in the twentieth, partisans of state-directed education have disparaged private schools, particularly Catholic parochial schools and, more recently, evangelical Protestant schools, for allegedly not socializing young people in democratic values. While that contention lacks empirical support, political scientists at the University of North Carolina, Duke, and Texas Christian have documented just the opposite, finding that fundamentalist Christian schools are "as successful as public schools in teaching the values necessary [for students] to assume the burdens of citizenship in a democratic society."
The three professors surveyed white tenth and twelfth graders that were enrolled in ten Christian high schools in a metropolitan area in the southwest United States. These schools-all but one with less than 150 students-were chosen because they taught biblical inerrancy, creationism, salvation by faith alone, the sinfulness of homosexual behavior, and that women should graciously submit to their husbands. For the public-school comparison sample, they chose a school district in the same metro area, where they surveyed white students in the tenth and twelfth grades who were not enrolled in special education classes.
At the tenth-grade level, the researchers found that students in the public schools scored higher on eight of the eleven educational objectives measures (particularly among what they call "classic liberal objectives" and "comprehensive liberal objectives"), while the fundamentalist students outperformed their public school peers in three (political knowledge and the "republican" virtues of volunteering and placing values ahead of individual success).
However, by twelfth grade, the fundamentalist students scored higher in seven of the eleven objectives. Not only did they significantly improve their scores on four of the five measures of "classical liberal values," but they also moved from significantly lower to significantly higher than their public school peers on two of those measures: support for democratic norms and in moral reasoning. The fundamentalist students also outperformed their public school peers in political tolerance, although the difference was not statistically significant. In the "comprehensive liberal objective" category that measured support for rights for gays and women and correcting inequality, these students scored, as they had in the tenth grade, significantly lower than their public-school peers, but the gap had narrowed.
These bivariate findings were supported by multivariate tests that controlled for father's education, family income, the number of books that students owned, student GPA, and church attendance. Given that the students in the fundamentalist schools reported higher levels of socioeconomic status, the researchers theorize that the dramatic improvements between tenth and twelfth grade students "may not be the product of the type of school, but of the type of student attending the school."
Nevertheless, these findings suggest that the American republic is threatened less by fundamentalist Christian schools, or the parents who patronize such schools, than by the politically correct crowd who foment fear over the mere existence of "sectarian" institutions.
