The Obamas’ School Choice

The Obama family is looking at expensive, elite schools in Washington DC for their daughters. One is an old Quaker school; another is very informal as students refer to teachers by their first names; tuitions range above $20,000 yearly. Governmental and parochial schools are apparently not in the running.

One of the surest barometers of a family’s cultural values is the choice of a school. We have several distinctive school cultures in our society:
- Governmental schools differ according to neighborhood: affluent towns have solid academic programs; most urban schools are disasters. The common denominator is that God and traditional values (about family, sexuality and innocent life) are proscribed while a secular code of relativism and inclusion is rigidly enforced.
- Expensive, elite schools for the affluent elite.
- Home schooling for the traditionalist and otherwise eccentric counter-cultures.
- The Church’s parochial school system, now in dramatic decline.
The accommodation of the Catholic community to mainstream suburban culture could be measured by the decline of our parochial schools. Where I live in Jersey City, charter schools have introduced a welcome element of diversity and competition but have also hurt the parochial schools which receive neither tax monies nor tax relief. The decline of the religious orders contributes to the problem, but at a deeper level there is the loss of desire for these schools. Consider that our ancestors built this magnificent system when they were poor immigrants; they wanted it that badly as a way to preserve and pass on the faith.

And so we have the Obamas enacting the standard ritual of liberal Democrats:
- The elite exercise an educational choice that is systematically denied to the poor.
- Urban blacks remain enslaved to horrible governmental schools as they herald with hosannas the one who denies them choice and diversity in education.
- Billions of $ become available to bail out mega-institutions like the Big Three and the UAW; but a voucher or tax credit of a few thousand dollars to make choice available to a working family is offensive to the Teacher’s Unions.
- Allegiance is pledged to public mega-bureaucracies and the autonomous, imperial Self (“choice”) as war is waged on mediating, nurturing organisms like the parish school, the family, and faith-based social agencies.

The Democrat idea of choice is that which destroys the unborn and family integrity; not the one that empowers poor families with educational freedom. Meanwhile, the blacks enslaved in the inner cities and Catholics exiled in suburban Babylonia swoon and wax eloquently about the “Great New Hope.” They know not what they do.