Layaliza Soloveichik
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the unanimous decision in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925). That case concerned a new law in Oregon, the Compulsory Education Act, that required all children to attend public school, with few exceptions. The challenge to the law was mounted by Hill Military Academy, a military training school for boys between 5 and 21 years of age, and by the Society of Sisters, an organization founded in 1880 to provide to children between 8 and 16 secular and religious instruction according to the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Supreme Court unanimously held that this Oregon law “unreasonably interfere[d] with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control,” reasoning in part that a “child is not the mere creature of the state,” and rejected “any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.” Id. at 534-35.
On behalf of the Federal Bar Council Quarterly, I recently interviewed Archbishop of New York, Timothy Cardinal Dolan – who had been instrumental this past fall at the Forum on Faith in commemorating the centennial of this decision – to understand why this ruling, a forerunner of others, such as Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972), was so important to him.
A “Blessed Arrangement”
Cardinal Dolan began the interview by remarking that in his view, Pierce was not only about religious freedom, but also about a “blessed arrangement” in the United States, wherein the government provides schools that parents may choose to use, which they commonly do, and in that case, as he put it, “Hallelujah!,” but the other part of the arrangement is that if parents “want to educate outside government schools, that too it is to be celebrated and defended.” He pointed to the military training school in Pierce to make his point that parental choice in education was “not just about religious education” but also about supporting a “vibrant nongovernment system of education,” that includes all types of non-government schooling.
I was interested to learn from Cardinal Dolan that Catholic education, although existing in various forms in the eighteenth century, from Georgetown University to the Ursuline Academy in New Orleans, founded in 1727 – which coincidentally he had just visited right before our interview – really ramped up in the 1840s. At that time, the predominant primary schools were not government public schools as we know them today, Cardinal Dolan explained, but rather Protestant community-funded “common schools.” When Catholics started to immigrate in large numbers to the United States in the 1840s, the first archbishop of New York, John Hughes, opened a school for Catholic immigrants, and Cardinal Dolan added that soon every big city on the East Coast had a flourishing system of Catholic schools.
The reaction to these schools was sometimes ugly. Cardinal Dolan related that his own doctoral dissertation had concerned one Edwin O’Hara, a priest in Oregon in the 1920s who (among his many projects) led the fight against the Compulsory Education Act challenged in Pierce. He saw that law as a product of anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment then rife in Oregon, where the Ku Klux Klan was operating. Cardinal Dolan emphasized in our conversation, expanding his brief remarks at this fall’s Forum on Faith program, that he felt it was the fact that Father O’Hara had marshaled support outside the Catholic community, among tolerant citizens of Oregon, that led to the successful challenge to the Compulsory Education Act.
Other Potential Goals
Cardinal Dolan wondered if the Pierce centennial might give the impetus to focus on other potential goals. He explained that one major problem today in Catholic education is the “huge financial burden” arising from trying to provide the best education, paying commensurate wages, and supporting generous scholarships to ensure a broad reach. He envisioned a system where “parents have the ability not only to choose a school but also to have tax dollars follow them to the school that they choose,” and he hoped that the centennial might be an opportunity to think more about this topic.
Cardinal Dolan also observed that he “bristles” when, as the antithesis of “public schools,” he hears the phrase “private schools,” because that tends to connote “fancy blazers” or “better horses for polo,” whereas the religious schools in his purview, he explained, do not focus on being elitist. Instead, they are “mostly invested” in academic skills and in emphasizing virtue, and in being “a space where faith can be taught,” and that many forms of alternative education, including home schooling, are similar in that regard.
In talking about some of the most important issues confronting parents in Catholic communities today, Cardinal Dolan felt that the “formative influence” on children “no longer” seems to be “family or faith,” but instead is an “aggressively secular culture.” He returned to his emphasis on Pierce by explaining that one of the ways parents “have the best chance of executing their God-given responsibility of forming their children” is through their schooling, where children spend so much of the day. For that reason, “if our schools are hostile to religious values, we are in big trouble,” and that is the importance of maintaining schools where those values may be taught.
How best to educate their children is an absorbing topic for most parents. Pierce is about allowing parents the freedom to exercise that choice thoughtfully, a freedom that is the first responsibility of liberty.