In “ Simple Justice ,” published today on the excellent Public Discourse website, Notre Dame’s Richard Garnett argues, persuasively to my mind, for public funding of schools outside the public school’s taxpayer-funded near-monopoly, a monopoly supported by the assumption that the public money we have for schooling are “public school resources, rather than public education resources.” This assumption is supported by an extreme (though politically mainstream) view of the separation of Church and state and practical arguments for the needs public schools being so great as to require denying any help to alternatives. As Garnett argues, the former (this is my paraphrase) offers to secular enterprises a constitutional blessing the Constitution doesn’t in fact give them and the latter is as a practical matter dubious, and in any case does not over-ride the requirements of justice.
