Word: lekachman
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Dates: during 1959-1959
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Last week four experts grappled with the question in a new Fund for the Republic report. Religion and the Schools. What emerged was a topflight summary of familiar views, and a sharp breach among the experts. Against aid for parochial schools: the one agnostic, Economics Professor Robert Lekachman of Barnard College, and Rabbi Robert Gordis of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. For aid: Catholic Layman William Gorman, onetime associate director of the Institute for Philosophical Research, and the Rev. Dr. F. Ernest Johnson of the (Protestant) National Council of Churches of Christ...
...discussion concerned the basic question of what role religion should play in tax-supported schools. Nobody was entirely satisfied with religious "lessons" by secular teachers. Rabbi Gordis decried handing over the work of church and home to public schools, which might develop a "religion-by-rote." Agnostic Lekachman agreed: "I consider religion to be much too important in human history to see it reduced to a patriotic exercise in the classroom...
Then what of church schools that keep high academic standards and teach religion as well? Agnostic Lekachman warmly supported the right of churches to maintain them, and just as warmly opposed tax aid for them. The public school has "primacy" in a free society, he felt, because it is "an ally of social tolerance, class fluidity, and the open mind." It is the one agent that may postpone choices "until they can become the acts of adults rather than the reflexes of children . . . The public school is too valuable to encourage alternatives to it." With much of this Rabbi Gordis...