The Crimson Mailbox

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

I generally consider myself one of the less vociferous elements in the Catholie Church, but I find that the state of discussion brought forth by President Conant's objections to private education has failed to make clear what seems to me to be the crux of the Catholic position. That position is very simply that Catholics would rather not send their children to a full-time educational institution that does nothing to teach them the most important thing they have to learn. The religiously neutral school envisaged by the advocates of universal public education is an impossibility. To believe that citizenship can be taught without reference to religion is to believe that religion is unimportant to citizenship; with this Catholies cannot agree. Catholics are far from wishing to turn away, in school or elsewhere, from the constructive elements in the life they share with the rest of the community. They believe, however, that the virtues and disciplines necessary to leading that life cannot be imparted without reference to God.

Private education, in short, does not accentuate the divisions in our national life, it is responsive to them, and responsive in a manner essentially in keeping with the American tradition of peaceable pursuit of divergent paths. The universally inoffensive public school is an impossibility; the increasing trend toward more militant secularism on the part of others makes this more and more obvious. The most appropriate reaction to this inescapable fact, and the one most compatible with the effectiveness of the public school itself, is to encourage those who cannot accept the education desired by the majority to supply their own. The alternative is continual squabbling over the content of public education. R. E. Rodes, Jr. 3L.