Choosing to Remain Silent About the Dismantling of Urban Public Education
In his blog last week, the Rev. John H. Thomas, formerly General Minister and President of the United Church of Christ and now a professor and administrator at Chicago Theological Seminary, sharply challenges the choice of mainline Protestant churches to remain silent about the injustices of today’s raging attack on urban public education in America. “How is it,” he wonders, “that the growing privatization of one of this country’s most venerable public institutions, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of school children due to public school closures, inadequate public financing, alleged ‘turn around’ strategies, or the growth of charter networks, and now pervasive influence of private wealth through foundations controlled by money from places like Microsoft and Walmart has not awakened mainline churches to the plight and peril faced by public education?”
Rev. Thomas poses his challenge to the church: “…a foundational debate in this country over the role of the public in the education of our young people, the responsibility to defend democratic institutions like the public schools, and the influence of wealth in our common life, is taking place largely without the voice of the progressive mainline church. This relative silence may reflect the growing marginalization of the mainline church in the American religious landscape. It may also be part of the reason for that very marginalization.”
Why the silence? Rev. Thomas’s critique lists seven likely reasons for the silence of the churches. Even if you are not affiliated with a church, I believe Rev. Thomas’s theories may also speak to you, for he identifies a much broader dilemma that has come to pervade our increasingly unequal and segregated society. Can we extend our empathy to our neighbors across the jurisdictional borders of our suburbs—to other parts of our state—to cities all the way across the country?
Here (in shortened form) are Rev. Thomas’s theories about why we are not paying enoughChoosing to Remain Silent About the Dismantling of Urban Public Education | janresseger: