It isn’t that the church schools are militant. It is the Righteous Right who see that they can get what they want for VOUCHERS and for CHARTER SCHOOLS by attacking the Florida Constitution. You see, at the time in the last quarter of the 19th Century when the Florida Constitution was written there was a fear of Catholicism and any support with public monies for Church Schools was seen as a violation of the separation of Church and State that is imbedded in the U.S. Constitution that was until recently considered to be inviolable and a sacred cow that was to be left alone.
But time marches on and the forces of Right Wing Religious Republicanism have won the day and here in Florida a Catholic Governor (brother to THE President elect) has decided that the time is right to try to redress old grievances. The oldest of these grievances is that Public Schools are alone in receiving aid for their continuance and prosperity. History teaches us that the Public Schools, almost as soon as they became popular and spread throughout the States, ran into the problem, NOT OF RELIGION so much, but the problem of segregation of schools into WHITE and BLACK institutions with the starvation of the BLACK schools and enhancing the WHITE schools being the general practice which goes on down to today.
For some reason, the hoards of children, scions of the huge numbers of immigrants pouring into this country were reluctantly the beneficiaries of good public schooling, particularly if they were white. All during the time of the developing of workable schooling practices there was the attempt for at least some of the money or time devoted to public schools to be given over to PAROCHIAL schools and their education. When public programs such as Head Start and Special Education classes were begun the wall between public schools and parochial schools were breached and classes in special programs were added to religious schools at public expense.
Now that Charter Schools are established (although reports are that they are not doing as well as expected), the Governor and Religiously oriented groups want to demolish the wall between public, private and parochial schools and education.
The reasoning is easy to see although the charge that discrimination of this kind is UNFAIR. The whole movement in this direction is to get GOD back into the classroom and get in the line of marchers across the country that is raising the Flag with the big CROSS on it as they go off to battle against the ungodly and the losers in the recent election. My conclusion is: Militant Church Schools – Poor Constitution. These anti-public school types read little history and know less.