Wednesday, November 3, 1999
arizona daily star
Bush: Schools must teach right and wrong
The New York Times
GORHAM, N.H. - Texas Gov. George W. Bush said yesterday that schools should allow more religous expression, - that teachers should be freer to punish unruly students and that the government should more aggressively prosecute children who carry guns.
In his third extended speech on public education , Bush offered an army of proposals designed to ensure that classrooms are places of learning and discipline, not fear and disarray. But he dwelled longest and most deeply on a conservative complaint that students are not being taught fixed principles of right and wrong, that religion is in retreat and that sexual abstinence Is not being urged Bush, as contraception.
Strongly the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination aid he would try to changed all of that and would, for example, increase federal government's annual spending on char- education to $25 million from $8 million.
"I want to make the case for moral education," Bush said, adding that morality is not "a cafeteria of personal choices - with every choice equally king right and equally arbitrary, like picking a flavor of ice cream."
Bush said church groups should be encouraged and allowed to participate more freely in after-school programs and that students should not be prohibited from voluntary gestures of spiritual conviction.
"Religious groups have a right to meet before and after school," he said. "Students have a right to say grace before meals, read their Bibles, wear Stars of David and, crosses, and discuss religion with other willing students."
Education experts said that- while there were worthy recommendations in Bush's remarks, there were also vague, unrealistic expectations and manipulations of the truth that amounted to pandering.
Jack Jennings, director of the Center on Educational Policy, a nonpartisan advocacy group in Washington, D.C., questioned how schools were supposed to become the cultivators of children's character on top of all the other responsibilities that schools shoulder.
... They can't do everything," Jennings said.
Much of what Bush discussed yesterday involved issues beyond the reach of the presidency or federal government, and he made it clear that he was not advocating a greater federal role in public education.
Instead, it was more a reflection of the broad political themes he is pushing in his campaign.