This quote from one of the legal minds at the center of the Dutch debate sums up the situation nicely. Professor T.J. Buys said, "I believe that an unlimited right to found Private Schools is not enough to establish the Freedom of Education; that the artificial protection of State Schools — be it by extending tuition-free education to other than the needy, or through the provision of other advantages — makes Private Schools unviable and the granting of this right illusionary."
In other words, by only paying for secular schools, the government has created a de facto bar to true Freedom of Education.
In Holland, secular Public Schools are tuition-free, but so are religious Bijzonder (Private) Schools. Parents have the Freedom of Choice to send their children to any school they wish, be it Catholic, Protestant, secular, Muslim, anthroposophic, or Montessori. This is the Dutch solution to the quandary of the Schoolstrijd. The Dutch equated Freedom of Education with Freedom of Conscience and Freedom of Religion, and decided that the solution was not just the separation of Church and State, but also the separation of School and State. The same quandary exists in America. It just has not been expressed in those terms.
Q: What prompted you to write this book?
A: What struck me as I was reading up on the history of the Dutch Schoolstrijd for my textbook, was how much the Dutch nineteenth-century debates sounded like the discussions about school vouchers and school choice that I have been hearing here. Sometimes I felt as if I were to translate some of the Dutch rhetoric into English, and change the names of the Dutch politicians to the names of American politicians and the Dutch place names to American place names, that it would seem right at home in an American newspaper today.
To ignore history is to be doomed to repeat it. The lessons of the Dutch Schoolstrijd should be of interest to those on both sides of the school voucher debate, as they may help us avoid the mistakes that the Dutch made, and keep us from reinventing the wheel.
Histories of the Schoolstrijd, however, are only available in Dutch. The names of Dutch politicians whose speeches were translated for this volume are household names in Holland, but nobody has heard of them here. Streets and schools are named after them in Holland. The Dutch already had this debate, and we should be able to learn from it. I, therefore, decided to write this book to make an English-language overview of the history of the Schoolstrijd available to the American public. The lessons of the history of the Dutch Schoolstrijd point to alternative solutions to the issue of school vouchers and school choice that could be applied to the American debate.
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