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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 September 2018
There are those of us whose job seems always to be immediate problem-solving. We are like people frantically busy piling up rocks with the fleeting notion that perhaps they are building something. To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy by Peter Berger and Richard Neuhaus (American Enterprise Institute, 1977) offers a portrait in which resemblances can be seen between the haphazard rock pile and the city of good “mediating structures” there portrayed.
Approaching the subject as a lawyer, the question at once comes to mind: Do we need mediating structures (family, church, voluntary association, neighborhood, racial and ethnic subgroups) in a society governed by the American Constitution? If the “mediating structures“ are thought to be necessary to protect the individual from the state, is that not precisely the function of the Constitution?
* Education, of course, can take place in situations or in encounters that are not “schools” in the popular usage of that term.
** Some parents do undertake the job of educating their children in the home–a matter that involves constitutional and other consid�rations not relevant here.
* In Meek v. Pittenger, 421 U.S. 349 (1973), the trial record disclosed the testimony of a Lutheran children's psychologist who was hired by the state to provide psychological services in nonpublic (including Calholic) schools. Mis sworn testimony showed him a competent Professional who considered himself bound by the code of ethics of the American Psychological Association not to introduce religion into his services. In the face of the record six justices held that, once he crossed the threshold of the religious school, “the potential for [his] impermissible fostering of religion…is nonetheless present” (Id. at 371). The Court did not make it clear whether the Catholic school would beam Catholic notions at him or whether he would beam Lutheran notions at the children. The record showed that neither had happened. But the six justices were dead sure that one or both would.
** More recently, the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, which operates the second largest System of religious schools, has joined vigorously in the resistance.–The Editors