Voluntary segregation is still segregation

I noticed a piece in the Toronto Star last week that covered the popular hesitation to publicly fund religious schools for Jewish and Islamic students. Supporters of such funding point to state funding of Catholic Schools. Turns out that this just re-opens an old debate.

Which in turns reopens, for me, an old speculation of why anyone needs religious-based instruction six days a week in the first place. Is it so difficult to drill ten little commandments into someone? Don't steal, don't kill, don't lie, etc. How hard is that, really? Are parents really so insecure about their ability to provide the proper example to the next generations that they must outsource it to so-called professionals? Or are they afraid that they may (by genetic fluke or whatever) have unwittingly spawned a demon-seed sociopath that must be tamed with the threat of hellfire? (If so, teaching a fledgling sociopath to revere a genocidal, child-murdering, human-sacrifice-demanding Great Sociopath in the Sky is not particularly bright.)

Or is the insecurity purely cultural? Growing up surrounded by those from similar backgrounds is somehow a bulwark against becoming just another drone in a homogeneous capitalist wasteland? Granted, I'm watching it happen to my nephews, and it's not a pretty sight. But I can't see that imposing additional conformity by segregating them into an artificially-defined subset of their peers is the key to helping them develop their own identity.

And so I hope that the Canadians will have the good sense and political will to cut off the tap for the outdated tradition of funding Catholic schools. It's a revenant from a more bigoted era, and makes as much sense as paying reparations to the American descendants of African slaves. The evil men do lives after them, to be sure. Yet when the redress outlives the evil, it's time to give the whole thing a decent burial and channel those resources into righting present wrongs.