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1. The NCEA is an august body that has unsuccessfully argued for more than two centuries for state-aid for US Catholic schools.
   The way in which the separation of Church and State are configured in the US makes it impossible to change this arrangement from a conservative, calvinist rationale for school-provision, in which all manner of illiberal and anti-scientific educational modalities are taught to essentially bolster the rugged capitalist-individualist project. (Remember that religion and education in the US are allied to uphold an elected monarch, the flag and an assumed liberatory project, in much the same way as a state-centric education in China is employed to perpetuate the precise reverse).
   This dominant 'melting-pot' discourse in public education is contested, sometimes by liberal and 'critical' minorities, keen to expose various mythologies, such as Creation Science, as steadfastly committed to the fundamentalist US religiosity project. The best-known US educational philosopher, to have linked education with the democratic project, is/was Thomas Dewey.
   Extremely embarrassingly, the US Catholic Education project, as portrayed in this film-clip, paints its own US private-school take on the so-called successes of a Catholic education, e.g. no unions, poor work conditions, falling enrolments, and school closures everywhere, except where wealth and philanthropy evidently militate against a much more elevated and sophisticated philosophy of the Catholic purposes of schooling.
   These are primarily, as espoused by St John Carroll and St Frances Xavier Cabrini, to serve the poor ('first and foremost!') with various contributions in similar vein from others, such as Fr Theodore Hesberg.

   Posted By: Dr Michael Furtado

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