The Court has been particularly vigilant in monitoring compliance with the Establishment Clause in elementary and secondary schools....Students in such institutions are impressionable and their attendance is involuntary....The State exerts great authority and coercive power through mandatory attendance requirements, and because of the students' emulation of teachers as role models and the children's susceptibility to peer pressure.
Which way should this cut when considering the Constitutionality of the Balanced Treatment act? Children who believe in Creation are also impressionable and their attendance at public schools is also involuntary. No? Isn't this exactly the purpose of the Balanced Treatment act, to provide more views and more evidence concerning the issue of human origins and then allow the children to make up their own minds about what to believe?
Now consider what Justice Kennedy says about children being exposed in school to ideas and messages they perceive as “distasteful or immoral or absurd” or even “offensive and irreligious." Quoting from my a work in progress of mine:
“To endure the speech of false ideas or offensive content and then to counter it is part of learning how to live in a pluralistic society, a society which insists upon open discourse towards the end of a tolerant citizenry. And tolerance presupposes some mutuality of obligation.” In other words, the remedy for students offended by ideas they are exposed to in public schools is not to censor the speech of their teachers and fellow students, but rather to have “confidence in [their] own ability to accept or reject [the] ideas" of others and to respond to what they believe to be false ideas with their own version of the truth.
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