Schrag (2001) says that a democratic theorist can justify setting aside a democratic decision about curriculum only if she can show that exposing future citizens to that curriculum would disable some or all of them from developing the capacity to fulfill their role as future citizens, and that Gutmann's argument does not come close to meeting that test
Challenge to Liberal theory.
In Schrag's second argument, he makes a case against William Galston, and Steven Macedo's liberal argument against teaching creationism in public schools. In William Galston's words, the core idea of liberalism is "that no citizen use state power to impose one's own way of life on others" (Schrag, 2001). Although liberalists have many different versions of liberalism, this statement seems to sum them all up. Galston draws a distinction in his essay between liberalist whom cultural diversity is the predominant value, and those for whom individual autonomy is. For those liberalist whom cultural diversity is the predominant value, Galston states that any liberal state will need to develop what he call "social rationality" (the kind of understanding needed to participate in the society, economy, or polity. To pursue this, Galston states "the state must intervene against forms of education that are systematically disenabling when judged against the norm") (Schrag, 2001). Schrag (2001) argues that yes it is possible for some institutions or schools to be "systematically disenabling", but in order for cultural diversity to mean anything, there is no reason to think that fundamentalist Christian schools would be disenabling in that sense. After all, adult fundamentalists are not known for their refusal to participate in politics or the economy. .
For liberals in which individual autonomy is the predominant value, Schrag (2001) says that if a child is to have individual autonomy, his education cannot remain exclusively secular, but rather include many different views.
