Cite as: 521 U. S. 203 (1997)
Souter, J., dissenting
today), it does nothing to undermine the sense of drawing a line between remedial teaching on and off premises. The off-premises teaching is arguably less likely to open the door to relieving religious schools of their responsibilities for secular subjects simply because these schools are less likely (and presumably legally unable) to dispense with those subjects from their curriculums or to make patently significant cutbacks in basic teaching within the schools to offset the outside instruction; if the aid is delivered outside of the schools, it is less likely to supplant some of what would otherwise go on inside them and to subsidize what remains. On top of that, the difference in the degree of reasonably perceptible endorsement is substantial. Sharing the teaching responsibilities within a school having religious objectives is far more likely to telegraph approval of the school's mission than keeping the State's distance would do. This is clear at every level. As the Court observed in Ball, "[t]he symbolism of a union between church and state [effected by placing the public school teachers into the religious schools] is most likely to influence children of tender years, whose experience is limited and whose beliefs consequently are the function of environment as much as of free and voluntary choice." 473 U. S., at 390. When, moreover, the aid goes overwhelmingly to one religious denomination, minimal contact between state and church is less likely to feed the resentment of other religions that would like access to public money for their own worthy projects.
In sum, if a line is to be drawn short of barring all state aid to religious schools for teaching standard subjects, the Aguilar-Ball line was a sensible one capable of principled adherence. It is no less sound, and no less necessary, today.
II
The Court today ignores this doctrine and claims that recent cases rejected the elemental assumptions underlying Aguilar and much of Ball. But the Court errs. Its holding
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