Don't make public schools a state church

Education, like religion, must be a matter of freedom of conscience.

from the October 25, 2007 edition

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Most recently, a small but rapidly growing number of parents, a majority of whom are conservative Christians, have chosen to educate their children at home. Holding to the proposition that parents have the primary right to direct the education of their offspring, a right affirmed by the Supreme Court several times since the landmark Pierce v. Society of Sisters decision of 1925, they are the most radical dissenters yet. Like earlier dissenters, most home-schooling families believe the public school system transmits an orthodoxy alien to their belief system. As a matter of conscience, they feel bound to provide an education congruent with their worldview. And like other dissenters from earlier state churches and the current functional equivalent, the public school system, these parents have had to pay taxes to support a government-privileged institution as well as the costs of the education they prefer, been occasionally harassed, and sometimes hauled into court.

Any government establishment, ecclesiastical or educational, breeds dissent. Unfortunately, dissenters have often been subjected to legal prosecution, unjust financial burdens, and sometimes outright persecution.

Such actions have often been justified as necessary for the "common good," while the "unorthodox" have been demonized as "divisive" or, in the case of 19th-century Catholic schools, "un-American." Today, home-schoolers are sometimes accused of being "selfish" or "undemocratic."

For those wanting a secular education for their children, as it currently exists in public schools, that is their choice and their right. Parents desiring a different kind of education should not have to pay twice as the price of liberty of conscience.

The role of government in a democracy should be to see that the public is educated, not to mandate, directly or indirectly through financial policies, one particular form of education. When the government privileges a specific set of propositions of knowledge and dispositions of value and belief, it has established the educational equivalent of a state church. Such an arrangement is just as incompatible with liberty of conscience, as were the established churches of America's early history.

Thomas C. Hunt is a professor of teacher education and fellow in the Center for Catholic Education at the University of Dayton. James C. Carper is a professor of social foundations of education at the University of South Carolina. Both are historians of American education. They recently wrote the book, "The Dissenting Tradition in American Education."

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