A Free Society Should Have Educational Options

Here is a mental exercise an education scholar once gave an audience: imagine you were sitting in a classroom somewhere in the world and knew nothing about the language, the students’ appearance, or anything else that would help you establish where you were. How would you know whether you were in a democratic nation or a totalitarian one? His answer: classroom practices and content should look different in a democratic nation.  

Let’s take the exercise a step further. Imagine you were dropped into a nation that valued diversity, freedom of thought and religion, and the rights of the individual. How would you expect its educational system to look? I suspect you’d find a wide variety of types of schools – Montessori and classical, STEM and the arts, religious and secular, and more. Further, students in those schools likely would be there by choice, not by residential assignment. In a society that embraces freedom, we could expect to see a system of education that maximizes educational pluralism and educational choice. 

In short, it’s not just what goes on inside a classroom that should look different in a democracy, but the very educational system itself that should look different. 

The current design of the American education system is out of step with these core values. Indeed, our public education system was not designed to promote pluralism or freedom at all. Just read the comments of proponents of common public schools. Their aims were clear. The goal was control and conformity to an ideal standard of what it means to be an American. At the 1888 National Baptist Educational Convention, for example, the Reverend O.P. Eaches remarked: “Who shall train for citizenship in these elements essential to the well-being of the Republic? I answer: the State.” Eaches was warning against public funds going to Catholic schools, which he argued would “give us mutilated men and women.” 

A year later, Congregationalists resolved at their National Council that the common schools were “the agency best calculated to unify and make homogeneous the various nationalities that make up our diverse population.” Similarly, the popular Christian periodical The Churchman argued in 1872 that it was “necessary in our government, in fact, in any government, to have instruction given to children which will tend to sustain and strengthen government; and we Americans calculate to give this instruction in schools over which the government shall have complete control.” 

Though much of the anti-Catholic rhetoric has died out, these same arguments have persisted throughout our nation’s history, right up to today. In 1952, James Conant, then the president of Harvard University, warned the American Association of School Administrators: “The greater the proportion of our youth who attend independent schools, the greater the threat to our democratic unity.”

Recently, University of Cincinnati educational philosopher Sarah Stitzlein claimed that school choice policies are increasingly undermining democracy by removing authority from the public and placing it in the hands of a minority of people – parents. She writes: “Voucher programs hand over decision-making power solely to guardians of school-aged children, who compose less than a quarter of American adults.” By creating educational vouchers, “Communities lose the ability to determine what content schools should teach, which skills are necessary for our workforce, and the best ways to develop active citizens.”

Stitzlein, like many other public school advocates past and present, seems to think that we need public education to teach a free people how to think and act in a free, democratic nation; but students do not have to attend state-run schools to learn about their rights and responsibilities as citizens. As Father Virgil Blum wrote in his 1958 book, Freedom of Choice in Education: “Diversity in education is a necessary prerequisite for freedom of thought and freedom of inquiry; it makes possible the active exercise of those freedoms and those responsibilities that characterize a free society.”

Stitzlein and others would have us believe that publicly funded vouchers are inconsistent with democracy. This is simply not so. Just as democracy is consistent with freedom and pluralism, it is consistent with freedom of choice in education.