Empower parents and families

There was once a day when the public schools were seen as crucial engines of democracy and incubators of civic character. In those days, most Christian parents in the United States understood public schools, funded with government monies taken from taxpayers, to be safe and trustworthy partners in the raising of children and in the shared project of shaping future citizens.

Public education for students, ranging from elementary grades through high school, became known as the common schools, and community after community joined the modern project. What started out as village and town schools became county school systems. States started to fund schools and establish standards, attempting to ensure some level of adequate educational quality throughout the state system.

These schools were seen as community projects and, even as America grew into a modern nation, the common schools were seen as central and essential to America’s future. This civic purpose became more and more visible as the schools transitioned with the nation into a modern society with modern challenges. In the big cities, the common schools helped waves of German, Irish, and Polish children, for example, to become “Americanized” together as a way of strengthening the nation. The school day began with the Pledge of Allegiance and usually with prayer. Parents trusted the schools because they bought into the common school as a civic project, and they generally knew the teachers and school leaders. They trusted those teachers and leaders with the hearts and minds of their children.

Today, the public school reality is light-years distant from that older common school project. The danger signs began appearing decades ago. Formative figures such as philosopher John Dewey, a signer of the Humanist Manifesto, saw the common schools as a way of separating children from the “religious prejudices” of their parents. But local control was a fortress of protection for many public school systems and lasted for a very long time. It lasted until it didn’t.

Three massive forces reshaped the public schools over the last five decades. First, the teacher education programs at most state colleges and universities came under the influence of progressivist and humanist conceptions of education. Second, the system of local control gave way to increased centralization and bureaucratic control, with the most threatening controls coming from the newly energized federal government. The third development was the rise of the teachers unions as they consolidated control over system after system. The teachers unions are driven by a radical political and ideological agenda that propels the entire public school system. If you doubt that, just take a look at the positions taken on social and moral issues over recent decades. Look at the control the teachers unions exercise over the Democratic Party. Look at the state legislators who cower in fear when the teachers unions threaten. Look at the massive influence of the liberal schools of education matched to the power of the political machines and the powers of government coercion.

Then take a good honest look at the worldview taught by and inculcated in public schools. While most of these trends started in progressivist school systems and were limited in their effect, those same progressivist ideas and concepts of education are now being forced even upon rural school systems in the American heartland. Even as some schools and county systems bravely fight against these trends, the progressivist public school establishment will win. They will not be satisfied until the revolution reaches your local school and defines the new reality.

Furthermore, public schools increasingly operate based on rules and “best practices” and standardized programs that combine educational failure with ideological capture. It’s a disaster. God bless those teachers, administrators, and school board members who fight against the tide, but the tide will win.

We increasingly see that the foundational problem is the government’s monopoly on education. This is not to argue that it is illegal to start a private or Christian school or to homeschool your children. It is to argue that when your tax monies are confiscated for a hideously expensive public school system that subverts your moral convictions and worldview, you have the right to look for a way to end that government monopoly.

Parental choice represents one powerful way to push back on the government monopoly. When vouchers or similar programs allow parental choice to cover at least some educational costs, the government monopoly is at least weakened—as parents and families are empowered. It was one thing to give the government an educational monopoly when the larger culture was unquestionably grounded in a common Christian morality. To do so now amounts to the subversion of families and the sacrifice of our children. Just look at how the LGBTQ revolution has reshaped the schools.

Christian parents need to understand what is at stake—and quickly. In Kentucky, voters will face an opportunity to push back on the government monopoly and progressivist energies by voting for Amendment 2, which simply allows for the state’s leaders to propose a system that, like Indiana’s Choice Scholarship Program, would empower parents and families. A vote against Amendment 2 is a vote to continue government monopoly control.

My own education, from first grade through high school graduation, was in the context of the public schools, but the public school reality I knew as a boy no longer exists. It’s time to face the facts. It’s time to break the monopoly and support families. It’s time to take a good look at where the teachers unions, schools of education at colleges and universities, and government bureaucrats want to take the schools—and take your children with them.