The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

Deuteronomy 6:4-9 stipulates the vital importance of parents in educating their children:  There is to be a formal structure where parents teach their children facts, ethical standards and doctrinal truth. Parents are also to model these virtues, values and standards before their children.  Parents are thus central in the moral and spiritual formation of their children.  Ideally today, parents, the church and the school should network together to accomplish this goal of moral and spiritual formation.  However, in 2024 moral and spiritual formation has been replaced by indoctrination and the pursuit of personal autonomy in much of public education.  As Christian parents take seriously their responsibility before God in educating their children, homeschooling and private school education are growing as viable options. Therefore, it is difficult to be optimistic about the future of public education in the US.  How did we get here?

First, a bit of history: The Northwest Ordinance of 1785 and the subsequent Land Ordinance organized the territory the United States gained by the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War.   Among other things, these acts organized the territories into townships and set aside one section in each township for a public school.  In the early decades of the new republic called the United States, it was understood that public schools would be a cooperative effort between the parents, the church and the school itself.  Indeed, well into the 19th century, schools were often held in the churches.  As the Industrial Revolution located factories in 19th century cities, many children did not go to a public school but worked in the new factories.  Therefore, the Sunday school was the only avenue for education open to many families.  Historian Timothy Larsen comments that “by the mid-19th century, Sunday school attendance was a near universal aspect of childhood.  Even parents who did not attend church themselves generally insisted that their children go to Sunday school.”  But as compulsory public education emerged, the church’s leading role in education came to an end.  The task of spiritual and moral formation now shifted completely to the parents and the church; public education was to play no significant role in this duty.

Historically in the US, public education has had a local emphasis:  Although the individual states often set certain standards, the local public school was funded by local property taxes, governed by locally elected school boards and generally reflected the values and practices of the local community.  But in post-World War II America, this began to change.  For example, with Elementary and Secondary School Act of 1965, the creation of the Department of Education in 1980 as a Cabinet level agency, and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the role of the federal government in public education became significant.  Today, the Federal government provides money, sets certain standards for achievement tests and is dominant in enforcing Title IX issues dealing with Civil Rights, and other issues relating to discrimination.  In short, public education is no longer simply a local issue of governance, finances or standardized testing.  Public education has become a controversial, polarizing and complex aspect of American civilization.

Public education in America in 2024 is in crisis—and has become a major political issue. Modern curriculums today, for example, give special emphasis to equity and progressive pedagogies, which are manifested “in new customs such as sharing gender pronouns, participating in identity-based affinity groups and adopting teaching materials that unsparingly discuss the role of racism in American society.” Therefore, both Democrats and Republicans are taking notice of all this.  As Bret Stephens correctly argues, “. . . it is dishonest to argue that [public education] is anything less than ideologically radical, intensely racialized and deliberately polarizing.”

Columnist Peggy Noonan notes that “Americans’ relationship with public schools changed during the [COVID] pandemic.  For the first time ever, on Zoom, parents overheard what is being taught, how, and what’s not taught, and they didn’t like what they heard.  The schools had been affected by, maybe captured by, woke cultural assumptions that had filtered down from higher-ed institutions and the education establishment.  The parents were home in the pandemic and not distracted.  They didn’t want their children taught harmful nonsense, especially at the expense of the basics.”  What parents observed via Zoom and the live-streaming of classes was that public education was no longer about teaching skills and communicating information necessary for success in life (e.g., mathematics, grammar, history as a framework for understanding the past, etc.); rather, public education is about political bias, hostility toward religion and sexual and racial indoctrination.

Philip Hamburger of the Columbia Law School goes so far as to claim that “The public school system, by design, pressures parents to substitute government education speech for their own.  Public education is a benefit tied to an unconstitutional condition. Parents get subsidized education on the condition that they accept government educational speech in lieu of home or private schooling . . . They are being pushed into accepting government speech for their children in place of their own.  Government requires parents to educate their children and offers education free of charge.  For most parents, the economic pressure to accept this educational speech in place of their own is nearly irresistible . . . Subjecting children to official political, racial, sexual and antireligious speech can be equally coercive.  And if public-school messages are so coercive against children, it is especially worrisome that parents are being pressured to adopt public educational speech for their own.”  Hence, for many parents, public education has become a vehicle for indoctrination, not the preparation for life.

Because of this crisis in public education and its absence in playing a significant role in moral and spiritual formation, the matter of parental rights has become a vital part of the discussion about K-12 education.  Joseph K. Griffith II, William Blackstone Professor of Law & Society at the Ashbrook Center and an assistant professor of political science at Ashland University, has written extensively on the subject of parental rights:  “By 2023, 22 states had implemented parental rights or curriculum transparency laws or executive orders, to varying results. In Maryland, Muslim and Christian parents sued their local school board for not allowing them to opt their elementary-aged kids out of mandatory LGBTQ story hours. In the state of Washington, the recent ‘Parental Rights initiative’—requiring public schools to release children’s medical records to their parents—is being challenged in the courts.  Meanwhile, homeschooling is now the fastest-growing form of education in the country. Once illegal in many states and associated with white, religious conservatives, it is increasingly ethnically, religiously, and politically diverse.”

How did we think about the potential tension between the right of parents to direct their children’s education and the role of the state and wider community in forming educated citizens?  Griffith offers a most helpful historical overview.

• “William Blackstone’s 1765 commentary on English common law is the seminal text on parental rights in the Anglo-American constitutional tradition. It begins not with the radical independence of autonomous adults but with parents’ intimate and enduring relationship with their children. The Creator of the universe, Blackstone wrote, has implanted in the heart of every mother and father a deep, familial love for their offspring that nothing can totally destroy. Parents present in their kids’ lives have a unique opportunity to know their children’s individual needs, proclivities, and capacities.  From this footing, Blackstone and his American counterparts in our country’s formative legal years struck a middle path between the absolute power of the state and the absolute power of parents, alternatives for which they found historical warnings in the legal codes of Sparta and Rome, respectively.”
• “Complicating Blackstone’s somewhat neat account of parental rights, however, every state in America funded common schools and passed a compulsory school attendance law between 1852 and 1918. In a political community where ‘We the People’ rule, it was argued, shouldn’t all parents be required to educate their children so that they may take on the responsibilities of citizenship when they grow up? As Schouler wrote, ‘So intimately is government concerned in the results of early training that it interferes, and justly, too, both to aid the parent in giving his children a good education, and in compelling that education.’  But then, don’t compulsory school attendance laws shift the responsibility of rearing children from parents to the state? Numerous state supreme courts resolved this tension by upholding the general authority of the state to form an educated citizenry while also protecting the right of parents to direct the particulars of their own children’s education. According to these decisions, states may set minimum educational standards, but parents have the flexibility to meet those standards in a variety of ways, both inside and outside of the classroom.”
• “This story culminates in the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision of Meyer v. Nebraska in 1923. In the aftermath of the Great War [World War I], the Nebraska legislature criminalized teaching foreign languages to children before the eighth grade in order to destroy ‘alien enemy sentiment’ and ‘Americanize’ the large German American population in the state. In response, Zion Lutheran School offered foreign language instruction during recess, which it argued was technically outside of regular school hours. Enraged, vandals shot out the school’s windows and burned all its German-language books.  However, at the behest of his students’ parents, Robert T. Meyer—a 42-year-old round-spectacled, mustached teacher at the school—persisted, teaching German from a book of biblical stories. He was fined a full month’s salary. Undeterred, he said that he had the responsibility to teach his students to practice “the religion of their fathers in the language of their fathers.  On appeal and in front of the Supreme Court, Meyer’s legal counsel declared that the case poses ‘one of the most important questions that have been presented for a generation’—namely, whether the state or the parent ‘has control over the education of his child.’  In a 7–2 decision, the Supreme Court struck down the law, ruling both that public education is of ‘supreme importance’ and also that a parent’s right to direct his or her children’s education is ‘essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.’ Echoing Blackstone’s thesis, the Meyer court held that, ‘corresponding to the right of control, it is the natural duty of the parent to give his children education suitable to their station in life.’”

Griffith concludes that “Today, in the United States, Christians can be thankful for our legal right to fulfill our sacred duty to educate our children according to the dictates of our consciences, whether at home or in public or private schools—a right unavailable to many Christians across the globe. Indeed, stories abound of Christian families from places like Cuba and Germany seeking refuge in America in order to educate their children as they see fit.  Of course, Blackstone’s framework, even modified for a democratic people, will not neatly resolve all disputes between parents and the state. It does not give parents the right to unilaterally dictate what is taught in public schools. But it does suggest that, since parents typically know and love their own kids, they ought to have the right to direct the particulars of their children’s education.”  Whether this will obtain well into the 21st century is open to debate.  As I mentioned earlier in this essay, it is difficult to be optimistic about public education in the United States.  We should therefore be thankful for the options still available of homeschooling and of privately funded Christian schools.

See Andy Olson, Christianity Today (November 2021), p. 7; Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, “School culture wars stirred up voters for a reason: Classrooms really did change” in the Washington Post (5 November 2021); Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal (6-7 November 2021); Bret Stephens in the New York Times (4 November 2021); Philip Hamburger in the Wall Street Journal (23-24 October 2021); and Joseph K. Griffith, “A Short History of Parental Rights” in www.christianitytoday.com (31 July 2024).