The Trouble With Government Schools

I’ve written frequently decrying what’s going on in government run schools—so-called “public” schools—across the country, especially the way they’ve been used to advance the Prog agenda to secularize American society. Indeed, I’ve also maintained that it’s precisely the loss of religious faith that has made Americans so vulnerable to the Prog agenda when pushed in various guises—such as the Covid Regime—that are supposedly in aid of goals that Progs place under the attractive headings of public safety or toleration.

Today Joy Pullman has a fine article at The Federalist that discusses many of these issues, and she does so—to a great extent—with reference to an article by noted Administrative Law scholar Philip Hamburger that appeared in the Friday edition of the WSJ:

Is the Public School System Constitutional?

Education consists mostly in speech, and parents have a right under the First Amendment to exercise authority over what their children hear.

Try following the link—I was able to get free access. YMMV.

For our purposes here I’ll simply quote a portion of Pullman’s article, dealing with the now little understood historical background of government run schools in America as well as the nub of Hamburger’s argument regarding the dubious constitutionality of our current system. The history and Hamburger’s arguments together are a good illustration of how Progressive initiatives consistently run amok with our way of life, are consistently at odds with the vision of the American Founding—in the long run for certain, but all too often even in the short run. These initiatives have consistently set America’s constitutional order at the start of a slippery slope.

Hamburger himself wrote his article with the current debates at the forefront of his mind—especially:

“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee for governor of Virginia, said in a Sept. 28 debate. The National School Boards Association seems to agree: In a Sept. 29 letter to President Biden, its leaders asked for federal intervention to stop “domestic terrorism and hate crimes” against public school officials. Attorney General Merrick Garland obliged, issuing an Oct. 4 memo directing law-enforcement agents and prosecutors to develop “strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”

Pullman’s article can be found here:

Columbia Law Professor Explains Why Public Schools Are Tearing America Apart

'[T]he schools remain a means by which some Americans force their beliefs on others,' Philip Hamburger writes. 'That’s why they are still a source of discord.'

Pullman begins her coverage of Hamburger’s arguments by noting that the roots of government run schools can be traced directly back to the Progressive Era in late 19th century America. The roots of that movement to have government take over education were far from neutral, as Pullman—following Hamburger—notes:

Whether parents or bureaucrats should control what kids learn. This has been at the crux of all the debates about public education going back to when Progressive Era do-gooders started American schools’ path towards nationalization.

Using Schools to Co-Opt Other People’s Kids

Columbia Law professor Philip Hamburger goes back to this history in a Friday Wall Street Journal essay explaining why public schools will remain a fierce culture war battleground until lawmakers make them release their grip on America’s kids. …

He notes that the steady transference of American K-12 education from private, mostly church-run schools to government agencies was planned to control what the next generation of voters believed. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, this manifested through the effort by the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment to convert Catholics by putting their kids in Protestant-ish public schools. That eventually turned into an effort by secularists to convert Christians of all kinds by banning Christianity from public schools. Both succeeded.

Here’s Hamburger himself:

The U.S. was founded in an era when almost all schooling was private and religious, …, the idea that public education is a central government interest was popularized by anti-Catholic nativists. Beginning in the mid-19th century, they elevated the public school as a key American institution in their campaign against Catholicism.

In their vision, public schools were essential for inculcating American principles so that children could become independent-minded citizens and thinking voters. The education reformer and politician Horace Mann said that without public schools, American politics would bend toward “those whom ignorance and imbecility have prepared to become slaves.”

The reality, of course, as we now see, is exactly the opposite. Our government run schools have—in increasingly explicit degrees—eschewed the very notion of education as most parents understand it. Instead, the goal is to produce compliant subjects of the Progressive state. Or, as they preferred to phrase it: American principles. Kind of like Obama’s favorite phrase: Who we are as Americans.

That sounds wholesome in the abstract. In practice, it meant that Catholics were mentally enslaved to their priests, and public education was necessary to get to the next generation, imbuing them with Protestant-style ideas so that when they reached adulthood, they would vote more like Protestants.

This goal of shaping future voters gave urgency to the government’s interest in public education. As today, the hope was to liberate children from their parents’ supposedly benighted views and thereby create a different sort of polity. ...

Is all this sounding terribly familiar? It should, because there’s a direct line from then to now. Hamburger cites the Supreme Court decision in the case of Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925). Various states, supported by the Ku Klux Klan (lookin’ at you, Oregon!) where attempting to force Catholic children into government run schools.

The inevitably homogenizing, even indoctrinating, effect of public schools confirms the danger of finding a compelling government interest in them. A 1904 nativist tract grimly declared that the public school is “a great paper mill, … we want the children of the state, of whatever nationality, color or religion, to pass through this great moral, intellectual and patriotic mill, or transforming process.”

... Far from being a compelling government interest, the project of pressing children into a majority or government mold is a path toward tyranny.

...

In their freedom, the 18th-century schools established a common culture. In contrast, public-school coercion has always stimulated division. It was long used to grind down the papalism of Catholic children into something more like Protestantism. Since then, there has been a shift in the beliefs that public schools seek to eradicate. But the schools remain a means by which some Americans force their beliefs on others. That’s why they are still a source of discord. The temptation to indoctrinate the children of others—to impose a common culture by coercion—is an obstacle to working out a genuine common culture.

Yes, coercion—as we see it so nakedly in the Covid Regime—is at the core of Progressivism.

Hamburger concludes by sketching out a legal approach for parents to follow. It requires a wrenching shift for many. Parents must put aside a fiction that they’ve been brought up to believe in: That “public” schools are the core of civic life in America, rather than the chosen instrument of ideological manipulation and oppression. There’s a seamless garment at play here:

There is no excuse for maintaining the nativist fiction that public schools are the glue that hold the nation together. They have become the focal point for all that is tearing the nation apart. However good some public schools may be, the system as a whole, being coercive, is a threat to our ability to find common ground. That is the opposite of a compelling government interest.

The public school system therefore is unconstitutional, at least as applied to parents who are pressured to abandon their own educational speech choices and instead adopt the government’s.

Parents should begin by asking judges to recognize—at least in declaratory judgments—that the current system is profoundly unconstitutional. Once that is clear, states will be obliged to figure out solutions. Some may choose to offer tax exemptions for dissenting parents; others may provide vouchers. Either way, states cannot deprive parents of their right to educational speech by pushing children into government schools.

Judges will be reluctant to vindicate the uncomfortable truth that education is mostly speech. Many have assimilated the nativist ideal that public education is a central and compelling government interest. As in 1925, however, the threat to parental speech has become unbearable.

The Pierce case in 1925 recognized the right of parents to educate their children in religious schools. What’s needed now is to extend that parental right so that parents can control the education in government run schools as well—as a First Amendment freedom of speech right.