It would seem too obvious to mention that different colleges, different majors, are going to attract different students and produce different outcomes. Preston Cooper calculated the Return on Investment for 30,000 bachelor’s degrees. This may thrill you or not, but it’s a valuable tool, even if anyone’s personal experience doesn’t match it. When you’re about to invest a lot of time and money, at least have a working understanding of what to expect when you come out on the other end.
To the extent you can get it, you get to choose. Choose wisely.
But you don’t get the same choice when it comes to public education, when a child is in grades kindergarten through twelve. There are some choices available, but they are limited by cost and availability. For most, there is no choice. You send your kids off to public school and wish them well.
Public education in America has always attempted to homogenize and mold the identity of children. Since its largely nativist beginnings around 1840, public education has been valued for corralling most of the poor and middle class into institutions where their religious and ethnic differences could be ironed out in pursuit of common “American” values.
If America was to be a nation of immigrants, a melting pot, there was consensus that one of the purposes to public education was to teach students how to be good Americans. Who got to define what it meant to be a good American and what exactly that meant was another matter, but it was largely taken for granted that schools could be trusted to do right by our children, bring them together as a cohesive nation and educate them, both in the substantive academic issues and in the civic virtues needed to maintain a viable nation.
In the mornings, we pledged allegiance. Our founders were heroes and our nation stood for virtue to be spread around the world. We were proud to be Americans, no matter where our families came from. That’s what we were taught, so that’s what we believed. That’s changing.
The public school system weighs on parents. It burdens them not simply with poor teaching and discipline, but with political bias, hostility toward religion, and now even sexual and racial indoctrination. Schools often seek openly to shape the very identity of children. What can parents do about it?
In the past, there were forays into education that went astray. Schools and texts that were based in teaching religious beliefs, such as rejecting evolution, but most roundly criticized it and recognized that it wasn’t going to help to get you into medical school. It was, however, a harbinger of how an educational bureaucracy could manipulate a government mandate to its own advantage by seizing control of curriculum and twisting the minds of the young for their own purposes.
Education consists mostly in speech to and with children. Parents enjoy freedom of speech in educating their children, whether at home or through private schooling. That is the principle underlying Pierce, and it illuminates our current conundrum.
The public school system, by design, pressures parents to substitute government educational 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.
It’s obviously true that what teachers teach involves speech. And schools are run by government, and attendance at school is mandated by government. Parents can opt their students out, but that’s tricky and not always a possibility. Plus, it’s public school, a benefit for which they’re paying either way, so they should be able to take advantage of it. But it comes with a catch, that the education children will receive is the education the government, be it federal, state or your local school board, decides they should.
When government makes education compulsory and offers it free of charge, it crowds out parental freedom in educational speech. The poorer the parents, the more profound the pressure—and that is by design. Nativists intended to pressure poor and middle-class parents into substituting government educational speech for their own, and their unconstitutional project largely succeeded.
Most parents can’t afford to turn down public schooling. They therefore can’t adopt speech expressive of their own views in educating their children, whether by paying for a private school or dropping out of work to home-school. So they are constrained to adopt government educational speech in place of their own, in violation of the First Amendment.
The argument that compulsory public education is an unconstitutional project has some rational appeal. Parents can’t control what teachers tell their children in the classroom, both as a practical matter (each parents could want the lesson expressed somewhat differently, and a teacher obviously can’t teach the same thing 30 different ways to please the parent) and pedagogical matter, the curriculum for what students in public school should be taught being determined by people who know better.
It’s not that compulsory public education doesn’t have significant First Amendment implications. It does. It just doesn’t work well when they’re asserted, whether by parents (“I demand my child be taught that 2+2=5” and “God created heaven and earth in seven days and Darwin is the devil”) or teachers.
Bari Weiss gives a good rundown of what’s gone awry, blaming cowardice for not putting an end to it when it devolved into gross excess. The problem is that is the same rationale used by those who demand that education be reimagined to be woke, that no one had the guts to call out the educational bureaucracy that perpetuated exceptionalism and whitewashed slavery when training students to be “good, loyal Americans.”
But public schools serve a critical purpose in our society to provide an education, and are thus the building blocks for students, no matter how modest their beginnings, to climb above their parents’ status and make the most of themselves, and contribute their skills, maybe even brilliance, to society in the process. It’s not that there is no free speech, compelled speech, government infusion of ideology involved. There is and always has been. But it has become overt and, for many, wholly unacceptable to have one’s child come home from third grade believing that they are privileged or oppressed.
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.”
Schools do not fit within the paradigm of First Amendment well. By making them an ideological battleground, parents are constrained to challenge the shift from creating “loyal Americans” into dutiful ideological allies to the woke. That this could push public education into the courts would be a nightmare, as judges are neither parents nor pedagogues, and can only decide whose First Amendment rights prevail.
But if we don’t figure out a way to pull back from the edge, to reach consensus on what public students are to be taught without making them pawns in the culture war, it’s hard to see how they will be prepared to assume their responsibility as adults some day. Granted, malleable minds are a fertile opportunity for those seeking to reimagine American society, whether woke or biblical, but we still need engineers who can design bridges that won’t fall down. Or is it good enough that they fall down but kill everyone equitably?