We’ve decided to have government run the schools. The education of young people is intimately tied into the transmission of values. This leads us to a serious conflict with the way we have chosen to order our society.

Some people will say that the schools shouldn’t teach values; that should be left for parents.  Unfortunately for that point of view, deciding not to teach values is itself a value choice. And people don’t usually hew to it; they want the school to teach their values, whatever those values are. State schools can teach the consensus values of their community without too much trouble - if there is a consensus set of values.

We have to recognize that people have a strong desire - and a right - to see their kids educated in the way they want them educated.  Larry Liberal wants his son to learn about tolerance and diversity; Connie Conservative wants her daughters to learn morality and individualism.  There’s not really a good compromise here; if their children go to the same school, someone (more likely everyone) is going to be unhappy.

We really only have two viable choices that I can see.  One choice is to voluntarily self-segregate - so that liberals live in one town, conservatives in another.  That mitigates the problem by making it easier for the schools to please the large majority of their constituents.  Liberals, out of Kansas; will the last conservatives and libertarians leaving New York turn out the lights, please.  Our family had a reasonably good experience in the public schools of a small mountain town in rural Colorado; there weren’t any liberals, atheists, or ACLUers around to complain that the kids celebrated Christmas and had Easter break.

The other choice is to completely convert to homeschooling and private schooling.  The government can still have a role in setting voluntary standards, providing curricula, and giving subsidy payments to parents who fall below a certain socioeconomic point.  Virtual academies - public curriculum and funding, but with parents teaching (and doing the values integration entirely independently) - are growing in popularity; that’s how we’re schooling our children.  I see downsides to this; some people will make bad choices about their kids’ schooling, for example, which imposes costs on the rest of us downstream when their kids graduate from the DeVry Institute of Poetry Studies and can’t hold a job.

But I think it’s a lot better than the alternative, which is a continuing failure in our schools to reinforce the value choices of families.