This brief essay is the fifth in a series describing forms of legislation available to any state that considers adopting vouchers for private school tuition. The previous essays focused upon rules governing admission to private schools, the dollar amount of the voucher, information required of participating schools, testing and disclosure of scores and related issues. These can be accessed here. My present subject is legislation that affects private school curriculum - with emphasis on rules that affect the teaching of virtue and civic values.

All states - sometimes with federal incentive - require the teaching in their public schools of what we can call “basics.” The education codes differ, but predictably include English, math, computers, and aspects of science that are not controversial. However, this relative uniformity diminishes with respect to value-laden subjects such as marriage, health, civics, history, sex and literature. Our media swarm with conflict over the values curriculum - what is required and what is forbidden - in public schools. And, quite apart from the statutory rules, what actually gets transmitted behind the classroom door of any public school can be a matter of mystery; it is sufficiently unpredictable that I have preferred to call it the “Bingo Curriculum.”

This gamble with the minds of children is, of course, another good reason to pity the fate of families whose relative poverty conscripts them to “free” schools of the state.

Private schools have been less burdened either by law or by complaint of those customers who, after all, have freely chosen them. State law does require such schools to address the secular basics, but generally in the broadest language; and they are left free - at the parent’s direction - to teach their own specific value systems and of course, religion. The private school can and does hire teachers who represent its distinctive vision of the good life. It does this in order to attract customers (parents) who share that view and who expect the school to help them pass it on to their child. The Waldorf, Montessori, Muslim, Catholic, Hebrew, and Lutheran school exist precisely for this purpose. The U.S. Supreme Court long ago recognized this distinctive power of parents - deriving outside secular law - to employ educators who transmit their own vision, which may well include basic ideas that are unavailable to the state.

But, if the state here lacks power, it does carry two kinds of responsibility. One is to protect the right of the child to a basic education; the other is to protect society from the risk of intellectual corruption that is always present in the adult-child relationship, including that of teacher-student. The state subsidy for the parent’s school choice thus will not be usable at schools that are either dysfunctional as basic educators or that consciously promote contempt for values foundational to civic order. (more…)