Editor's note: As momentum builds across the United States for expanded school choice, it is important to understand the movement's legal and philosophical foundations. For more than 40 years, John E. Coons, redefinED co-host and professor of law, emeritus, University of California at Berkeley, has argued that parents - and not government - have the primary legal and moral responsibility and authority to educate their children. Coons is a powerful thinker whose reflections are best consumed slowly and with respect. Enjoy this special post. 

It takes a village to raise a child—or so they say, and perhaps it’s true. Humans are interdependent, and every particular village -whatever that word means - has influence, for good or ill.

But the phrase is murky and subject to many interpretations. It can be read as the quirky proposition that the village is what logicians call a “sufficient condition” of some outcome; alone, by itself, it determines the bundle of effects that will be the person called Andrew or Susie.

An equally strange interpretation converts the term into a moral proposition: The thing called “village” actually ought to raise the child, displacing all competing influence; whatever its peculiar norms and culture the village itself is the official moral standard for child-raising. If there is strong variety among villages, this proposition would be hard to swallow. At some point one begins to grasp that - in minds that love the metaphor - the word “village” has come to imply more than the old neighborhood.

As we watch these enthusiasts we gradually understand that this transcendence of the village is a two-fold concept: First, the all-good village has morphed into an idealized version of the nation itself; but, second, the corporate mind of this perfected nation mirrors the preferences of whichever speaker is using the expression. Village means what he wants it to mean.

I remain thoroughly puzzled by this modern mystique so often introduced to justify our coercive assignment of children from have-not families to schools of the state. The claim seems to be that, for such a kid, it takes a village and therefore … Therefore what? One awaits today’s favorite battle cry inviting us all to go out and occupy something - in this case the mind of the child. Let us occupy Jimmy!

In all these village slogans it seems forgotten that, in the first place, it took families to create the village. While the village may be important, it is not the concept of village, but that of parent (as part of family) that will allow us to disentangle the intellectual mess we have made of the various relations of the child to village, to state, to parent and to family.

This state of our culture and its favorite metaphors bears upon educational choice. (more…)