Education

“If we are to reach real peace in this world, we shall have to begin with the children.” – Ghandi

Education in a Multicultural, Secular Democracy

Summary

Education is both a private benefit and a public necessity. It prepares children to support themselves, but a democratic society also depends upon citizens who can read, reason, evaluate evidence, understand other viewpoints, and participate intelligently in self-government.

That creates an unavoidable tension. Parents have a profound interest in the upbringing and education of their children. Teachers and schools have professional responsibilities. Communities have legitimate interests in determining what their schools teach. And the state has an interest in ensuring that every child receives an adequate education regardless of family income, religion, race, disability, or place of residence.

Current controversies over school choice, curriculum, books, religion, race, gender, parental rights, testing, educational inequality, and federal authority are different expressions of this underlying conflict.

In a multicultural, secular democracy, public education cannot reasonably be expected to teach every family’s beliefs as truth. Neither should it attempt to replace those beliefs with an official government ideology. Its more defensible purpose is to give students the knowledge and intellectual tools necessary to encounter competing ideas, examine evidence, distinguish fact from opinion, and eventually make informed judgments for themselves.

That suggests an important principle for educational policy:

Parents should have broad freedom to raise their children according to their convictions, while publicly supported education should give every child both the basic knowledge necessary to function in society and the intellectual independence necessary eventually to form convictions of his or her own.

Article

Few government responsibilities affect the future of a society more profoundly than education.

Schools teach reading, mathematics, science, history, and practical skills. But education does something more. It influences how children understand their country, other people, authority, evidence, morality, citizenship, and themselves.

That makes education inherently controversial.

In a multicultural, secular democracy, citizens do not agree about religion, morality, politics, family life, race, sexuality, patriotism, or even the proper purpose of education. Yet their children attend schools supported and regulated by the same government.

The fundamental educational-policy question is therefore larger than what textbooks schools should use or how much teachers should be paid:

What may a democratic government legitimately teach children whose families hold fundamentally different beliefs?

Why We Have Public Education

Education benefits the individual. A well-educated person generally has greater opportunities for employment, economic independence, and participation in society.

But public education exists for another reason.

Democracy requires educated citizens.

Voters are routinely asked to make judgments about taxation, war, economics, public health, technology, constitutional rights, environmental policy, and competing claims by political candidates. They cannot personally investigate every question.

They need to know how to obtain information, evaluate its reliability, recognize manipulation, understand numbers, distinguish evidence from assertion, and reconsider conclusions when evidence changes.

Education therefore has a civic purpose.

A democracy cannot guarantee that its citizens will make wise decisions. It can try to give them the tools with which wise decisions are possible.

Who Should Control a Child’s Education?

Parents have both legal rights and profound personal responsibilities concerning their children.

They reasonably expect to have considerable authority over their children’s religion, values, upbringing, and education.

But parental authority cannot be absolute.

Society requires children to receive an education even when parents might prefer otherwise. It establishes minimum standards. It prohibits abuse and neglect. It requires schools to prepare children for eventual life as independent adults.

This reveals an important distinction.

A child belongs neither to the government nor, in the ordinary sense of ownership, to the parents.

The child is a developing person.

Parents temporarily exercise extraordinary authority because children cannot yet make all of their own decisions. Government also exercises limited authority because children have interests of their own and because society has legitimate interests in the education of its future citizens.

Educational policy must continually negotiate among all three: parents, society, and the developing independence of the child.

Education in a Multicultural Society

The problem becomes more difficult when families hold incompatible beliefs.

One family may believe that human beings were specially created by God. Another may have no religious beliefs. One may consider same-sex relationships immoral; another may include two mothers or two fathers. Families may hold sharply different views about racial inequality, gender, American history, capitalism, socialism, immigration, abortion, climate change, and patriotism.

A public school cannot teach all contradictory beliefs as simultaneously true.

But neither should a secular public school simply decide which comprehensive moral philosophy children should adopt.

A useful distinction is between teaching an idea and teaching that an idea must be believed.

Students can learn what Christianity teaches without being taught to be Christians. They can learn about Islam without being taught to be Muslims. They can study Marx, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Darwin, the Bible, the Constitution, feminism, and the civil-rights movement without being required to accept every proposition associated with any of them.

A multicultural education should not protect students from disagreement.

It should prepare them for it.

Secularism and Religion

A secular public school is not an anti-religious school.

Religion has played an enormous role in history, literature, art, philosophy, politics, war, reform movements, and the development of civilizations. Students cannot understand the world without learning about it.

The constitutional problem arises when a government school moves from education about religion to religious instruction or observance imposed by the state.

At the same time, students do not surrender their own religious freedom when they enter a public school. They may hold and express religious beliefs subject to the same reasonable rules that apply to other student expression.

The proper goal is therefore neither religious public education nor education from which religion has been erased.

It is religious neutrality by government combined with religious liberty for individuals.

School Choice

One of today’s largest policy disputes concerns who should provide education and who should pay for it.

Traditional public schools remain the principal system, but families may also use charter schools, private schools, religious schools, homeschooling, and other arrangements. Voucher programs, education savings accounts, and tax-credit scholarships increasingly permit public resources or tax advantages to support alternatives to traditional public schools.

Supporters of school choice make a powerful argument: wealthy families have always had educational choices because they can move to expensive school districts or pay private tuition. Why should lower-income families be trapped in a school that does not meet their child’s needs?

Choice can also permit different educational approaches and create pressure on schools to improve.

Critics raise an equally important question: What happens to universal public education when public resources increasingly follow individual families into separate systems?

Private schools may select students differently, provide different services to students with disabilities, operate under different accountability rules, or teach religious doctrines that a public school could not constitutionally teach.

The dispute is therefore not simply “choice versus no choice.”

The difficult policy question is how much choice society can provide while maintaining a strong educational system available to every child.

Equality and School Funding

American education contains another contradiction.

We frequently describe education as a route to equal opportunity, yet children begin with radically unequal educational resources.

Some attend schools with advanced courses, experienced teachers, counselors, laboratories, music and arts programs, modern buildings, and extensive extracurricular opportunities.

Others do not.

Differences arise from state funding systems, local tax bases, geography, family income, housing patterns, and many other causes.

Equality need not mean spending exactly the same amount on every child. Some students require more resources than others. Children with disabilities, students learning English, and children who enter school substantially behind their peers may require additional support.

The more useful principle is adequacy combined with opportunity: every child should receive an education sufficient to provide a realistic opportunity to become an independent and capable adult.

If the quality of a child’s education depends overwhelmingly upon the wealth of the family or neighborhood into which that child happened to be born, public education is not fully performing its democratic purpose.

Race, History, and DEI

Few educational subjects have generated more political conflict in recent years than race and American history.

One concern is that schools may present children with an ideological interpretation of history, divide them into racial categories, or assign present-day moral responsibility to children for historical injustices.

The opposing concern is that restrictions on teaching controversial subjects may produce sanitized history that minimizes slavery, segregation, dispossession of Native Americans, discrimination, and continuing racial disparities.

These concerns do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Schools should teach unpleasant historical facts when the evidence supports them. Students should understand slavery and abolition, the Civil War and Reconstruction, segregation and the civil-rights movement, immigration and exclusion, Native American history, and the continuing disagreements about the consequences of these events.

But studying historical injustice does not require assigning inherited guilt to individual children.

The proper educational response to disputed history is not less history.

It is more evidence, more context, and greater freedom to examine competing interpretations.

Books, Libraries, and Curriculum

Disputes over books illustrate the same tension.

Schools necessarily select materials. A first-grade library is not expected to contain everything appropriate for adults. Age and educational purpose legitimately matter.

Parents and elected school boards therefore have a role in deciding what materials schools provide.

But removing a book because it is genuinely unsuitable for a particular age is different from removing it because officials dislike its political, religious, historical, or social viewpoint.

A school library cannot contain every book ever published. Selection is unavoidable.

The important policy questions are therefore procedural:

Who makes the decision? What standards are used? Can parents object? Are professional educators involved? Is a book evaluated as a whole or by an isolated passage? Is there a transparent review and appeal process?

A pluralistic society should be particularly suspicious when either political side attempts to make uncomfortable ideas disappear rather than allowing students of appropriate maturity to examine them.

Sex, Gender, and Parental Rights

Questions involving sex and gender have become another major conflict between schools, families, students, states, and the federal government.

Disputes include athletic participation, bathrooms and changing facilities, pronouns, school records, parental notification, counseling, and what schools should teach about sexual orientation and gender identity.

These controversies involve interests that can genuinely collide.

Parents claim a right to know important things occurring in their children’s lives. Students have interests in privacy, dignity, and safety. Schools have responsibilities toward all students. Female athletes have interests in fair competition. Transgender students have interests in equal treatment and protection from harassment.

Calling one side hateful or the other side radical does little to resolve these conflicts.

Policy should identify the actual competing interests, distinguish different ages and circumstances, rely upon evidence where evidence is available, and make clear which decisions belong to parents, which to schools, which to students as they mature, and which require uniform legal rules.

Academic Achievement

Political controversies can also distract from the most elementary responsibility of a school:

Children should learn.

American students suffered substantial academic setbacks associated with the COVID-19 period. Recent national assessments show some recovery among younger children, but important losses remain, particularly among older students.

Chronic absenteeism also increased dramatically and remains a serious educational problem.

These facts should matter regardless of political philosophy.

A school can have an admirable philosophy, sophisticated technology, inclusive policies, strong parental participation, or an innovative curriculum. But if many students leave unable to read difficult material, write clearly, reason mathematically, or evaluate evidence, something fundamental has failed.

Reading, writing, mathematics, science, history, and reasoning should remain at the center of educational policy.

Testing and Accountability

Standardized testing is one attempt to determine whether students are actually learning.

Its advantage is comparability. Without common measures, serious educational failure can be hidden behind grades, graduation rates, or local standards.

But testing can also distort education when test performance becomes the dominant objective. Schools may narrow curricula, devote excessive time to test preparation, or treat a single score as a complete measure of a student or teacher.

The sensible question is not whether testing is good or bad.

It is what should be measured, how often, and what decisions the measurements should control.

Assessment should provide information. It should not become the purpose of education.

Teachers and Professional Authority

Teachers occupy an unusually difficult position in these disputes.

Society asks them to be subject experts, instructors, disciplinarians, counselors, evaluators, protectors, and sometimes substitutes for social services. At the same time, parents, legislatures, school boards, administrators, unions, and federal agencies may all attempt to influence what happens in their classrooms.

Teachers need professional discretion.

But public education is a public institution, so professional authority cannot mean complete independence from democratic oversight.

The solution again requires balance: establish clear public objectives and standards while allowing trained educators substantial freedom over how to achieve them.

Teacher quality is too important for either unlimited administrative control or unlimited job protection. Schools need to attract, develop, retain, reward, and trust excellent teachers—and to address persistent poor performance fairly when it occurs.

Technology, Phones, and Artificial Intelligence

Educational technology creates a newer set of policy questions.

Smartphones can provide instant access to information, but they can also interrupt attention, facilitate cheating, intensify social pressures, and consume enormous amounts of students’ time.

Artificial intelligence presents an even more complicated challenge.

AI can tutor students, explain difficult material, translate languages, help teachers prepare lessons, and give students access to capabilities once available only to people with substantial resources.

It can also do a student’s work.

Simply prohibiting AI is unlikely to prepare students for a world in which AI will be commonplace. Allowing students to substitute AI output for thinking is equally indefensible.

Schools will increasingly have to distinguish between using AI to help someone think and using AI instead of thinking.

That may become one of education’s most important responsibilities.

Local Control and National Interests

American education has traditionally been primarily a state and local responsibility, while the federal government plays important roles in civil rights, support for disadvantaged students, disability law, student aid, data collection, and other areas.

Local control permits experimentation and allows communities to reflect local priorities.

But some rights cannot depend entirely upon local preference.

The history of school segregation demonstrates the danger clearly. A local majority can itself deny the rights or opportunities of a minority.

The appropriate division of authority is therefore not simply federal versus local.

Local governments are often best positioned to operate schools. States can establish broader standards and funding systems. The federal government has a particularly strong justification when protecting constitutional and civil rights, gathering national information, or addressing problems that states cannot adequately solve individually.

The guiding principle should be to exercise governmental power at the lowest level capable of doing the job without sacrificing the rights and genuine educational opportunities of children.

What Education Should Ultimately Produce

Many educational controversies become easier to understand when we ask what sort of adult education is supposed to produce.

A democratic society should not want schools to produce adults who merely repeat what their teachers told them.

Nor should education produce adults who automatically repeat what their parents, political party, religious leaders, favorite websites, or social group told them.

An educated adult should be able to read difficult material, understand quantitative information, recognize uncertainty, ask useful questions, evaluate sources, distinguish evidence from rhetoric, listen to opposing arguments, and change an opinion when the evidence warrants it.

That person may ultimately become conservative or liberal, religious or nonreligious, conventional or unconventional.

The educational success lies not in which conclusion the person reaches.

It lies in the person’s ability to reach conclusions intelligently.

Conclusion

The deepest controversies in education are ultimately controversies about authority.

What belongs to parents?

What belongs to teachers?

What belongs to students?

What belongs to local communities?

And what may the state legitimately require of everyone?

A multicultural, secular democracy cannot eliminate those conflicts because its citizens genuinely disagree about important things.

It can adopt a principle for dealing with them.

Public education should teach established knowledge honestly, expose students at appropriate ages to significant competing ideas, protect their ability to ask questions, and give them the intellectual tools needed to judge those ideas for themselves.

Parents should retain broad authority over the upbringing of their children. Government should exercise restraint in matters of belief. Schools should not become instruments for either religious indoctrination or political indoctrination.

But society also owes something directly to every child.

It owes each child an education sufficient not merely to inherit the beliefs of the previous generation, but eventually to examine them.

That may be the most important contribution public education can make to a free society.

References

John Rawls. Political Liberalism. Expanded edition. Columbia University Press, 2005. Discussion of reasonable pluralism and the problem of maintaining political institutions among citizens holding incompatible religious and philosophical doctrines.

U.S. Constitution, First Amendment. Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses.

U.S. Supreme Court. Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925). A foundational decision concerning parental authority and the state’s power to regulate education.

U.S. Supreme Court. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). Landmark decision on equal educational opportunity and racial segregation in public schools.

U.S. Supreme Court. Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969). Student expression and constitutional rights in public schools.

U.S. Supreme Court. Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972). Religious liberty, parental authority, and compulsory education.

U.S. Supreme Court. Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico, 457 U.S. 853 (1982). School libraries, book removal, and the First Amendment.

U.S. Supreme Court. Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 536 U.S. 639 (2002). Publicly supported school-choice programs and religious schools.

National Center for Education Statistics. The Nation’s Report Card: 2024 Mathematics and Reading Assessments. U.S. Department of Education, 2025. National data on fourth- and eighth-grade achievement.

National Center for Education Statistics. NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessment: Reading and Mathematics at Ages 9 and 13. 2025 results. National data documenting recent academic recovery among younger students and continuing difficulties among older students.

U.S. Department of Education. Chronic Absenteeism. Data and research concerning the substantial increase in students missing 10 percent or more of the school year.

U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights. Title IX and Sex Discrimination. Federal law and current guidance concerning sex discrimination in federally funded education.

U.S. Department of Education. Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA) materials. Federal requirements concerning parental access, student surveys, sensitive information, and certain parental notification and consent rights.

Education Week. Coverage of the federal K–12 tax-credit scholarship program scheduled to begin in 2027 and the continuing national debate over vouchers, education savings accounts, religious schools, accountability, and public-school funding.

John Dewey. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. Macmillan, 1916. Classic examination of the relationship among education, individual development, and democratic society.

Amy Gutmann. Democratic Education. Revised edition. Princeton University Press, 1999. Examination of parental, governmental, and individual authority over education in a pluralistic democracy.

John Stuart Mill. On Liberty. 1859. Particularly the discussions of freedom of thought, individuality, education, and the dangers of social conformity.