The Fall of the Wall around Religious Education
If the past two years have taught us anything as a society, it is that American schoolchildren should not be held hostage by a public-education monopoly that is unable to keep schools open, safe, competent, or free of indoctrination in left-wing fads and anti-American lies. Many of the parents voting with their feet to take their children out of public schools have an additional urgent interest on their minds: They want their children schooled in their faith, and in the values informed by their faith.
Ideally, public money for education at every level should follow the student, not the institution. The public-education bureaucracy, out of both self-interest and ideological desire to retain its captive audience, has long wielded the establishment clause of the First Amendment against religious parents, demanding that they — and they alone — must choose between the school of their choice and the public support that every other student receives. Using the language of the Burger Court’s much-derided Lemon test, which ventured far from the original understanding of the Bill of Rights, the educrats have argued that it is unconstitutional to have any “entanglement” between government and religious schools. In this telling, substituting a letter by Thomas Jefferson […]