The Supreme Court has ruled again for parents’ religious liberty in public schools. This verdict is not surprising as the practice of passing along to one’s children one’s own religious beliefs gets a good deal of protection from the Constitution. Scholars often call it the “first liberty,” and it is indeed the first one named in the Bill of Rights.
But when parents’ religious beliefs are robustly protected, as in this court case, does that threaten of school’s civic mission? That is, after all, publicly education’s founding purpose — to keep the republic. This requires “a crusade against ignorance,” Jefferson wrote.
Public schools teach academic content — the “three Rs” but many other subjects, too, such as history, geology, and algebra. This kind of knowledge isn’t “merely academic,” as some claim. Rather, it gets lots of practical, civic work done. Most important, such knowledge provides a shared standard for distinguishing truth from fiction, information from disinformation, and journalism from gossip.
This orders our collective life from juries to markets and legislatures, and lays the groundwork for all kinds of communication and decision making. Parents send their kids to school to learn this curriculum. Then conflicts arise. The journalist Walter Lippmann observed long ago that curriculum controversies “are among the bitterest political struggles which now divide the nations.”
Why the bitterness? “Wherever two or more groups within a state differ in religion, or in language and in nationality, the immediate concern of each group is to use the schools to preserve its own faith and tradition,” Lippmann wrote. “For it is in the school that the child is drawn towards or drawn away from the religion and the patriotism of its parents.”
Factual knowledge opens windows on the world around us. It frees students to think outside the boxes of their upbringing. Parents want their children to have access to this knowledge, but not when it draws children away from the beliefs and bonds of home.
They want their children to be taught to think critically, but not when it is applied to parents’ values. They want the school to open windows, to broaden their children’s horizons; but they want it to mirror the home, too. In Mahmoud v Taylor, the Supreme Court recently ruled 6-3 that parents must be allowed to opt their children out of instruction that offends their religious beliefs.
The issue turns on three legal principles: the “free exercise” clause of the First Amendment, the perennial tension in democracies between the public good and the private good, and third, the distinction between coercion and exposure. In that decision, a group of Maryland parents of diverse religious backgrounds wanted to pass on to their children their faith-based views on sexuality and gender, but the school district had put “LGBTQ+-inclusive” books into the required K-5 curriculum.
The parents asked to have their children excused, and the local school district refused. The Court found the district policy unconstitutionally coercive because it compelled children to support values their parents reject and to reject values their parents embrace. Quoting the decision, “The storybooks present same-sex weddings as occasions for great celebration” and “suggest that it is hurtful, and perhaps even hateful, to hold the view that gender is inextricably bound up with biological sex.” The stories, in other words, “are unmistakably normative.”
The school policy preventing opt outs, the Court concluded, interfered with the parents’ right to direct the religious upbringing of their children. Offended parents in Tennessee met a different fate in an earlier case, Mozert v Hawkins County Public Schools (1987). Elementary-age children were compelled to read stories in the school’s literacy curriculum that, according to the parents, violated their “born-again Christian” beliefs.
The parents found depictions of witchcraft in excerpts from MacBeth and The Wizard of Oz, for example, and elsewhere the idea that humans and apes share a common ancestor. (This was the same county where the Scopes “monkey trial” was held 60 years before.) The parents believed they must protect their children from exposure to these ideas, but the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the citizens of Tennessee had a compelling interest that outweighed the burden placed on these parents’ religious liberty. That interest, quoting the ruling, is that “public education must prepare pupils for citizenship in the Republic,” which includes exposing them to diverse customs and beliefs in the school curriculum.
Mozert’s children were being exposed to the world, the judges said. They weren’t compelled to believe the contents of the stories, only to be aware that such customs and beliefs exist. This was education, not catechism, the court felt: students were required to read, not believe.
But the LGBTQ+ materials in Maryland crossed that line, the Supreme Court held last month. Students were coerced to do more than read about gay love and gender fluidity. They were pressured to approve of it as did the stories themselves. In this case the 6-3 majority ruled that education had turned to indoctrination and the parents deserved the escape they sought.
The most important collective task adults face is to decide, across their differences, how to educate children for what will surely be a complex future. Citizenship in a republic requires a modus vivendi, a social contract. Decisions about how to live together and move forward are made through argument and compromise, not blood and vengeance.
The task requires education, certainly, and a delicate balance of curricular windows and mirrors. Opting out of some lessons is a needed provision because religious liberty is fundamental in many ways, but so is knowing the big, wide world, including one’s fellow citizens, well enough to keep the republic and the citizenship we prize.
Americans value both liberty and knowledge, so this basic tension will persist.
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