There is no sense in pretending that what is happening here and now is a conflict between some humane and liberal set of universal democratic values and the self-centered factional demands of some particular group of ideological partisans. And there is no denying that in many cases — the overwhelming majority of them — it has been progressives who are the ideological aggressors in these disputes. That is particularly true when it comes to sexual education, something that never should have been entrusted to the public schools to begin with. When Bruni and others talk about “democratic values” or the common good, they most often are talking about their own values by another name. The fact that we are fighting over these questions is pretty good evidence that these values are not in fact universally held, or that at the very least we differ radically in our interpretation and application of them. Of course, our progressive friends believe that their values should be universally held, and, like their Puritan forebears, they are willing to go to great lengths to punish heretics.
Yes, the public schools are public. “You have to accept our values because of the great public benefit we are forcing you to pay for at gunpoint” is, considered without ornamentation, not a very good argument at all.
There is no way to avoid such disputes entirely, though there are some ways they might be mitigated. If I were designing a system of universal education from scratch, there would be no public schools at all: There would be public funding of education distributed on a per-student basis to privately operated schools of many kinds overseen by a dozen or so competing credentialing agencies. The accreditors would ensure that certain basic educational standards were satisfied, and families would be able to enroll their children in schools that reflected their priorities and values. Not all of these are hot-button Kulturkampf issues: In some cases, the issue very likely will be that we’d rather spend an hour each day instructing our students in higher mathematics or Greek than showing them how to roll a condom over a cucumber.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
