When the COVID-19 pandemic pushed K–12 education online and gave public school parents a recent window into how and what their children were learning, a nationwide debate erupted. Public curricula on race, class, and gender and the role of oldsters in shaping their children’s education got here under scrutiny as they hadn’t for 20 years.
By 2023, 22 states had implemented parental rights or curriculum transparency laws or executive orders, to various results. In Maryland, Muslim and Christian parents sued their local school board for not allowing them to opt their elementary-aged kids out of mandatory LGBTQ story hours. In the state of Washington, the recent “Parental Rights initiative”—requiring public schools to release children’s medical records to their parents—is being challenged within the courts.
Meanwhile, homeschooling is now the fastest-growing type of education within the country. Once illegal in lots of states and related to white, religious conservatives, it’s increasingly ethnically, religiously, and politically diverse. Some parents are (correctly) taking it on a kid-by-kid, year-by-year basis.
How did we get here? And how should Christians—especially those that wish to each train up their children in the best way they need to go (Prov. 22:6) and seek the welfare of their city (Jer. 29:7)—think concerning the potential tension between the proper of oldsters to direct their children’s education and the role of the state and wider community in forming educated residents?
William Blackstone’s 1765 commentary on English common law is the seminal text on parental rights within the Anglo-American constitutional tradition. It begins not with the unconventional independence of autonomous adults but with parents’ intimate and enduring relationship with their children. The Creator of the universe, Blackstone wrote, has implanted in the center of each mother and father a deep, familial love for his or her offspring that nothing can totally destroy. Parents present of their kids’ lives have a singular opportunity to know their children’s individual needs, proclivities, and capacities.
From this footing, Blackstone and his American counterparts in our country’s formative legal years struck a middle path between absolutely the power of the state and absolutely the power of oldsters, alternatives for which they found historical warnings within the legal codes of Sparta and Rome, respectively.
On one hand, because parents typically know and love their very own kids, the responsibility of raising, protecting, and educating children belongs initially to folks, to not the state or the broader political community. Early American legal commentator James Kent faulted the traditional Spartan regime’s try to subsume the person into the state. “It is a plain precept of universal law,” wrote James Schouler, one other influential Nineteenth-century American jurist, that “young and tender beings ought to be nurtured and brought up by their parents.”
On the opposite hand, since parents’ power is “derived from” their duty, Kent continued, their power just isn’t (and within the Anglo-American tradition never has been) absolute. There is not any right to abuse or neglect one’s offspring. Indeed, Kent emphatically denounced the Roman patriarch’s power of life and death over his children as “barbarous and unfit for a free and civilized people.” (Similarly, writing within the context of the Roman family in his letter to the Ephesians, the apostle Paul instructs fathers not to impress their children to anger [6:4].)
Complicating Blackstone’s somewhat neat account of parental rights, nevertheless, every state in America funded common schools and passed a compulsory school attendance law between 1852 and 1918. In a political community where “We the People” rule, it was argued, shouldn’t all parents be required to coach their children in order that they might tackle the responsibilities of citizenship after they grow up? As Schouler wrote, “So intimately is government concerned in the outcomes of early training that it interferes, and justly, too, each to help the parent in giving his children an excellent education, and in compelling that education.”
But then, don’t compulsory school attendance laws shift the responsibility of rearing children from parents to the state? Numerous state supreme courts resolved this tension by upholding the general authority of the state to form an informed citizenry while also protecting the proper of oldsters to direct the particulars of their very own children’s education. According to those decisions, states may set minimum educational standards, but parents have the pliability to satisfy those standards in a wide range of ways, each inside and out of doors of the classroom.
For example, these courts ruled that oldsters have the proper to opt out their children from studying certain subjects or from participating in certain activities in public schools (resembling bookkeeping, grammar, singing lessons, and dancing exercises in a physical education class).
In a regularly cited decision that closely followed Blackstone’s argument, the Wisconsin Supreme Court wrote in 1874 that oldsters have the “paramount right … to make an affordable alternative from the studies within the prescribed course which his child shall pursue” because parents are “more likely to know the health, temperament, aptitude and deficiencies” of their very own children. Moreover, the Massachusetts and Indiana Supreme Courts, on the turn of the twentieth century, ruled that oldsters have the proper to coach their children at home, provided, in fact, that they meet the minimum standards set by the state.
This story culminates within the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision of Meyer v. Nebraska in 1923. In the aftermath of the Great War, the Nebraska legislature criminalized teaching foreign languages to children before the eighth grade with the intention to destroy “alien enemy sentiment” and “Americanize” the massive German American population within the state. In response, Zion Lutheran School offered foreign language instruction during recess, which it argued was technically outside of standard school hours. Enraged, vandals shot out the varsity’s windows and burned all its German-language books.
However, on the behest of his students’ parents, Robert T. Meyer—a 42-year-old round-spectacled, mustached teacher at the varsity—continued, teaching German from a book of biblical stories. He was fined a full month’s salary. Undeterred, he said that he had the responsibility to show his students to practice “the faith of their fathers within the language of their fathers.”
On appeal and in front of the Supreme Court, Meyer’s legal counsel declared that the case poses “probably the most necessary questions which have been presented for a generation”—namely, whether the state or the parent “has control over the education of his child.”
In a 7–2 decision, the Supreme Court struck down the law, ruling each that public education is of “supreme importance” and likewise that a parent’s right to direct his or her children’s education is “essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” Echoing Blackstone’s thesis, the Meyercourt held that, “corresponding to the proper of control, it’s the natural duty of the parent to offer his children education suitable to their station in life.”
Today, within the United States, Christians can be pleased about our legal right to satisfy our sacred duty to coach our kids based on the dictates of our consciences, whether at home or in public or private schools—a right unavailable to many Christians across the globe. Indeed, stories abound of Christian families from places like Cuba and Germany in search of refuge in America with the intention to educate their children as they see fit.
Of course, Blackstone’s framework, even modified for a democratic people, won’t neatly resolve all disputes between parents and the state. It doesn’t give parents the proper to unilaterally dictate what’s taught in public schools. But it does suggest that, since parents typically know and love their very own kids, they should have the proper to direct the particulars of their children’s education.
Joseph K. Griffith II is the William Blackstone Professor of Law & Society on the Ashbrook Center and an assistant professor of political science at Ashland University. This article is tailored from a previously published paper, “‘Long Recognized at Common Law’: Meyer and Pierce’s Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Precedent on Parental Educational Rights and Civic Education,” in Perspectives on Political Science.
