School choice--really. (Flashback).(compulsory education)

Back when our great-grandparents were children, trudging barefooted through blizzards to one-room schoolhouses warmed by the patriotic heat of Parson Weems and McGuffey Eclectic Readers, school "choice" meant just that: Parents had the choice of whether or not to send their young 'uns to the education factory. They lost that choice--but maybe everything that dies someday comes back.

Massachusetts was the first state to enact a compulsory schooling law, in 1852; by 1918 every state in the land of the free had abolished what had once seemed a basic freedom. The compellers blamed feckless American parents for bringing coercion upon themselves. As B. G. Northrop, secretary of the Connecticut State Board of Education, said in 1872: "To bring up children in ignorance is a crime and should be treated as such."

Compulsory education went fist in velvet glove with child-labor laws. The mines, mills, and farms in which young people labored were being emptied of children, as enlightened, usually childless progressives made war on the rights of rural and working parents to raise their children as they saw fit.

Parental resistance to compulsion was fierce. Coercive education was said to be "monarchical," "un-American," "un-Constitutional," and "inimical to the spirit of free democratic institutions." In 1848, the North American Review remarked of a typical parent in this original choice movement: "To compel him to educate his children would have been an invasion of his rights as a free-born Rhode Islander, which would not be endured."

From the start, compulsory education relied on military metaphors and brute threats. Educationist Calvin Stowe told the Ohio legislature in 1836,"A man has no more right to endanger the state by throwing upon it a family of ignorant and vicious children than he has to give admission to the spies of an invading army." One nineteenth-century zealot extolled the state's "right of eminent domain" over the minds of children. All in all, kid, you're just another brick in the wall.

What the anarchic American system needed was the lash of Prussian discipline, or so Americans were told. Martin Luther's 1524 letter to German rulers was widely quoted: "The civil authorities are under obligation to compel the people to send their children to school." Those ...