There are many critical battlegrounds in the war to restore individual sovereignty in America, but perhaps the most important is the battle over the future of our education system. Universal School Choice is becoming an important asset in this battle.
The battle over our education system is important because it spans generations, affects almost everyone in our society, and is triggering dramatic changes in American culture.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. Are you tired of seeing declining educational outcomes even though education spending continues to rise? Are you angry that there has been a tidal shift in the public educational focus from teaching the bedrock principles of the American founding to teaching the Marxist principles of America’s destruction? Are you frustrated that core skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic are being deemphasized in favor of cultural and political indoctrination?
In a rare bit of good news, there is a rising tsunami in the education industry that is poised to sweep away these problems.
In many states, this rising tsunami is called Universal School Choice. It is a free market approach to education, wherein the state provides funding directly to families of school-age students. The parents can then choose which public or private school to send their children to. In other words, the money follows the student to wherever the parents decide the student should be educated, rather than the student being forced to attend a monopolized public school.
In my view, this approach is as critical as the religious establishment clause in the Bill of Rights. Just as governments have no business promoting or establishing a religion, they have no business promoting or establishing ideological dogma, especially in schools with captive audiences of moldable students. The minds of our children are sacred. It should be up to parents to decide what secular ideology they are taught, just as parents should decide what religion they are taught. If those choices are left to the state, the only ideology that they will be taught is collectivism.
Up until now, the public-school stranglehold on ideological dogma has been one of the key drivers in the fundamental shift of America’s culture. Whereas America was once a bastion of individual freedom and personal responsibility, it is gradually being “educated” to be a deathtrap of collectivist conformism and victimhood. Identity politics and entitlement are being drilled into the minds of our children instead of principle-centered character and personal accountability. Class conflict, gender conflict, and racial conflict are being force fed as normal social conditions to innocent minds.
But this is a solvable problem. It is also a problem that must be solved before most of our other social and political ills can be properly addressed. If the culture of the country is not founded on bedrock truths and principles, then the politics of the country will be a cesspool of floating, self-contradictory abstractions. Politics follows culture, and culture follows education. We have no choice but to fix our education system if we want to fix our culture and our politics.
We parents have a growing array of tools at our disposal to address this problem. From homeschooling to Universal School Choice, more and more parents, communities, and states are recognizing that the current government monopoly on education can (and must) be confronted. Free market solutions work best in supplying our nation with goods and services. Education of our youth is perhaps the most critical service of all. So let’s give parents the freedom and control they deserve. Let them participate in a free market of education to determine how the minds of their children are going to be molded.
Please click here for an overview of the states that have either implemented Universal School Choice or are on the verge of doing so. The efforts of these states are establishing a viable blueprint for a transition to an education system controlled by the decisions of empowered parents rather than by government-run monopolies.
