Every couple of years I see a type of news story that shakes my support for public education. It goes like this: a parent (usually a mom) is put in jail for the heinous crime of enrolling her child in a school while living outside the attendance zone. Maybe the official offense is falsifying a document, but at its root a person is put in jail for trying to get their child into the “wrong” school.
It makes me think about the relationship between proactive state laws and public education. When I say “proactive” I mean those laws that compel action (e.g., those wishing to drive a car must have the car registered and the driver licensed) as opposed to those that restrict (e.g., speed limits). Underneath these laws is the threat of violence—follow the trail of civil disobedience far enough and you’ll almost always end up with prison, a body restricted from free movement due to physical force.
So much of what I advocate for (fair, adequate and excellent public education) is only possible via this threat of state violence. At its most basic, children of a certain age are forced to attend school due to compulsory education laws. Even though no one is required to go to a public school, the limitation of resources mixed with laws requiring children to be in school somewhere makes them de facto mandatory for most. As those news stories show, the government is not bluffing on their warning for punishment.
How can a Christian in the policy world square education—cultivating curiosity, creativity, agency, cooperation, etc.—with state violence?
I think it’s helpful to start with WHY all children have to attend some sort of schooling for several years of their childhood. Compulsory education laws are older than the United States. Members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony saw education as a requirement to participate in religion and the market. Early colony leaders believed that mandatory schooling would make better church goers and a stronger economy. Ironically these laws proliferated in the early 20th century as a way to keep people out of jobs. Many Americans began to recognize the dangers of child labor, and required school attendance promoted public education while restricting a parent’s ability to put their child to work in a factory all day.
As far as I can tell, the fear of child labor has subsided. Without that concern, voices have risen to declare compulsory attendance laws as a restriction of individual freedom or even in some cases, inhumane. The thinking goes: requiring education, even if private and homeschooling are allowable, gives the government too much authority within the responsibilities of parents. How can the state presume to tell families how to best raise children?
I think this type of talk makes sense only if education is treated as an “extra” and not a necessary passage into society. Perhaps we should think of ignorance like a disease. Failure to understand geology or algebra leads to dangerous housing construction. Inability to tell credible news stories from lies or propaganda online causes fear and can push people to despair. Misinformation corrupts elections, institutions and relationships—we all have a reason to address ignorance with the vigilance of containing a smallpox outbreak.
Christians should be first in acknowledging that incorrect views lead to dangerous actions. The Christian church spent generations convening meetings to hammer out theological points for fear that heresy would spread. In the same way that a child with the flu shouldn’t go to Sunday School, an adult who doesn’t know history should not be making political decisions. When viewed this way a proper education provides a base competency to society at large, and I can support the state requiring exposure to education in the same way I can support the state requiring forklift drivers to have certifications.
I don’t think I’ve angered too many people by saying that education has value, but there’s another level to the news stories that I referenced at the beginning. The mothers in those stories see the importance of schooling, so much so that they’re willing to lie to give their child a better education. You see the issue isn’t just that kids must be in school, but that some kids must go to a qualitatively worse school than others.
As I’ve written before, I got to see firsthand the difference in educational opportunities between the rich schools and the poor ones. I spent elementary school in Clayton County which had much less money per child than the neighboring Fayette County where I attended middle- and high school. Fayette County schools had (and still has) far more educational resources than those in Clayton. Residents in one county are forbidden from enrolling in public schools in another, and the housing prices of Fayette keep the average Clayton County resident from moving. Often policymakers will decry this system as “trapping” a child in a “failing school.”
“Why not get rid of these arbitrary restrictions?” you may ask. One reason is that if you let anyone enroll in any public school, families will flock to the rich schools and the poor schools will just become even more economically isolated. But that’s not the real reason. The real reason is high school football. If you allow any child to enroll anywhere then coaches will make sure that the best players all go to like 5 schools in the state and that angers ~500 schools.
But that first reason is real. All the parents who can afford to drive their kids an extra 20 minutes to school will abandon Clayton County and everyone else will remain. I want to believe that people will continue to invest in a “bad” school but American history teaches me that people will do ANYTHING if they think it will provide a leg up for their child.
So where does that leave us? If we criminalize people trying to get their kids into a better school we’re trapping them in bad schools. If we take away that prohibition then we’ll make a lot more bad schools. Here’s where I want to step away and ask: but WHY do people want to leave Clayton County schools? Why are there “bad” schools at all? Lawmakers who want to let parents “escape failing schools” but don’t engage with the very reason these schools are struggling are playing a game with us. Because if the state invested resources into those schools fairly then parents wouldn’t be in a situation so desperate that they risk jail to send their kid to a different school.
A Christian’s Response to Injustice
The story of a mother punished for enrolling their child in the “wrong” school should break our hearts for a world that treats poor folks as undeserving and push us to change that world structurally. We should look to Proverbs 31, Matthew 25 and the many more passages that command support for the poor and the stranger. We need to lament a system that prioritizes the upper- and middle-class at the expense of the least wealthy. And if you’re tempted to step away from this article with a nebulous disdain for “society” then consider that, if you’re not low-income, you personally financially benefit from this system. We get to have lower taxes (because if the state paid for schools fairly then it would cost more) a sense of entitlement (since we can tsk tsk that other people didn’t go to college and THAT’S WHY they can’t afford a house, etc.) and a cheaper lifestyle (it’s easier to pay less-educated folks less), among the many benefits of societal stratification. Do not get it confused, we are not some casual observers of a broken system but rather active beneficiaries of it. Which means that we should not be surprised when the solution costs us.
But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? (1 John 3:17).
As Christians we must be calling for the end to laws that enforce participation in poorly-financed public institutions by openly declaring our intention to pay to make sure that all schools are high quality. If we do the former without the latter, I’m afraid we’re recognizing the problem but but refusing to see our place in it.
Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth. (1 John 3:18).
-Stephen