Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Campaigning for state involvement in education
Campaigning for state involvement in education
Jun 14, 2025 7:11 PM

I came across a troubling essay in this month’s issue of Grand Rapids Family Magazine. In her “Taking Notes” column, Associate Publisher/Editor Carole Valade takes up the question of “family values” in the context of the primary campaign season.

She writes,

The most important “traditional values” and “family values” amount to one thing: a great education for our children. Education is called “the great equalizer”: It is imperative for our children to be able pete on a “global scale” for the jobs that fund their future and provide hopes and dreams for their generation.

So far, so good. But from the somewhat uncontroversial assertions in that paragraph, Valade moves on to make some incredibly unfounded conclusions. (I say “somewhat” uncontroversial because it’s not clear in what sense education is an “equalizer.” Do we all get the same grades? Do we all perform as well as everyone else?)

Valade simply assumes that an emphasis on “education” as a “family value” means that we ought to push for greater government involvement in education, in the form of funding and oversight. “Education funding should be the most discussed topic of the campaign; it should be the focus of budget discussions,” she writes.

Let’s be clear that the immediate context for ments are the national primary elections. It’s thus fair to conclude that Valade is talking primarily about the role of the federal government. This is underscored by her claims that “Head Start and pre-school programs are not a ‘luxury’ in state of federal budgets; they are an absolute necessity.”

The problem with Valade’s perspective is that it equates concern for education with concern for political lobbying: “Who will ask for such priorities if not parents? Who will speak on behalf of our children’s well-being if not parents?”

It is the case that the great concern that so many parents have for their children’s education have led them to move them into private schools and even (gasp!) to home school them. There is no facile and simple connection between valuing education and valuing government involvement in education. Given the performance of public schools in pared to charter schools and private schools, there is an argument to be made that greater government involvement in education weakens rather than strengthens our children’s education.

Placing a high priority on a child’s education leads some parents to want their kids to be instructed in the truths about God and his relation to his creation, and this is instruction that by definition is excluded from a government-run public education. So there’s at least as strong a case to be made that valuing education means that we should lobby for less government involvement rather than more, or at least not think of education as primarily a political issue but rather a familial and ecclesiastical responsibility.

“There are many things the government can’t do – many good purposes it must renounce,” said Lord Acton. “It must leave them to the enterprise of others.” One of those “good purposes” is an education centered on Christian moral formation.

See also: “Too Cool for School: Al Mohler says it’s time for Christians to abandon public schools.”

And: H-Net Review, Religion in Schools: Controversies around the World (Westport: Praeger, 2006).

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Reading ‘Democracy in America’ (Part 4): The long shadow of the French Revolution
This is the fourth part in a series on how to read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Read the Introduction and follow the entire series here. In the previous installment, we considered feudalism as a class system of mutual responsibilities centered on land. Land was the basis of wealth during the medieval period. But by the 12th century, land was slowly being replaced by trade as the main generator of wealth in Europe. That basic shift and the subsequent...
The anti-capitalist roots of American anti-Semitism
Over the past week Americans have been debating the removal of Confederate statues from our public spaces. The discussion was prompted by the white nationalist protest in Charlottesville, Virginia that was supposedly in response to the plan to take down the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. But if the rally was about a statue, why were the protestors shouting about Jews? “Once they started marching, they didn’t talk about Robert E. Lee being a brilliant military tactician,” says...
The cramped morality of trade protectionism
“If a product is seen only as the opportunity for work, it is certain that the anxieties of protectionists are well founded.” –Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms Drawing inspiration from a 1847 essay by the inimitable Frédéric Bastiat, economist Donald Boudreauxtackles a popular argument from today’s trade protectionists: namely, “that protectionism is justified if enough consumers or voters are willing to pay higher prices in order to help workers.” The problem, of course, is that such a perspective debases the value...
Parents’ inalienable rights over their children’s education and religious instruction
As children in the U.S. return to school, their European contemporaries have or soon will join them. However, they do so in a context that recognizes fewer of the traditional rights that society has accorded parents over the education of their children, especially whether they are taught to uphold or disdain their family’s moral and religious views. Grégor Puppinck, Ph.D., the director of theEuropean Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ), addressed the rights that parents rightfully exercise over their children’s...
Our economic age of anxiety
“Developed nations are increasingly haunted by doubts about the legitimacy of their economic structures,” says Victor V. Claar and Greg Forster in this week’s Acton Commentary. “This paralyzing anxiety crosses all lines of ethnicity, religion, class, party and ideology.” This is not a mere selfish concern about who gets how much of what. It is a moral anxiety, a concern about what kind of people we are ing. Is America still a country where it pays to “work hard and...
Why Christians must get poverty and inequality right
Over the last two decades, global poverty has plummeted and the world’s poorest people have steadily climbed out of the shadow of death. Yet many Christians cannot distinguish between dire poverty and e inequality, falsely believe both are worsening, and oppose the very policies that have lifted the world’s poor out of malnutrition. “Why do we underestimate success?” asks Philip Booth in a new essay forReligion & Liberty Transatlantic. “Why do we accept fake news about these issues?” Booth– a...
The socialist threat to Catholic schools in Spain
The Spanish government is currently run by the center-Right People’s Party, led by Mariano Rajoy. However, should Spain’s socialist parties return to power, they have announced their intention to remove Catholic education from the curriculum and replace it with a secular curriculum that teaches fidelity to the government. In place of voluntary religious education, the socialists of Spain would impose secular and progressive “Education for Citizenship and Human Rights” (EfC). In this way, socialism could use government funding to bring...
Radio Free Acton: Ismael Hernandez on the recent ‘Detroit’ film and Jacqueline Isaacs on Libertarian Christians
This week on Radio Free Acton, we ask Ismael Hernandez, founder and president of the Freedom and Virtue Institute to give his opinions on the new film “Detroit,” depicting the 1967 12th Street Riots. Hernandez states for listeners how “it is important to know that every time you see a portrayal of a historical event, you need to be able to separate fact from narrative…we have to be able to understand that we are being sold a narrative with the...
Video: Rev. Robert Sirico on the Vatican’s targeting of evangelical and Catholic collaboration
President and Co-Founder of the Acton Institute, Rev. Robert Sirico, was recently interviewed on EWTNby news anchor Raymond Arroyo to discuss a recent controversial article published by La CiviltàCattolica. The article, approved by the Vatican, received much criticism because it targeted “conservative evangelical and Catholic collaboration around social issues.” Sirico parses the issues revolving around the article, stating how the article was “not substantive and did not exhibit any kind of real understanding of evangelicalism or of conservative, traditional Catholicism.”...
How the invisible hand reduces industry costs
Note: This is post #45 in a weekly video series on basic microeconomics. petitive markets, the market price—with the help of the Invisible Hand—balances production across firms so that total industry costs are minimized. In this video by Marginal Revolution University, economist Alex Tabarrok explains petitive markets also connect different industries. By balancing production, the Invisible Hand of the market ensures that the total value of production is maximized across different industries. (If you find the pace of the videos...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved