Hewitt, Milton Academy; John C. Koenig, Stanford University; Homer W. Taylor, Middlesex School; C. Members of the Harvard faculty who served on subcommit- tees or otherwise gave their aid included: Castle, Henry Chauncey, I. Bernard Cohen, Archibald T. Emmons, Walter Gropius, Richard M. Holmes, Jo- seph F. Kemble, Delmar Leighton, Harry T. Matthiessen, Theodore Morrison, Frederick G.
The committee wishes to express its special gratitude to Rob- ert J. Havighurst, of the University of Chicago, who spent two periods of several weeks each with the committee. One member, Byron S. Hollinshead, devoted his entire time to the work of the committee, having come to Harvard for that purpose. The following members of the Harvard faculty served as members of the committee at one period or another: Mercer was secretary to the committee during its first year.
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The committee owes much to two successive secretaries: Hobson and Madelyn S. Brown, and to Elizabeth F. Hoxie, who helped prepare the manuscript for publication. Rather, we have opened the whole earth and sea to our enterprise and raised every- where living memorials to our fortune.
Pericles, as reported by Thucydides Youth is the time when the character is being molded and easily takes any impress one? Shall we then simply allow our children to listen to any stories that anyone happens to make up and so receive into their minds ideas often the very opposite to those we shall think they ought to have when they are grown up?
They are in essence contradictory. The first breathes the pride of a free society which, through the released energy of its citizens, had achieved a power, wealth, and height of material progress unknown until that time. The second concerns the effects of this creative freedom. It reflects a time when many shades of opinion, many forms of special knowledge, many standards of life and conduct, beat confusedly upon the young, and it asks how under those circumstances they might be expected to reach a settled outlook.
The achievements proclaimed in the first statement thus set the question of the second. Taken together they reflect two characteristic facets of democracy: General education, as education for an informed responsible life in our society, has chiefly to do with the second of these questions, the question of common standards and common pur- poses. Taken as a whole, education seeks to do two things: Obviously these two ends are not wholly separable even in idea much less can preparation for them be wholly separate. Who docs not recall from school or college some small, seemingly quite minor subject which through a teacher or on reflection took on inclusive meaning?
Yet to analyze is inevitably to separate what in fact clings together, and this report on general education will perforce deal mainly with preparation for life in the broad sense of completeness as a human being, rather than in the narrower sense of competence in a particular lot. Illogically enough, such being its purpose, it fails to deal with the primary school and, still more illogically, with infancy surely the times in life when education is nothing if not general.
But as for infancy, it is doubtful whether a group of professors would show at their best on that subject, and as for the primary school, its relatively clear, definite function does not at least present the confusing choices which come up later. Apart from the size of primary classes and the indefensible practice of paying teachers less and less the younger the class that they teach, a practice related neither to the difficulty nor to the importance of their work, we have, moreover, the strong impression that pri- mary education in the United States is more satisfactory than either secondary or higher education.
In any case, what we have to say will, rightly or wrongly, be confined to the high school and college, though we shall turn briefly at the end to adult education and the more imponderable, if not less formative, realm of radio and movie. We can claim neither completeness 4 Education in the United States nor originality. The size of the subject precludes the former, and its character, at once ageless and contemporary, the latter. Much has lately been written on general education, and several colleges and universities have taken new steps toward carrying it out. What usefulness this report may have will therefore not be of a pioneering kind but because it shares a widespread and as one thinks back over the history of education surely an ancient concern.
Why has this concern become so strong in late years? Among many reasons three stand out: It is hard to say whether the effect of these changes has been chiefly to estrange future citizens from one another because of the very different backgrounds and forms of training from which they take up their different parts in life, or, because such masses of students have been involved, whether it has not been rather toward a stiff uniformity cramping the individual's best de- velopment. Certainly both forces have been at work. The ques- tion has therefore become more and more insistent: It is not too much to say that the very character of our society will be affected by the answer to that question.
It is impossible to talk about general education except against this background of growth and change. We shall begin with what seem on the whole the clearer of these shaping forces, dis- cussing here the growth of our educational system and the effects of society on it, and leaving to the next chapter the partic- ularly vexed and murky question of the nature and organization of modern knowledge. The unparalleled growth one could almost say eruption of our educational system, taking place as it has while our way of life was itself undergoing still vaster changes, is like a mathe- 5 General Education in a Free Society matical problem in which new unknowns are being constantly introduced or like a house under construction for which the specifications are forever changing.
To have embarked toward the ideal of free secondary education was surely to cut out work enough. But to have done so when life was always raising new demands, when the prospects facing young people were never stable, and when the very goals of education had therefore to be constantly revised, was to undertake more even than was bar- gained for. The wonder is not that our schools and colleges have in some ways failed; on the contrary, it is that they have suc- ceeded as they have.
Restated, then, the background of general education involves two far-reaching questions: We shall say a few words, necessar- ily inadequate, of each. Growth of the Schools THE movement toward universal education, inaugurated in a few states before the middle of the last century by such prophetic figures as Horace Mann and Henry Barnard, had borne fruit by the end of the century when free public education had been established in every state and free secondary education in most. The momentum thereafter steadily mounted, particularly in the years following the last war.
The period of schooling was ad- vanced to sixteen, new buildings went up everywhere, the cur- riculum was enormously enlarged, and armies of teachers were recruited for the swelling ranks of pupils. As the slender-spired white wooden church symbolized an earlier period, so in count- less towns across the continent the less aspiring but more tolerant and more embracing high-school building symbolized this era.
The year , just before the movement got strongly under 6 Education in the United States way, offers a good point of contrast. In the seventy years be- tween then and the population slightly more than tripled. Thus, while the general population was increasing three times over, the enrollment of high schools was being multiplied about ninety times and that of colleges about thirty times. And the end is not yet. Even now one young person in six fails to reach high school, and half of those who enter drop out before the end. It will have been noted that in three fourths of those who attended high school went on to college.
The high school's function was therefore clear; it was quite simply to pre- pare for college.
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Its curriculum, membership, and general at- mosphere were all dominated by that purpose. Those who went to high school were therefore a fairly homogeneous group, on the whole children of well-to-do families looking forward to the learned professions or to leadership in politics or trade. If in- cluded among them were doubtless a certain proportion of chil- dren of poorer families, still these cherished the same ambitions, probably all the more intensely. They were the proverbially ambitious poor boys, eager to rise in the world and no doubt destined in most cases to do so. No one was compelled to stay in high school, and if you could not stand the pace, you fell out.
The result was that the curriculum, if narrow and rigid by mod- ern standards, was compact, testing, and absolutely clear in its intention. The teachers, hardly more numerous as a class than college teachers, were themselves commonly college men, shar- 1 About one third were in university-extension courses. But by another seventy years how great was the change from this decorous, self-contained system. The ninetyfold increase in numbers observed above, a convulsion as powerful as an earth- quake, was of course the controlling fact.
But had this increase, vast as it has been, meant simply a ninetyfold multiplication of the old plan and kind of schooling, it would have been compara- tively minor. Far outshadowing in importance this mere numeri- cal increase is the gradual change which it has brought about in the whole character of the high school and in its function toward American society.
This more significant, more inward change has followed quite simply from the fact that, instead of looking forward to college, three fourths of the students now look forward directly to work. Except for a small minority, the high school has therefore ceased to be a preparatory school in the old sense of the word. In so far as it is preparatory, it prepares not for college but for life.
The consequences of this transformation for every phase of the high school are incalculable and by no means yet fully worked out. This mighty and far-reaching fact in itself gives rise to one of the main themes of this report a theme to be set forth more fully at the end of the chapter and discussed at length thereafter: And, more important still, how can these two groups, despite their different interests, achieve from their education some common and binding understanding of the society which they will possess in common?
But instead of pursuing this question now, it is worth observing 8 Education in the United States somewhat more exactly what this new part is which the high school has been called on to play. It is, in essence, the incom- parably difficult task of meeting, in ways which they severally respect and will respond to, masses of students of every conceiv- able shade of intelligence, background, means, interest, and ex- pectation.
Unlike the old high school in which no one was com- pelled to stay if he could not or did not wish to do the work, the modern high school must find place for every kind of student whatever his hopes and taknts. It cannot justly fail to adapt itself, within reason, to any. No argument is being attempted here for what has been called, usually scornfully, at an earlier stage "the child-centered school.
Fu- ture generations will probably think that, much as has already been done, it is only a beginning. The tendency is always to strike a somewhat colorless mean, too fast for the slow, too slow for the fast. The ideal is a system which shall be as fair to the fast as to the slow, to the hand-minded as to the book-minded, but which, while meeting the separate needs of each, shall yet foster that fellow feeling between human being and human being which is the deepest root of democracy.
But already, it hardly need be said, these inescapable differ- ences among students have brought about a huge increase in the number and kind of subjects taught in high school. That change, to be sure, has not taken place to anything like the same extent in small country high schools with few teachers and fewer facilities, which are still the majority, though they no longer have the majority of pupils. But even here the widespread movement toward consolidating small country schools in a central school to which pupils come from round about has made possible a very great enlargement of courses.
It is therefore of some importance to see why such an enlargement is a great gain, but also what difficulties it raises. The heart of the question is what is meant by difference of 9 General Education in a Free Society intelligence. For it is obviously for this reason that some students are at home in the traditional subjects, while others flounder and fail. It has been estimated that algebra, for instance, is success- fully taught to fourteen-year-olds of slightly superior gifts but that, as now taught at least, it is more or less meaningless to fully half of the age group.
What does such a fact mean?
Education in a Free Society
The answer if it could be fully known would certainly be most complex, and no claim is made here to knowing it. But this much seems clear: A child brought up where books are read, interests are in the air, and promptings everywhere solicit his own small explorations will evidently stand a better chance of exhibiting intelligence, as our society judges it, than one who has felt no such promptings.
But who can say that at birth the one child was more promising than the other? One approaches here a realm of causation doubly shaped by physical accident and the visible hand of the social order. The result is that what passes for intelli- gence is certainly in part the same thing as opportunity, by which is meant the whole complex of surroundings which help to shape a child's view of the world and of his place in it. It was said that the high school is morally obliged to adapt itself to every kind of student. The view of intelligence just set forth is the ground of this duty.
For assuming that a young person's abilities to some extent reflect his surroundings and both together color his hopes of life and expectations of himself, then a truly democratic education must perforce try to equalize opportunity by counteracting impediments. But it cannot do so simply by offering the conventional academic subjects to all students indiscriminately.
These, again as now taught at least, are too alien to the backgrounds of most students to be anything like generally effective in breaking down the barriers of circum- stance. Something closer to their experience is needed which, by meeting them halfway, will lead them out and beyond them- selves. That is not the case, to be sure, with the very gifted. Their vivid minds, like powerful currents, overleap all breaks do Education in the United States between life and study, supplying by imagination what they have missed in experience. Much has been written, and rightly so, about the need of seeing to it that such students, whatever their means, find their path clear to the topmost reaches of education.
We shall return to the subject later. Certainly few subjects touch more closely the spirit of democratic education. But democracy is not only opportunity for the able. It is equally betterment for the average, both the immediate betterment which can be gained in a single generation and the slower groundswell of betterment which works through generations.
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Hence the task of the high school is not merely to speed the bright boy to the top. It is at least as much so far as numbers are concerned, far more so to widen the horizons of ordinary students that they and, still more, their children will encounter fewer of the obstacles that cramp achievement. To return then to the profusion of courses in the modern high school, its justification is by no means wholly practical: The justification is quite as much one of method: Manual training, business training, work in mechanics and agri- culture, courses in health and home economics these and a thousand more functional adaptations of the older disciplines, such as general mathematics instead of algebra and geometry, discussion courses instead of composition and literature, study of work and government in the United States instead of formal his- tory all reflect in part at least the search for the right means of influencing the great mass of students who, through bent or background or both, learn little from the conventional studies.
This search will continue and will almost certainly produce a yet greater diversity. As was said, there is no solution simply in striking a dull average, satisfactory to neither the quick nor the slow. Too little has been done for the slow especially those who in simpler times would have left school early and gained through work the kind of self-respect and upstandingness which they find hard to gain from books. The movement toward some do General Education in a Free Society form of national or community service clearly owes some of its support to the feeling that the schools have failed with these young people.
But be that as it may, the present diversity of in- struction in the high school reflects dimly like a clouded mirror the diversity of our society itself, and it will not be adequate until it catches the image more exactly. Put thus as the reflection of modern life, this growth of the curriculum raises again, but more clearly now, the main problem of this report, which has to do, not with the thousand influences dividing man from man, but with the necessary bonds and com- mon ground between them. Democracy, however much by en- suring the right to differ it may foster difference particularly in a technological age which further encourages division of function and hence difference of outlook yet depends equally on the binding ties of common standards.
It probably depends more heavily on these ties than does any other kind of society precisely because the divisive forces within it are so strong. But, from what has been said, it is clear that this task of implanting common ties is far from simple. The very disparity between students which has forced the high school to its expanded cur- riculum means that there is no single form of instruction that can reach all equally.
Hence, even if it could be agreed what stand- ards Americans have in common, the task of interpreting these to students of different ages, gifts, and interests must still be im- mense. Again, the fact that some students prolong their educa- tion far beyond high school, while the great majority do not, could become to some extent has already become a strongly dividing force.
For to the degree that high schools try to prepare the majority for early entrance into active life by giving them all sorts of practical, immediately effective training, to that de- gree something like a chasm opens between them and the others whose education is longer. And in this chasm are the possibilities of misunderstanding and class distinction. But to see these difficulties is to grasp more firmly what must be the char- acter of general education.
It must be at once, as it were, horizontal, in the sense of uniting students of similar ages, and also perpendicular, in the sense of providing a strand that Education in the United States will run through both high school and college, uniting different ages. Finally, before leaving the growth of the high school, it is worth adding a few words on a subject closely related to the ex- pansion of the curriculum, the course-unit system. It has this re- lation to the curriculum because it is the mechanism whereby courses of every kind are legitimatized, put on equal footing, and made available for tabulation.
A unit represents a year's work in one subject, and for graduation a student offers sixteen such units or fifteen when four years of English are mysteriously counted as three. But it is important to note that he may not haphazardly combine any courses to make up this total. On the contrary, his choice is strictly limited by the kind of diploma for which he is aiming. Large high schools commonly offer several different over-all courses: Of these the general course alone leaves the student comparatively free; the others all specify fairly exactly the range of subjects from which he shall choose.
A few conclusions therefore follow about the course-unit system. It is in practice the instrument by which the great diversity of gifts and interests among students is matched by an equal diversity of instruction. Hence the profusion of courses, all equally counting as one unit, to which it has led. Then, it resembles the system of "concentrating" or "majoring" in a given subject which is in force in most colleges, in that it tends to increase rather than to mitigate these differences in students.
For, being combined with a series of restrictions on choice of subjects, it in effect divides the high school into a number of lesser schools which, at least so far as the curriculum is concerned, are virtually sealed off from one another. The course-unit system is thus in practice a divisive force in the high school. And because it encourages students to think of their studies as a series of blocks, each a unit complete in itself and separable from all others, it has a somewhat similar effect on the individual student also.
That is, it divides his work into compart- ments, some of which may be related to others before or after, but many of which are simply islands of experience, connecting 13 General Education in a Free Society with nothing, leading to nothing. It is noteworthy that European schools follow a quite different scheme. Students there take the same six or seven subjects concurrently through successive years, though with different emphasis and expense of time in any given year.
The intention evidently is to keep all subjects steadily be- fore the student as he matures, in the hope of giving his work both sequence and roundedness. In our system the heaping up of requirements for any one of the diplomas gives some such thread of sequence but without adequate roundedness and at the expense, as has been said, of dividing the high school into virtually autono- mous groups.
Within limits, this dispersion and dividing of work both in the high school as a whole and in the case of any single student is no doubt desirable. The differences between students make it even to some extent inevitable. Seen in perspective, the course-unit system reflects more clearly than anything else simply the titanic growth of the high school. It has been a method of setting standards and defining functions, almost of setting up inter- changeable parts.
Tasks have had to be known in advance if teachers were to be trained for them; students have had to be provided with universally recognizable records. The whole vast machinery of the high school has necessarily veered toward standardization as the alternative to chaos. Yet the system has its serious dangers. From what has been said these will appear chiefly two: The first of these two points has been made already. The root idea of general education is as a balance and counterpoise to the forces which divide group from group within the high school and the high school from the col- lege. But in so far as general education is also conceived as an organic strand running through the successive years of high school and college, then it should play the same binding, unifying part for the individual as well.
Certainly it will fail of its full function unless it does so. But, as was said at the start, this growth, though revolutionary, has not alone guided its development or prescribed its characteristic form. The unceasing, ever-faster process of change that has gone on simul- taneously in outer society, by creating new conditions the effects of which have flowed back over the high school like a flood, has been at least equally shaping.
Though it is possible to do even less justice here to this huge subject, still an attempt must be made to suggest something of its importance.
The great underlying fact to which every phase of the ques- tion in some way goes back is the change of the United States, during the period which we have been considering, from a mainly agricultural to a mainly urban and industrial nation. The familiar statistics hardly need repeating in detail. From the turn of the century to , the number of people living in communities of twenty-five hundred or more rose from about 40 to 56 per cent.
Fostered by quick means of transportation, great metropolitan districts came into being, each embracing one or more central cities with satellite towns and farming lands, and these, some one hundred and forty in number, contain nearly half the population. Meanwhile, the wealth invested in industries increased many times over and their output at an even faster rate. Industrializa- tion became increasingly a national phenomenon, with the South and Far West affected in only less degree than the older sections of the East and Middle West, and with the war tending to erase even these disparities.
To an amazing degree people's environ- ment has come to consist of machines and man-made things, much as the environment of animals is made up of natural objects and growing things. Even the farmer and his wife have mechanized their work, go to town in a car, and hear the voice of the city from the radio.
Of the two, the country has fared far the less well, and because education is a state and local responsibility, those states which are largely rural, less industrialized, and less wealthy have been at a very great dis- advantage in comparison with their richer and more urban neigh- bors.
The birth rate being higher in the country than in the city, the poorer states face the further disadvantage of having a relatively higher proportion of children to educate. South Carolina, for instance, has twice the proportion of children to adults as Los Angeles county; yet Los Angeles has five times the wealth available for education. Indeed, if South Carolina spent its entire state budget for education, it would still be spend- ing less per pupil than do several states.
Such disparities have roused the current movement to obtain federal support for education. The question is troublesome. On the one side is the evident fact that in no sphere is local and state concern more natural or rightly stronger than in education. It is the sphere next removed from the family itself, touching parents and communities in their closest interests. Hence in no sphere is remote control less desirable. On the other side is the equally evident fact that the nation at large has no less concern for the condition of its young people. Americans move about more than any people on earth.
Country children go to the city, young people brought up in one section move to another. The quality of education in one state therefore affects all other states. It fol- lows that the federal government has an inescapable duty toward education, the more so because the income tax is increasingly draining from the states the funds by which education can be supported.
It has in fact recognized this duty, though spasmodically and for the most part in conjunction with other aims, as in the Civilian Conservation Corps, which was partly educational in function, 16 Education in the United States in the National Youth Administration, which was more fully so, and even as early as the Smith-Hughes Act of furthering vocational training.
The war has brought other steps of the same ambiguous kind, in the use of schools and colleges for training and in educational provisions for veterans. Nothing is more to be wished than that the whole tangled subject be clarified and a solution found which shall do justice at once to the clear need for local and state control and yet to the equally clear obligation of the federal government toward those states which cannot now support anything like an adequate system of schooling.
There is a further question whether the best interests of the nation, in both peace and war, would not be served by federal subvention of very able students. The difference of educational opportunity as between country and city thus appears in part as a difference between state and state.
But it appears also as a difference within any given state, and this whole question of the relative advantages of the country and the city child leads in turn to a basic and intensely interesting question concerning the larger role of the modern school. In simpler times, still partly perpetuated in small towns and in the country, schooling, far from being the whole of education, was only one among several influences at least as strong, probably stronger.
First and strongest was the family, usually large, living together in a household where each member had tasks and all watched and learned the others' tasks. Then, there was the world of crops, animals, and wild nature, the green or snowy margin ever at the door, a standing lure to learning and doing. In addi- tion were the relatively clear, settled standards of less changing times, those of the family first of all, but hardly less those of the community of small-town or country neighbors. And finally there was the more or less tight bond of the church. By tempera- ment most city-bred moderns probably tend either to idealize or to disparage these conditions.
Certainly it is hard to judge them accurately. Moreover, they differed enormously from place to place. It is a far cry indeed from the secure small towns de- scribed by Sarah Orne Jewett to the more cheerless of the Mis- sissippi settlements visited by Huckleberry Finn. We are not 17 General Education in a Free Society concerned here to judge these conditions but simply to point out that, for better or worse, the older school was as the country school to some extent still is strictly limited in function because other influences were so strong.
To conclude with the country school, its disadvantage as com- pared with the city school is therefore less great than might ap- pear at first sight. For the latter's ever- widening scope which now extends to health, athletics, extracurricular activities of all kinds, counseling, placement, and even in some cases to staying open all day and all year as a meeting ground and place of or- ganized doings is in part simply a compensation for the re- strictions of city life.
The country school, on the other hand, having to supply no such compensations, has less call to be so elaborate. Yet it is true that the country school has serious needs. As was noted, many country children eventually find their way to the city, where more complex conditions await them and they must compete for all kinds of jobs. Moreover, farming itself has become increasingly technical, both as a science and in the use of machines.
When one reflects that the majority of American high schools are still small rural schools of five or six teachers and less than one hundred and thirty pupils, it is evident that enormous tasks are to be done. These are mostly tasks of consolidation and redistricting and to some extent of specializing. Consolidation of outlying schools in a central school makes possible a range of courses much more nearly equal to the actual differences among pupils than anything that a small school can offer.
Specializing means the setting up in one district of a school strong in certain subjects and, in another district, of one strong in others. There are evident dangers and difficulties in such a scheme: But if the country child is to crown his many native advantages by a formal education in any way equal to that of his city cousin which is to say, if his advantages are to be of the use to him and to the nation that they might be then some such steps must be carried forward in all parts of the country as fully as they have been carried forward already in some. That possi- bility in turn leads back to the question of federal support.
But the city, with all its familiar complexities and contradictions, its unity yet discord, its efficiency yet waste, its opportunity yet frustration, is after all the characteristic feature of the times, and it is the city high school which puts most neatly the current problems of education. These spring in part from the weakening or loss of precisely those things which the country school can assume: They reflect in part also the growth of entirely new influences, comparative freedom from work, readier access to books, ideas, and music, the indiscriminate presence of the movies, radio, and pulp magazines.
Not least im- portant, they reflect the economic and cultural schisms within the seeming unity of the city, schisms which are all the greater if one reckons as part of the city the industrial and residential areas around it. And with everything else they reflect the weight of sheer numbers. There is of course no such thing as the typical city high school.
But certain broad types can be distinguished. To stay in business, private schools would have to quickly adjust to the buyers of educational services. Who in society—the parent or the state—is in a better position to know the educational needs of a child? Yet, public schooling virtually deprives parents of this right.
The public school can even become a machine to shape the child, as John Stuart Mill wrote: A general state education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government…. This leads to a "battle" for power over the school authority. Parents must send their children to school, either to a private school or to the one state school designated in the district.
And private schools today are no real escape because they must meet state standards and regulations, and parents must first pay for public schooling. Such coercion is no teaching device. Only those who wish to learn can or ever will do so. One only needs to return to the example of books and magazines to realize the alarming condition of public education. Yet, this is exactly the case in public schooling, and it is a far cry from the education to be expected in a truly free society. If a free society is to survive, private property as the means of producing goods and services must survive.
In a free society, a student is free to choose his educators. Rothbard, Education, Free and Compulsory, Wichita: And just as Americans would not grant government the authority to run their Sunday schools, so they should not grant government the authority to run their schools Monday through Friday. Parents and guardians have a right to direct the education of their children. Of course, if parents neglect or abuse their children, they can and should be prosecuted, and legitimate laws are on the books to this effect. Further, parents, guardians, and citizens in general have a moral right to use their wealth as they judge best.
Accordingly, they have a moral right and should have a legal right to patronize or not patronize a given school, to fund or not fund a given educational institution—and no one has a moral right or properly a legal right to force them to patronize or fund one of which they disapprove. These are relatively straightforward applications of the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness—the rights on which America was founded.
But the educational system in America today systematically ignores and violates these rights. It involves force from top to bottom: The state forces children to attend its schools or state-approved alternatives. It forces taxpayers—whether or not they use the schools—to pay for them. It dictates what is taught in the classroom through its mandatory curriculum.
And it dictates how teachers are to teach the content, through its requirement and control of teacher certification.