The Crusade Against Ignorance? Supreme Court Rules for Opting Out

The Supreme Court has ruled again for parents’ religious liberty in public schools. This verdict is not surprising as the practice of passing along to one’s children one’s own religious beliefs gets a good deal of protection from the Constitution. Scholars often call it the “first liberty,” and it is indeed the first one named in the Bill of Rights.

But when parents’ religious beliefs are robustly protected, as in this court case, does that threaten a school’s civic mission? That is, after all, public education’s founding purpose — to keep the republic. This requires “a crusade against ignorance,” Jefferson wrote.

Public schools teach academic content — the “three Rs” but many other subjects, too, such as history, geology, and algebra. This kind of knowledge isn’t “merely academic,” as some claim. Rather, it gets lots of practical, civic work done. Most important, such knowledge provides a shared standard for distinguishing truth from fiction, information from disinformation, and journalism from gossip.

This orders our collective life from juries to markets and legislatures and lays the groundwork for all kinds of communication and decision making. Parents send their kids to school to learn this curriculum. Then conflicts arise. The journalist Walter Lippmann observed long ago that curriculum controversies “are among the bitterest political struggles which now divide the nations.”

https://www.postalley.org/2025/07/20/the-crusade-against-ignorance-supreme-court-rules-for-opting-out/