European Journal for Education Law and Policy 6: 9–14, 2002. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 9 Sharing responsibility for education: Families, government, and educators Charles L. Glenn Boston University, MA, USA Midwestern Lutherans in the United States have a reputation for being calm and unexcitable, slow to become involved in political issues, but eighty years ago they became mobilized in a bitter struggle for their children. In a campaign whose slogan was the question, “Whose is the child?” they were opposing a proposed amendment to the state Constitution requiring that all children between the ages of 5 and 16 attend public schools rather than religious schools. The sponsors of the amendment argued that abolishing Roman Catholic and Lutheran and Dutch Calvinist schools “would eliminate much of the suspicion and bitterness between people of different religious beliefs.” Religious schools, they charged, existed “only to perpetuate some foreign language, custom or creed.” Many Michigan voters, or their parents and grandparents, in fact came from countries where suspicion and bitterness between Catholics and Protestants had long been stoked, not by the existence of faith-based schools, but by efforts to require all children to attend a single, state-controlled system. The great Dutch immigration of the nineteenth century, for example, was in part a reaction of orthodox Protestant parents to what was then a monopolistic state system in the Netherlands forcing their children to attend schools teaching a version of Christianity from which sin and salvation had been surgically removed. In Michigan and other American states, in 1920, there was a real possibility that non-public schools would be outlawed, as in fact they were in Oregon. And so, Lutherans in the state distributed 50,000 campaign buttons to raise a challenging question that would be answered definitively by the United States Supreme Court five years later: parents, not the State, bear the primary right and the primary respon- sibility to prepare children for their future as adults. “The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose,” the Court wrote in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, striking down the Oregon law, “excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept teaching from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.” “The child is not the mere creature of the state” ... that principle, stated with such confidence 80 years ago and reiterated, in one way or another, in various international covenants and in a number of European constitutions, has not always been accepted as self-evident. During the radical phase of the French Revolution, for example, Danton and others insisted that the child did belong to the state (la République) rather than to his benighted parents, and, of course, Plato had insisted on that two thousand years earlier when constructing his just “city in speech.” Those who value freedom should never take education for granted. There can be no doubt that education is often profoundly liberating, both for individuals and for whole peoples, and that – in general – a well-educated population is more likely to insist upon participating in the polit- ical process. Some observers have attributed the fall of communist domination in Eastern Europe at least in part to the growing education level that resulted from efforts to overtake the West in science and technology; well-educated subjects were no longer willing to be blindly obedient. 1 On the other hand, education controlled by the State has all too often been an instrument of totalitarian rule. There is much at stake, for freedom, in how education is provided, and by whom. The United States Supreme Court made a second point, in 1925, one that has been made again and again in the inter- national covenants and the constitutions that limit the power of the state over education. No question is raised [the Court wrote] concerning the power of the state reasonably to regulate all schools, to inspect, supervise, and examine them, their teachers and pupils, to require that all children of proper age attend some school, that teachers shall be of good moral char- acter and patriotic disposition, that certain studies plainly essential to good citizenship must be taught, and that nothing be taught which is manifestly inimical to the public welfare. Our field of education law and policy is concerned in large part, we might say, with exploring the tensions and accommodations between these two principles: the state’s authority to ensure that children are educated appropriately, and the limits on that authority deriving from the prior rights of parents in a free society. This was the central theme of ELA’s founding conference, in Antwerp, which produced a notable volume on ‘subsidiarity,’ 2 and it has continued to be addressed in much of our work in subsequent years. The task of finding a reasonable accommodation of the interests of the state and of families is made more difficult by the extreme positions taken by some who participate in the debate. On the one hand, we have Libertarians who would have the state abandon entirely its concern and financial support for education, even repealing laws requiring school attendance. 3 On the other, we find Statists insisting that it