While the debate over school choice tends to focus on things like whether vouchers weaken public schools by draining away state funds or creaming the best students, most such contentions can be refuted by evidence. But the root of the hostility to school choice among many who see themselves as progressives is really something far deeper, writes Peter Berkowitz in a recent review of four books on school choice. At bottom he finds a disagreement about the ends of education in a free society. What choice opponents really fear, Berkowitz suggests, is that private schools, particularly religious ones, won't educate children to be autonomous free agents who transcend narrow communal and religious attachments. But he would have us resist this impulse to force all citizens into a single mold, to use the state to rescue children from sectarian parents (a strand that Berkowitz names "homogenizing liberalism"). True liberals recognize that there are a variety of human goods, and that the role of the state is not to regulate private affairs in order to liberate individuals from ways of life it deems hidebound, cramped, or fettered (which is to say, lives that incorporate tradition and religion). For more see "Liberal Education," by Peter Berkowitz, The Weekly Standard, May 20, 2002.
