The United States is in a period of moral fragmentation and decay, and the extended family—the primary historical source of moral education—has given way to a nuclear family that is stretched thin and, in many cases, itself fractured. Children now spend less of their formative time inside family networks and more of it in schools, daycares, afterschool programs, and summer camps. Yet cultural conflict and politics have left these places less able to shape character at the very moment their role has grown. This is a problem, and private school choice, while no panacea, is the most practical education-policy response.
By “moral fragmentation and decay,” I mean a weakening of the shared norms that make everyday life and democracy work, such as respect for rules, respect for others, empathy, sympathy, and self-restraint. As these have eroded and society has become more atomized, they’ve contributed to declining social trust, eroding participation in civic and community life, polarization, rising contempt for institutions, and more disorder and conflict in the places where people work and learn.
These shifts affect children because they develop character through daily habituation, including repeated expectations, modeled behavior, consistent consequences, and the peer cultures that form around them. A child’s “moral education” is therefore inseparable from the environments where that child spends the most time.
The biggest change is the transformation of family life. Americans still have devoted, loving parents, but the network that once made moral formation easier and more consistent has splintered. Geographic mobility separates grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who used to be present in daily life. Household structure is also less stable for many children, with a large share born to unmarried parents and many experiencing divorce or separation. Meanwhile, the pressures on parents’ time and attention are significant: dual-earner schedules, long commutes, and a digital environment that competes with, and often corrodes, family life rather than supporting it. When adult time, adult presence, and intergenerational reinforcement decline, the work of character formation becomes harder to sustain.
As family life has changed, the time-allocation of childhood has shifted toward institutions, a shift that’s visible in rough hour-counts. Consider two early-childhood pathways. A child cared for primarily by family members and attending half-day preschool from ages three to five might accumulate something like 18,000 hours embedded in family life and 2,000 hours in institutional care by the start of kindergarten. A child who attends full-time daycare and then full-day preschool could be closer to 8,000 hours with family and 12,000 hours in institutional care over the same span. Precise figures vary, of course, but the direction is unmistakable: Long before kindergarten, many children are spending a substantial share of their formative time in institutional settings.
Once kindergarten begins, school alone accounts for roughly 1,000 hours a year for many children, plus before- and after-school care, structured extracurriculars, and summer programs—not to mention tremendous amounts of time on their phones and other devices. By adolescence, many students have spent a majority of their waking weekday hours in places designed primarily for instruction and supervision (or in the case of screen-time, attention and engagement), instead of environments designed for deep, values-centered formation—especially a formation that’s in line with a specific family’s values. Parents are still relevant, of course, but institutional environments now bear much more of the load than in past generations.
If those institutions were well-suited to provide coherent character education, this shift might not matter as much. But in the modern United States, public school systems face three structural constraints that make this difficult.
First, pluralism and politics make agreement on more substantive moral teaching hard to achieve in a public system. Schools tend to default to simple values—be kind, follow directions, wait your turn—because they are the only ones that are politically safe. And as the next paragraph explains, they often struggle to enforce even these. Under these circumstances, schools can’t possibly do all the work that families once did. The result is often a patchwork of implicit values, contested norms, and conflict avoidance.
Second, many schools have moved toward discipline policies that are less corrective and less consistent. Kids learn right and wrong when adults state rules plainly and reliably enforce and model them. When misbehavior is handled unpredictably, or treated as something adults must accommodate rather than correct, students learn that boundaries are flexible and obligations to others are optional. Even when the intent is compassionate, the cumulative effect can weaken the school’s culture of conduct.
Third, modern incentives push schools toward measurable academic outputs and away from sustained character formation. They’re evaluated primarily on test scores and graduation rates, not on the difficult, hard-to-measure, and deeply relational job of building a coherent culture of right and wrong. Teachers receive limited training and support for that sort of work, and school leaders have strong incentives to minimize controversy rather than take clear stances on what virtues a school will explicitly model and promote.
Private schools are less constrained by these forces, which is why programs that give more families the opportunity to attend them are the most promising of available, real-world education policies for offsetting our moral fragmentation and decay. They won’t solve the problems, of course; they’re far too enormous and their causes too many. It’s more like bringing an excavator to a massive landslide—insufficient by itself, but a necessary part of the solution, and therefore important to pursue.
Private school leaders can state a moral mission openly, be it religious or secular, and build a coherent culture around it in ways that district schools often can’t (and in the case of public charter schools, often don’t). They can hire staff who believe in their mission. They can adopt curricula and instructional practices that treat character formation as central rather than as an awkward add-on. And all of this can align with the expectations and values in students’ homes because families opt in rather than being assigned. Moreover, that alignment cuts both ways: If a school drifts from its mission, parents can hold it accountable by leaving.
This is what the moment demands. If moral education requires habituation inside consistent environments, then coherence between families and institutions matters. And a private school community that agrees on what virtues it is trying to cultivate is better positioned to teach them than a public school that has to serve families with fundamentally competing moral commitments.
A predictable objection is that private school choice lacks guardrails. If that’s true, it’s also fixable. Programs can honor family freedom while still protecting the public interest by instituting regulations that require transparency about mission and outcomes, track academic achievement in core subjects, and protect against fraud, abuse, and discrimination (however defined). Some places will require more of these rules, other less. The challenge will be ensuring that any such constraints don’t rob private schools of the qualities that allow for strong character formation.
Another objection is that choice could intensify social fragmentation. If people self-select into different moral communities, won’t we become even more divided? But we already sort—by neighborhood, housing prices, and social networks—and public schools already reflect those divides. More importantly, a pluralistic society is held together by citizens who have developed strong moral foundations, and who can then bring those virtues into a shared civic space, not by forcing everyone into one contested set of values.
In this sense, private school choice is a central response to a central problem. If schools are going to carry more of the moral-formation load in a strained, fragmented society, then leaders should expand the number of schools capable of doing that work effectively and expand access to them. Policies like education savings accounts, vouchers, and tax credit scholarships—especially when well designed and regulated—do just that.
