Every school, whether intentionally or not, teaches more than academic subjects. Simply participating in the daily life of a school, its routines and how it justifies and enforces them, its norms for relationships among pupils (of the same age and of different ages) and between youth and adults, the ways[Read More…]
Tag: school choice and democracy
School choice is good for democracy
The belief that a society or a nation can be unified – its barriers of religion, class, and race broken down – by bringing its children together in common schools that express a lowest-common-denominator vision of national life is a persistent theme throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and has[Read More…]
It’s the school, not the curriculum, that fosters real citizenship
Editor’s note: Critics often suggest that expanding school choice to include private, faith-based schools will erode democracy. But noted school choice expert Charles Glenn says the evidence shows the opposite – that students are more likely to become engaged citizens if they attend schools where they feel a sense of[Read More…]
Expanded school choice will strengthen society and democracy, not undermine it
Valerie Strauss recently reprinted a commentary on her Washington Post blog, Answer Sheet, from Ann Geiger, a former Orange County, Fla. school board member, who asserted that empowering parents to select their child’s school is undermining our country’s religious and social cohesion. Geiger quotes extensively from Ross Douthat’s recent New York[Read More…]