Classical Christian Schools Shining Alternative to Public Education

If you were to pick an episode at random of Aaron Sorkin’s 1999–2006 political drama The West Wing and watch it from beginning to end, you’d have about a one in three chance of hearing a soaring oration extolling the virtues of American public schools and lamenting their desecration at the hands of Republican lawmakers. From the lips of Rob Lowe or Martin Sheen you would hear, accompanied by a triumphant orchestral theme, that public schools are the last best hope of this country, that they ought to be gilded marble palaces with budgets that would make a Saudi prince green with envy, and that the average teacher should be outearning professional athletes and pop stars. This represents what has been more or less the consensus view on the left concerning public education for at least a hundred years. It is the master key, the philosopher’s stone, the universal panacea.

Precisely the opposite is true. There are few permutations of the moral, intellectual, and social perfidy infecting American culture and politics today that cannot be laid, in some sense or another, at the feet of public schools. By making this argument, I do not mean to insult public-school teachers, only to criticize the conditions under which they work.

About the Author

Cameron Hilditch

Cameron Hilditch was a 2020-2021 William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism at National Review Institute.

Featured Tags

Manage following

Education

If you were to pick an episode at random of Aaron Sorkin’s 1999–2006 political drama The West Wing and watch it from beginning to end, you’d have about a one in three chance of hearing a soaring oration extolling the virtues of American public schools and lamenting their desecration at the hands of Republican lawmakers. From the lips of Rob Lowe or Martin Sheen you would hear, accompanied by a triumphant orchestral theme, that public schools are the last best hope of this country, that they ought to be gilded marble palaces with budgets that would make a Saudi prince green with envy, and that the average teacher should be outearning professional athletes and pop stars. This represents what has been more or less the consensus view on the left concerning public education for at least a hundred years. It is the master key, the philosopher’s stone, the universal panacea.

Precisely the opposite is true. There are few permutations of the moral, intellectual, and social perfidy infecting American culture and politics today that cannot be laid, in some sense or another, at the feet of public schools. By making this argument, I do not mean to insult public-school teachers, only to criticize the conditions under which they work.