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Our schools are failing not because of what happens in the classroom, but because of what happens—or more to the point, what doesn’t happen—at the dinner table. If we wish to be a serious people, then we must bolster our institutions with the power to humanize and domesticate the bedlam within us all.
In her new book, Ilana M. Horwitz shows how public schools are both more formative and more limited than is often assumed. While they serve an important role in the academic and social formation of students, schools stand as just one institution among many in contributing to student outcomes. As we emerge from the significant educational disruptions occasioned by the COVID pandemic, Horwitz’s research suggests that we must work toward rebuilding schools and other institutions alike.
In Carson v. Makin, the Supreme Court held that Maine’s exclusion of faith-based schools from a tuition assistance program for students in rural districts violated the Free Exercise Clause. The case, which is in many ways the culmination of a battle for equal treatment of faith-based schools spanning more than a century and a half, has significant implications for education policy.
Today, in Part I of this essay, I explain critical race theory and show how many of its ideas have made their way into public schools across the country, prompting a backlash that has led to the introduction of anti-CRT education regulations in many states. CRT views values like “objectivity” as tools of oppression. It’s clear that many public schools are indeed incorporating plenty of CRT-inspired ideas like these in their curricula.
Our schools of business should be places where the whole academic community, which includes administrators, faculty, and the students themselves, can work together towards educating tomorrow’s business leaders, cultivating the very best in them. We should not allow the cheating subculture’s self-righteous and narcissistic agenda to undermine the higher quest for excellence.
Our nation’s morally formative institutions are weak and weakening further, thanks in no small part to the enormously destructive effects of social media. The single type of institution best suited to resist these and other pressures of our times is the mission-driven, tech-skeptical K–12 school. The successes of our best countercultural colleges and universities, viewed in the light of Yuval Levin’s invaluable work on the nature of institutions, show us how the incentive structures of an excellent K–12 school make it the formative institution our time needs most.
The lastingness of each person’s reality as male or female is so integral to the faith’s architecture, that to deny it—even to equivocate about it—is to undermine Catholic faith itself. No Catholic institution should risk that effect.
Catholic schools, along with other faith-based schools, are a vital gift to the families they serve and to our country. America’s COVID-19 relief efforts should support the educational choices of all families and work to save Catholic schools.
The classical school approach offers a fundamentally different vision of education that families fed up with a factory approach to learning find compelling.
Most other nations with advanced levels of universal schooling provide public support to faith-based schools with no evident harm to their social fabric and with considerably less conflict over schooling. The time has come for the United States to adopt principled pluralism as the fundamental and equitable structure of our education system.
Until policy-makers and the public realize the factual and moral bankruptcy of transgender ideology, pressure will continue to mount to normalize the tragically abnormal.
Many of our schools are breeding grounds for cynicism. Schools need to be “thick” institutions that tutor students’ deep human needs of happiness, friendship, approval, and rootedness.
To create a society in which human beings can flourish, we must support child-raising families, schools that intentionally cultivate the intellectual and moral virtues, and local church communities. The second of a two-part series.
Same-sex marriage endangers not only religious liberty, but also the school choice movement. We need new laws to protect schools from being forced to adopt sexual orientation nondiscrimination policies in order to be eligible for voucher, tax credit/deduction, or educational savings account programs.
Truth has been relegated to a secondary position in the nation’s public schools, universities, political forums, and public squares.
More evidence from Canada of the danger of allowing the endorsement of same-sex marriage to become a prerequisite to participation in public life.
A recent meta-analysis of 90 studies on religious private schools, traditional public schools, and charter schools shows that students perform best academically and behaviorally when they attend religious private schools.
Paradoxically, the progressive effort to overcome constitutional limits on government power—purportedly justified on grounds of efficiency—hardly seems to have enabled government to govern well. Instead, the unwieldy and often conflictual morass of agencies and officials in the administrative state has more often than not resulted in governmental paralysis, perhaps thankfully leaving Americans as ungovernable as we have always been.
Today we might instinctively look at Nazi criteria for death as utterly baseless, but at the time seasoned medical professionals regarded them as reasonable. To have a sense of history is to grasp the arbitrariness of such criteria. When it comes to killing patients, there is no way to get the criteria just right because the stamp of medical approval sends a social message that there is a category of persons who should not exist.
As the experience of many nations around the world shows, constitutions are easily dissolved, and constitutional order lost, when citizens allow their leaders to violate their charter to achieve partisan goals. When that happens, the delicate system of checks and balances usually gives way to an oppressive one-party rule. 
Living for others is hard for everyone, in any stage of life. And in a culture that exalts the autonomous self, it is hard to remember that sacrifice is the only path to flourishing.
Smith's book is an excellent reminder that conservatives should never prioritize an idealized individual or nation. Rather, we must work to preserve those institutions that point us to better lives.
Haidt’s work points us toward reclaiming childhood. Let’s go further and reclaim our humanity.
Here are our editors' favorite essays on education, liberal arts, the university, and flourishing in college and in life.