Who will raise children? Their parents or the bureaucratic experts?

The fight over school choice is really a battle over a basic question: Who will raise our children?

If parents can choose how and where their children are educated, they are effectively determining how their children will be raised. Education not only affects economically useful skills, such as literacy and numeracy, but also shapes the character of young people by emphasizing certain values and role models. Parents have long recognized the importance of education in character formation, which is why historically, they had large control over who taught their children — and over what they were being taught.