In an op-ed today on education reform, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal writes, “No one cares more, and knows better, about children than the parents who bore and raised them.”
This is not an undisputed point in American politics today. In fact, there’s much energy behind the contrary notion: that government and experts in various fields need to protect children from their misguided and ignorant parents.
Of course there are bad and abusive parents, and there is a public responsibility to protect children from abuse. But governments regularly overreach in this regard. (Consider the case of my home county, which threatened to take two kids away from their parents because the parents let the kids walk home.)
And you can see the Left increasingly attacking things like homeschooling. The broader education debate is largely this fight: do we trust parents, or do we need to give more authority to bureaucrats and educational industry experts
Jindal knows that this tension exists. In the education policy paper he released today, he writes:
Jindal, as an example, writes: “In Louisiana, a former leader of that state’s teachers’ union publicly stated that low-income parents have ‘no clue’ how to choose schools for their children.”
Today, at a lunch at the Heritage Foundation unveiling the paper, Jindal advocated “a bottom-up approach that trusts parents” and painted his enemies as those who “simply don’t trust parents.”
This is an important split to understand, because it highlights the real tension in American politics today. The culture war could be a cultural truce, I believe, if we limit government’s role in people’s private affairs, and let a pluralism thrive.
There’s little indication that the Left has an appetite for pluralism today, though, giving Jindal’s side an uphill climb.
