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The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues

Abstract

In 1923 and 1925, respectively, the U.S. Supreme Court rulings in Meyer v. Nebraska and Pierce v. Society of Sisters established limits on the ability of government to constrain what children’s education contains and where it occurs. The Court recognized the “right” of parents to exercise basic control over those things. One hundred years later, we are seeing a renewed emphasis on “parental rights,” both with booming growth of “school choice” programs that allow government-connected funding to follow children to educational options their parents select and efforts to constrain what public schools do. The position of conservatives on such parental rights appears to have reversed between 1924 and 2024: against them then, for them today. This paper examines the similarities in the historical moments of the 1920s and 2020s, most notably the effects of society-jarring shocks—the First World War and the COVID-19 pandemic—that shook faith in major institutions but might have also opened the floodgates for social changes that were already approaching. It then discusses how and why conservative responses changed from efforts to exert control, leading to the Meyer and Pierce decisions, to support for programs enabling private education choice. Using Albert O. Hirschman’s framework, it looks at why the conservative response appears to have moved from voice to exit, and using contemporary evidence speculates whether that would continue were conservatives empowered to control public education.

Volume

26

Issue

1

Start Page

359

Faculty Editor

Maimon Schwarzschild

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