Written by Charles L. Glenn |
Wednesday, September 7, 2022
“The family,” Koganzon writes, “does prepare the child for citizenship, but not by having him rehearse civic principles from a young age. Rather it does so by inoculating him against the worst tendencies of liberalism—the tendencies to be ruled by fashion, custom, and the opinions of the majority.” This essential rootedness is in urgent demand today in a society tossed about by passions that make unbridled democracy a threat to the freedom not only of individuals, but also of families and religious communities.

Parental authority has been an issue of lively and often bitter public debate over the past two centuries, and it seems likely to play a significant role in the 2022 elections and beyond. As I write, a lead story in the Washington Post features a new nationwide organization called “Moms for Liberty,” which insists, “We do NOT CO-­PARENT with the ­GOVERNMENT,” and objects to a variety of practices of local public schools, including mandatory masking and purported indoctrination of children in Critical Race Theory.
Rita Koganzon does not address these current controversies; she discusses how John Locke and other political theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries understood parental authority in relation to wider civic goals. For Thomas Hobbes, it was essential to minimize any threat the family posed to the authority of the sovereign. The child should learn “to appreciate the curbs that the sovereign’s law places on what would otherwise have been their fathers’ complete power over them and to anticipate the day they are freed from their fathers to be subject only to a distant and largely non-­interfering master.”
Hobbes sought to delegitimize the family and other independent sources of formation, thereby creating a monopoly of authority within the state. This vision became public policy during the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution, during subsequent eras of nation-building in Europe and the Americas in the nineteenth century, and under authoritarian regimes worldwide in the twentieth.
Government policies in many countries have sought to use popular schooling to inculcate loyalty to the nation, and to overcome divisions that might arise from community traditions, religious convictions, and other differences among the population. The child belongs to the state, with parents enjoying a temporary guardianship subject to cancellation at any point if they are guilty of providing an understanding of life that is in tension with the state orthodoxy.
Koganzon goes on to discuss the very different role of the family in John Locke’s essays on education, society, and government. Unlike Hobbes, Locke had a pluralistic vision of society. He sought to weaken the role of authority in civic life. And he argued that doing so required emphasizing authority within the family. “It is precisely to provide a hedge against the power of fashion, custom, and opinion,” Koganzon writes, “that Locke re-introduces a narrow and strictly pedagogical form of authority over children into the family after he has delegitimized it everywhere else.”
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Written by Charles L. Glenn |
Thursday, July 7, 2022
We welcome the Supreme Court’s explicit recognition that faith-based schools that retain a strong distinctive mission must not be punished for it. This recognition should, in turn, renew the commitment of those working in or supporting a school with a religious mission to ensure that the mission is evident in every aspect of the school’s life and work.

This week, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in Carson v. Makin that a Maine program that bars “sectarian” schools from receiving state-funded tuition assistance is a violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. The decision is a welcome acknowledgment that religious schools must not be penalized for loyalty to their faith tradition nor tempted by government into conformity with public schools.
Many rural communities in Maine do not have public schools. Since the nineteenth century, Maine has had a program under which families in such communities (more than half of school districts in the state) may receive grants to send their children to public schools in other districts or to private schools of their choosing. But since 1980, state officials have excluded schools that they consider “sectarian” from this program. The state defines a “sectarian school” as “one that is associated with a particular faith or belief system and which, in addition to teaching academic subjects, promotes the faith or belief system with which it is associated and/or presents the material taught through the lens of this faith.” The Carson v. Makin case was brought on behalf of Amy and David Carson and other parents who sought state funding to send their children to private schools that reflected their religious convictions.
In a dissent, in which he was joined by Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, Justice Breyer insisted that “government neutrality” on religious matters was essential, and thus Maine was justified in excluding schools seeking to “teach and promote religious ideals.” The majority opinion points out, however, that “there is nothing neutral about Maine’s program. The State pays tuition for certain students at private schools—so long as the schools are not religious. That is discrimination against religion.” The Court’s majority opinion in Carson notes that “we have repeatedly held that a State violates the Free Exercise Clause when it excludes religious observers from otherwise available public benefits.” It adds that “a neutral benefit program in which public funds flow to religious organizations through the independent choices of private benefit recipients does not offend the Establishment Clause.”
Significantly, the majority opinion rejects the state defendants’ attempt to make a distinction between the religious identity and the educational practice of faith-based schools.
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