Each year, National School Choice Week celebrates the growing number of educational options available to families. Homeschooling, private schools, learning cooperatives, and other alternatives remind us of an important truth: parents—not the state—bear the primary responsibility to educate their children.
That truth is worth affirming. But it also requires clarity.
Parents have both a moral obligation and a natural right to direct the education of their children. Families differ in how they fulfill that responsibility, and freedom allows parents to choose the path that best fits their convictions, circumstances, and calling. Educational uniformity has never served children well, and parental choice should be protected.
Genuine educational freedom does not require—nor justify—government control or compulsory funding.
Civil government was not created to educate children but rather to protect life, liberty, and property. Education long predates modern states and properly belongs within the family. When government assumes the role of provider or financier of education, it inevitably claims authority it was never given.
This is where many conversations about “school choice” go astray.
The right of parents to choose how they educate their children does not include a right to use money taken from others through compulsory taxation for that purpose. True choice is exercised through responsibility and voluntary cooperation, not coercion. When education is funded by force, it ceases to be fully free.
Government-funded “choice” programs may promise flexibility, but funding always carries strings. Oversight, regulation, and standardization follow money as surely as night follows day. Over time, parental discretion shrinks, and families become accountable not to their convictions, but to bureaucratic requirements.
By contrast, educational freedom flourishes where parents take responsibility for the costs of education themselves, or where others choose freely to help through donations, scholarships, churches, and community support. Voluntary generosity strengthens civil society. Compulsory redistribution weakens it—and invites expanded state control.
National School Choice Week is an opportunity to celebrate parental responsibility rightly understood. Parents should be free to choose how they fulfill their obligation to educate their children—but that freedom must remain grounded in personal responsibility, not government entitlement.
Educational freedom is strongest when it is voluntary, accountable, and family-directed—and when the role of the state remains firmly limited. Anything less risks trading liberty for convenience, and responsibility for dependency.