For much of the past century, and especially since the dawn of the new deal era (in the early 1930s) liberalism and by extension the Democratic Party, has largely taken for granted that the state and its institutions are the best agents, defenders and protectors of liberal interests - of humanity and humanism - in American society.
This was a view not without some justification. As this country and the west more broadly transitioned from an agrarian economy to an urbanizing, industrial economy the wages of inequality were vast, and heartbreaking. As lifespans increased, so did the need for some kind of universal pension system. As the demand for a more skilled workforce increased, so did the need for universal primary and secondary schooling. And as medicine became increasingly adept at improving and extending life, the demand arose for universal medical coverage, especially for the elderly. The Democratic Party of the twentieth century rose to most of these challenges (still waiting on that universal health care), abandoning its agrarian populism, and taste for limited government and federalism for an aggressive push to expand the powers of the state to advance and protect the interests of the poor and middle class.
Since the 1968 realignment, the new deal coalition of Democrats has famously fractured along largely cultural and regional lines. And liberalism since the 1960s has become increasingly a politics of culture, rather than a politics of economy. The safety net, and especially the middle class safety net, has suffered, but there seems to remain a consensus (even if word has not yet reached any number of Republicans) that some kind of safety net is considered by most an entitlement, as is universal access to k-12 education (and hopefully at some point in the not too distant future health care as well).
What I would like to challenge though is the notion that the state is always the best and most liberal institution for providing services, and particularly education.
Second wave generation xers, born between roughly 1971/72 and 1980/81 - which includes me - were the first generational cohorts in many decades to grow up knowing little to nothing of the touchy feely liberal statism - the maternalism - that had come to define the Democratic Party and the America it dominated. Our first polished memories are often of the Reagan years, when middle class job security, and the welfare state, were already embattled. Meanwhile, the prison state was in bloom, and despite the fact that crime had actually begun to decline when first wave generation xers began to reach adulthood (in 1979), the war on crime escalated; mandatory minimums, three strikes laws, and the end of federal parole took root.
In California, where I grew up, the defunding of our public schools began simlultaneous to the passage of Prop 13, at about the time I was in pre-school. As is well known by now, the quality of public schooling began to decline, not just in California but across much of the nation.
At the same time, the growth of the prison state and the increasing criminalization of youth, began to spill over into the public school system. Armed guards, metal detectors, video surveillance, athlete drug testing, barbed wire fences (my brother-in-law - also an xer - went to a suburban high school in Virginia with razor wire around the perimeter), "zero tolerance," and "lockdown" all began to proliferate at middle and high schools, first in the inner city, and then in the suburbs and rural areas as well.
By the time I reached middle school (in a fairly upscale district in southern California) I sensed that something was fundamentally wrong with this world in which I was spending five days a week, nine months out of the year. It seemed punishing to me, like being in jail, and the social culture especially seemed to reward stupidity and cruelty rather than intelligence, humanity, and creativity. And no one seemed to care that so many kids, gifted and troubled alike, were falling through the cracks around me. But at the time I was too young to be able to articulate exactly what so bothered me about the system, and my parents - like the overwhelming majority of parents of generation x kids - were too laissez faire with me (not to mention too busy yelling at each other during this particular period) to notice that something was rather terribly wrong. It would be several more years before I would finally ask (or rather tell) them that I wanted out.
I was blessed with the opportunity to attend a small, independent school in the San Fernando Valley, and the experience rocked my world. It was a place of such warmth and humanity, where critical thinking and creativity were praised and valued (the art teacher once "caught" me drawing at lunch - I thought I was in trouble - and had me start coming in an hour before school everyday to work with me), where teachers were not constrained by stifling bureaucratic rules and regulations that prevented genuine human interaction with kids (one of my English teachers, who was also an Episcopal priest, became a kind of surrogate father to me, in part because of my sometimes messy home life), where there was little in the way of social hierarchies, where adults and kids alike respected each other (if you'd been having a difficult day it was okay to simply leave for the afternoon). It was a place in short where liberal values - humanity, liberty, and creativity - flourished. The culture shock was so great - I was so thankful to be there - I went home and cried after my first day. I was proud to wear that uniform, and would do it again in a heartbeat.
The experience led me to question over time some of my basic assumptions, notably that the state is always the basic vehicle to provide services and entitlements, including education. Like most Americans, I believe that every child has a right to k-12 education, but I no longer believe that the state is best equipped to provide the kind of education that kids deserve. Our independent, non-sectarian and nominally sectarians schools are the gold standard of k-12 education in this country, outperforming public schools on not just test scores and college admission rates, but I believe on less tangible but no less important measures of humanity and equality and decency.
I am not a right-wing loon (although I may be some other variety of loon), and this isn't about efficiency for me. I have nothing against public school teachers. I am opposed to for-profit schools, and deeply uncomfortable with the prospect that fundamentalist Christian schools might well proliferate under any voucher scheme. I feel caught in between liberals on the one hand defending a failing, illiberal system and conservatives - most of the Nohrquist and Fallwell variety - peddling vouchers for their own illiberal reasons. There would have to be strict government oversight of schools that accept vouchers. There would have to be a significant grassroots and institutional (non-profit) effort to build new (and hopefully independent) schools. Vouchers would have to be progressively funded (as they are in the Netherlands), and I would certainly support a guild for teachers (not unlike the guilds in Hollywood) guaranteeing minimum pay and benefits. I would like to see kids allowed to choose their own schools (even against the wishes of their parents) beginning at age 12 or 14.
But the present system is just failing too many kids of all races and classes, gifted and troubled alike. No child should be forced to attend a school that resembles a medium security prison, with armed guards and metal detectors and drug testing and lockdown. No child should be forced to attend a school where cruelty is rewarded among one's peers, where class differences are reinforced, where acceptance of authoritarianism is inculcated, and where creativity and critical thinking are punished. All of these things are defining features of America's public school system today, however little they go mentioned in the press or measured in the statistics. I believe that every child deserves the kind of experience I had.
It may be that as the party of Goldwater (that is, limited government and individual liberty) continues to become the party of Bush (and "big government conservatism"), consolidating its control of Washington and seeking not to dismantle the federal government but to remake it in its own creepy image, Democrats may become may amenable to this argument. Indeed, as the Bush Republicans wage war against tenure for teachers, increasingly mechanize schooling and "teaching to the test," universalize abstinence-only education and quite possibly resurrect school prayer, Democrats may simply seek to create their own independents schools reflecting their own liberal values with state funds, and becoming the leading voucher advocates.