During the 1996 presidential primaries, for example, all the Republican hopefuls called for publicly funded vouchers for private schools. Vouchers would give parents the freedom to send their children to a private school. Parents and students must have choices. Few would disagree with that. But limiting one's concern to the rights of individual parents fails to do justice to the complexities of public education in a democratic society.
Freedom is more than an individual concern.
It also involves safeguarding the democratic freedoms of society as a whole. It's impossible to think about public education without understanding its relationship to democracy. Schools are the place in this society where children from a variety of backgrounds come together and, at least in theory, learn to talk, play, and work together. Schools are by no means equal and play a significant role in maintaining our highly stratified society. Certainly it doesn't happen in our highly segregated neighborhoods.