John Coons has a special place among those voices were crying in the wilderness fifty and forty years ago that government should make it possible, without financial penalty, for parents to choose the publicly funded schools their children would attend. First Milton Friedman and then John Chubb and Terry Moe argued persuasively that market discipline would improve the quality of schools. Some contended that justice would be served and urban schools become more focused and effective through allowing poor parents the same right to choose enjoyed by the middle class. Others pointed to long-standing policies in other Western democracies that provided public funding to faith-based and alternative schools chosen by parents and thereby eliminated the conflict over schooling so common in American communities. But it was Coons who rested the case for parental choice on fundamental principles.

Appropriately, The Case for Parental Choice: God, Family, and Educational Liberty, a collection of Coons’s work on the subject, edited by Nicole Stelle Garnett, Richard W. Garnett, and Ernest Morrell, leads off with his 1985 essay “Intellectual Liberty and the Schools,” whose wisdom I have quoted countless times in my own writing:

Or, as he put it in “School Choice as Simple Justice” (1992), “Children are the books written by the poor” (57).

For Coons, much more is at stake than simply the ineffectiveness of bureaucratically operated school systems. American society and its culture are impoverished by the absence of school choice. As Coons wrote, “[p]arents choose shoes, food, games, hours, and every other important feature of a child’s life. In education, this liberty is not only opposed but squelched. Ordinary families with all their rich variety in culture and values are forced to accept the form, content, and ideology of a politically dictated education. Public schools, as currently organized, chill the traffic in ideas that is generated by free family choices in every other area of life” (19). He does not hesitate to charge that public schooling is “the most comprehensive nonpenal system of compulsion known to our society, not excluding the military. School is the lever of intellectual control, the tool of a conscious collective effort to induce citizens to think correct thoughts” (32). Fortunately, he might have added, it is too blunderingly ineffective and too locally contested to be an instrument of totalitarian rule.

In several of the essays collected here, Coons goes even deeper in exploring the philosophical and human dimensions of parental authority, including in the choice of schools. “Luck, Obedience, and the Vocation of the Child” (2008) brought this home most forcibly to me, perhaps because I wrote another of the essays in the volume in which it was first published. Coons and I, at the invitation of John Witte Jr., had taken part in a small colloquium on the vocation of the child at Emory University’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion. After rereading Coons’s essay in this new volume, I reread my own and was humbled by how superficial it seemed in comparison. While I had provided a workmanlike overview of relevant policies and practices in a number of countries, he had gone much higher and deeper to explore fundamental questions about what can and should be taught, and who should make that decision.

“For better or worse,” he points out, “outside the government’s narrow authority to rescue—the parent makes the rules for the child and enforces his or her will in ways and for purposes about which the state is not entitled even to express an opinion” (165). But there is one great exception: mandatory government-managed and government-defined schooling. Parents with sufficient resources may choose private schools that correspond to their own convictions, or to live in a community whose public schools do so, but for the poor there is no such choice: their children are dragooned from the age of five or six into public schools over which the parents have no influence and by whose professional staff they are seldom respected.

Coons’s concern goes far beyond the question of simple justice, however. He questions the very basis of government-prescribed schooling in a pluralistic society, first observing, “[f]ew mothers indoctrinate their infants in theories of moral anarchy. And the father who plays the moral skeptic for his buddies at work rediscovers the rule of virtue whenever he enters the nursery.” As he concludes, “[t]he office of parent reconfirms every child’s experience of his or her own responsibility to the authority of a real order of correct behavior. There is a good; here are its specific contents; believe it; do it. And, by contrast, outside the home this elemental ratification of the child’s basic vocation to a real good is nowhere guaranteed” (168). After all, he offers, “the more primary and eternal question for the civics educator concerns the authoritative source (if any) of every human duty. Is a child in fact subject to any responsibility that precedes and transcends society and that itself makes citizenship an authentic calling? It is not clear under prevailing law that government schools are entitled to get serious about such a question” (169). Thus, Coons concludes, the “most truly civic response to pluralism would secure to every five-year-old the dignity of a free and saving obedience to the one coherent authority that a young child can know. It is the parent alone whose judgments can simultaneously affirm both our moral diversity and the universality of the child’s responsibility to seek what is true and good” (174).

Public schooling, then, presents two problems. It intervenes in the moral authority of the parent, and it does so without the capacity to shape the moral life of the student. Such a program of public school creates conditions in which students are unprepared for civic life because unprepared to engage questions of public good. Or, as Coons wrote in an earlier essay, “The Religious Rights of Children” (1996), “in a pluralistic society, public values are best secured by a vigorous market in contrasting moral ideas taught in free institutions by adults who believe in them. Children who conclude that morality is a matter of private taste are the least likely to embrace civic responsibility. It is the child imbued with strong ideas who will best contribute to social dialogue about the common good” (178).

Not that Coons limited himself to making a theoretical case for schools that would be free to address such fundamental questions because based upon parental choice. In “Making Schools Public” (1981), as in his earlier book with his Berkeley Law colleague Steve Sugarman, Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), he provides a detailed discussion of how a publicly funded school choice system could function, with specific language for a proposed amendment to the California Constitution. In a mark of Coons’s policy acumen and prescience, this model anticipates in important respects what would become the more recent charter school policies adopted in a number of jurisdictions.

This useful collection is not limited to the question of schools, families, and the state, though that is appropriately its primary focus. In “Orphans of the Enlightenment: Belief and the Academy” (2006), Coons provides a personal and insightful account of how religious perspectives were progressively (in both sense of the word) chased from academic life during his career, which began in the 1940s, and what this has cost to free inquiry. Wisely, the editors also include a number of brief and highly readable blog posts that Coons wrote between 2013 and 2018 for the blog reimaginED. In these late reflections, he gives voice more explicitly than elsewhere to the religious convictions that underlie his policy prescriptions. Thus, in “Faith, School Choice, and Moral Foundations” (2013), he insists that “in moments of moral crisis, such [secular moral frameworks as Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative or John Rawls’s original position] do not provide that essential, challenging, universal insight that tells each of us he ought to put justice ahead of his own project. Only a recognition of God’s authority and beneficence can, in the end, ground our grasp of moral responsibility” (215).

His lifelong commitment as a Roman Catholic finds expression in a number of the essays, in what could be called a broadly ecumenical form. This he writes in “Education: Nature, Nurture, and Gnosis” (1998):

As an evangelical Anglican, I am by no means capable of assessing whether this is in fact the position of the Catholic Church on the significance of agreeing or disagreeing with its core teachings. While, to my taste, the statement seems rather casual toward choices that I (and probably Coons as well) consider of ultimate importance, it does serve as a basis for trusting cooperation despite strongly held divergent views. I am even prepared, as a “lousy empiricist” (so my late mentor Peter Berger used to teasingly call me), to accept Coons’s claim, in a 2014 blog post, “Equality, ‘Created Equality,’ and the Case for School Choice,” that “national religious consensus—not necessarily unanimity—on mankind’s equality of access to God irrespective of creed (or of no creed) would largely defang the ideological objections to the subsidized choice of religious schools” (227). Maybe so, if it could ever be achieved.

This is a rich collection drawn from a long and productive career, with much to offer even those readers for whom parental choice of schools is not a primary concern. I am grateful to Garnett, Garnett, and Morrell for bringing these incisive reflections together.