by Matt Barr

What would winning the war over the courts be like?

As everyone prepares for a battle of Biblical proportions for control of the courts, do you ever wonder why we're not seeing the same kind of war being fought for control of public schools? (This thought inspired by my previous post.) Both are powerful institutions and means by which to enact your agenda when you can't seem to have any luck persuading people via the democratic process that you're right.

Of course, a war for control of schools is being waged here in the U.S., all the time, only on different fronts. And propaganda is one of the main weapons. My faithful readers on the left will surely argue that school propaganda is a tool of the right, which tries to foist its out-of-the-mainstream views on evolution, abstinence, anti-environmentalism and homosexuality on impressionable schoolchildren. It's not propaganda if you believe it, I suppose, but my point is that manipulating textbooks is a powerful way to indoctrinate children to grow up to believe in what you believe in, and surely the left, which slings the charge of "propaganda" around just as often as the right, would agree, or wouldn't get lathered up about it.

Not to give short shrift to the prevalence of arguments on the right about the use of textbook propaganda, on the environment, sex education, homosexuality, and many other issues. But until the NEA comes out in favor of abstinence education, traditional families and American exceptionalism, I'll thank you to let me continue to be concerned about propaganda of a more leftist variety in U.S. schools.

So given that both sides view the schools as an important front, why no national high-profile battle over them, the way we do the courts? I aver that issues like abortion, gay marriage, church and state and crime and punishment are supposed to be fought out in communities and statehouses, like textbook skirmishes are. But these issues became successfully defined as national in the last 50 years, when the highest court in the land was persuaded to grant itself unreviewable power to decide them for everyone. No similar avenue exists to nationalize educational issues. If it did, we wouldn't have these minor, local eruptions in Pennsylvania, Kansas and Texas over what to teach kids, we'd have more lobbyists and bureaucracies concentrated in Washington.

In a sense, the way textbook battles play out in the U.S. foreshadows what the battle over our most divisive issues is likely to be like if the Federalist Society revolution in the courts is successful. Communities and states will decide how to regulate abortion, marriage, crime and the like. National pundits and left wing blogs will make fun of the ones who are most backward -- i.e., regulating abortion and prohibiting gay marriage. Conservatives will bristle and contend that their way is the mainstream American way. Nothing unfamiliar about any of that, right?

What else might happen? Liberals will discover that the Constitution can actually be amended, something quite unnecessary in the last few decades, and will propose all sorts of them. Opinion polls will show elementary and middle school students overwhelmingly in favor of all of them. Fortunately for liberty lovers, kids grow up. The ones who grow up to get Masters Degrees in political science will write new proposed amendments to the Constitution, while most everyone else will urge their state legislatures to vote against them. Most will be pleasantly surprised to learn they have state legislatures.

Confounded by having to persuade 37 state legislatures they know better instead of five Supreme Court justices, liberals from the heartland and southeast will gravitate on the west coast and the Boston-New York-D.C. corridor, while what conservatives are left there will move to "redder," to use today's terminology, states. The more conservative candidate for President will win twelve consecutive elections, and calls for the abolition of the Electoral College will be deafening. The Senate and House will move to the right.

Owing to the appointment power (a Constitutional amendment will be proposed eliminating this with respect to court appointments), the courts will remain out of play in the culture war. Efforts to control the schools will redouble. Cured of their "you can't fight City Hall" mentality, nurtured by decades of Washington making every little decision for them, the people won't stand for it, and will take reinvigorated interest in how their schools are run. Interest in school vouchers will die as public school education, whether or not it improves, will become more acceptable to parents.

Children, ever the contrarians, will grow up more liberal.

Browse books from Amazon.com:
teachers+unions constitution courts Supreme+Court