Parental Rights, Parental Choice, and State Public Education Mandates

Pierce v. Society of Sisters and Meyer v. Nebraska were cases about parental rights in general, and parental choice in particular. Both centered on a challenge to a state’s legal effort to reduce or eliminate the educational choices available to parents—in the former, by requiring students to attend public schools, in the latter, by requiring instruction in all schools, public and private, be conducted in English. Pierce and Meyer also were about state efforts to forge a homogeneous American citizenry by limiting the educational choices available to parents. As Justice McReynolds observed in Meyer, “The desire of the Legislature to foster a homogeneous people with American ideals . . . is easy to appreciate,” but, as he observed a year later in Pierce, “the fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.”