The history of what’s known as “school choice” is more convoluted than I had realized. Fighting for the Freedom to Learn, from the Cato Institute, maps out that history in a set of twelve essays by different authors. Together, they add up to a narrative from the colonial era to modern times in the United States. The book is less polemic than its title may sound, providing a lot of information for anyone interested in the history of American education.

This isn’t an area where I have much knowledge, so I can’t say confidently how accurate it is. I can say that it presents an informational tone, has lots of end notes, and doesn’t say anything that looks obviously suspicious.

Most people today look at advocacy of school choice as an exclusively right-wing issue. (Everything today is a right-wing or left-wing issue.) In the past, though, it’s been complicated. Today we think of public schools as secular institutions, but for much of our history they were tools of nativist Protestant hegemony. I’m old enough to remember being told in school to pray to “Our Father.” In the first half of the nineteenth century,

A crucial factor of the development of the state role in education was an expansion of the concept of the citizen. With increased discussion of alternative forms of political authority, there was a renewed appreciation of Aristotle’s argument that citizens should be shaped by state-directed education to match the form of government under which they would live.

The concern increased along with the growth in Irish immigration, which was mostly Catholic. Senator James Blaine promoted state constitutional amendments, as well as unsuccessfully urging a national one, barring the granting of government funds to religious schools, while insisting that they could “not be construed to prohibit the reading of the Bible in any school or Institution.” By “the Bible,” he meant the King James Bible. The target of the amendments was Catholic schools.

The authors acknowledge that following the Supreme Court’s Brown decision and the Civil Rights Act, many segregationists saw private schools as a way to maintain racial purity, but they insist this is far from the whole story. Public schools with predominantly black student bodies often got a bad deal (and sometimes still do).

Throughout American history, people from all walks of life have sought educational options for a variety of pressing reasons, most of them rooted in freedom. The roots on the left are deep and fascinating. They are found in the centuries-old struggle for educational opportunity in the black experience, in the liberal academics who saw vouchers as a tool in the War on Poverty, in the counterculture dissidents who sparked the “free schools” and homeschooling movements, and even, for 20 years, in the Democratic Party’s national platform.

There’s a lot to learn from this book. I recommend it to people interested in American educational history.