On tuition vouchers

I believe Gwen Faulkenberry is well advised to seek “redemption.” We should all do likewise.

More immediately, she should first seek enlightenment, of which it seems she is sadly bereft, if her March 20 column is any indication.

Tuition vouchers empower parents in charting the educational path of their children. Vouchers are in no rational sense a “diversion” or “misappropriation” of “public” funds to which (indeed) government schools have no a priori “entitlement” in the first instance.

Children belong to their parents and not (to the extent that they can be said to “belong” to anyone other than God and themselves) to government bureaucrats.

There is nothing historically inevitable, foreordained, or morally or constitutionally inexorable about government schools. Indeed, for a long time they did not even exist in this country. They are, properly understood, merely an ongoing experiment; an experiment whose time, in the minds of more than a few people, has come and gone.

J. FRED HART JR.

Little Rock