The winds of change seem to be finally blowing as a sea change (particularly over the past five years) has taken place in America’s schools’ systems as parents have increasingly demanded choice—religious and otherwise—be not merely tolerated but publicly supported.

The dog days of summer are not typically associated with school, but the summer of 2025 has marked the hundredth anniversary of two pivotal events in the history of American public schools.

One is well known but arguably misunderstood. The “Scopes Monkey Trial” is famed as a showdown over the teaching of evolution in public schools. While the creation side technically won that courtroom battle, the media coverage ensured that the fundamentalists lost the broader cultural war. The case now serves reasonably as a marker for the start of establishing secularism in American public schools.

The second milestone is less remembered but hardly less important. Like Scopes, it too ultimately revolves around the establishment of religion in American public schools.

In 1922, Oregon voters, with the support of Governor Walter M. Pierce and the backing of the Ku Klux Klan, passed a ballot initiative amending Oregon’s Compulsory Education Act to require parents to send their children to public schools, effectively targeting parochial schools—especially Catholic—for elimination. This led the Society of Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary to sue the governor. Winning an initial injunction against the law, the case wound its way through the American judicial system until in 1925 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the injunction and struck down the law as a violation of parental rights protected under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment.

In Pierce v. Society of Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, the Supreme Court declared, “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. The child is not the mere creature of the state [emphasis added]; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”

This ruling, frequently cited subsequently in a grand variety of personal civil liberty cases, has for 100 years protected parents’ right to determine the education of their children rather than being forced to submit to the state.

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