The Place of Public School Education in the Constitutional Scheme

Abstract

This article suggests that if the drafters and ratifiers of our Constitution sought to structure the political process partly through that document, the state may not legitimately act, or fail to act, without justification in ways that tend, even unintentionally, to substantially undermine the crucial presuppositions relied upon by and embodied in the ratified Constitution. Such a state of affairs does not violate any particular provision of the Constitution in the sense that an unreasonable search or seizure does. However, it presents us with the same choice of either allowing the repugnant state-caused condition to continue or living fully by the adopted Constitution as the supreme law of the land. Those persons left grossly undereducated for reasons at least partially attributable to the state are, of course, in some sense individually the victims of the state, and undoubtedly suffer competitive job market harm. However, the essence of this article is not that they as individual victims are denied a constitutional right to meaningfully contribute to or individually profit from public life, but rather that the public as a whole is denied the possibility of their so contributing, contrary to the clear sense of the Constitution as a charter of collective self-government. The public as a whole is the precise relevant victim, just as the individual uneducated student is the most direct victim of his competitive injuries in the job market.