We still believe minimum standards for education are absolutely necessary to ensure that a school district’s, a state’s, or a country’s citizens have a certain level of knowledge and ability, and those standards help ensure educated decision making both at the ballot box on election days and during the course of daily life.

But leaving the establishment of those minimum standards to the transient whim of public opinion and passion is dangerous. The learning experienced by young people, from kindergarten through high school and onto college, should not be held hostage by political candidates or politicians. The future is not something to be toyed with, and holding a willingness to change educational curricula as often as every election cycle would only lead to instability among the educational community.

School curricula are determined most often in the United States by local school boards. Those elections happen every few years, and sometimes can become heated affairs, as community divisions, especially in small towns, make large to-dos about issues of teaching sex education, or evolutionary theory instead of intelligent design.

Students should be exposed to a variety of ideas, be given enough information to evaluate them for themselves and choose one to use in their own lives. The theory that, if allowed to know about and experience all the shades of gray from damnation to righteousness, people will eventually choose the best or upright way on their own volition is not new to American shores. In the 1680s William Penn, for whom the state of Pennsylvania is named, took the same attitude toward creating a haven for Quakers. Unlike Massachusetts Bay, for example, his colony would be the most righteous because it chose to be that way, not because it was imposed.

There is a second, perhaps more powerful, reason for not determining the exact content of education. There is a difference between inculcating people with facts they can recite on command (think of multiple choice questions) and educating people in a set of skills they can utilize to adapt to any set of facts they come across (think of essay questions).

That education in skills cannot be spelled out by a legislature. It has to be left up to trusted individuals, teachers, to assign and critique student assignments. Simply being told an answer is wrong is no help; to fix the issue, a student needs to know why it is wrong, and what he or she can do to improve the quality of his or her work.

Leaving education mostly to educators is no threat to the maintenance of community standards. It is our opinion that, if anything, a broad education would lead students to more fully appreciate those standards.