Perhaps with the Supreme Court hearing a case on Monday pitting a student’s right to proclaim “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” against a public school’s need to maintain order, it was inevitable that public schooling conflicts would get some attention. If nothing else, what media outfit would pass up the chance to grab peoples’ attention with a phrase as absurd – but vaguely subversive – as “Bong Hits 4 Jesus”?

But maybe it’s not just a banner emblazoned with a bizarre phrase – which then-high school senior Joseph Frederick says he held up as a joke that ultimately got him suspended when the Olympic torch was run past his high school in January 2002 – that has brought attention to the fact that public schooling forces people and their values into conflict. Maybe, as I chronicled in Why We Fight: How Public Schools Cause Social Conflict, it’s that such battles are constant – indeed, almost inevitable – in public schools for which all people must pay, but in which only one set of values can prevail.

Illustrating just how common such fighting is, at the same time the bong hits case was grabbing headlines this week, several other public schooling conflicts were in the news, including skirmishes over dress codes, a teacher giving kids material containing Biblical references, photo standards for yearbooks, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the content of public school library and text books. And just yesterday, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel ran a piece by columnist Patrick McIlheran that examined several battles being fought in public schools, and reached the only conclusion possible:

Nothing so fractures society as imposing beliefs people loathe….Of course the culture wars rage around schools. They will rage there as long as we hold to the idea that common schools can establish a unanimity that no longer exists, if ever it did. …

School choice is the answer. However it works, by charters or open enrollment or by vouchers, it recognizes that parents aren’t willing to think of their children as the common property of the state.

That schooling grounded in coercion and forced unity is doomed to constant rancor is a message, it seems, that might finally be getting out. If it does, we just might have the silly phrase “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” – as well as countless public schooling battles – to thank for it.