Kevin Carey over at The Quick and the Ed has been in a bit of a spat with Andrew Coulson about education tax credits and school choice, and Andrew has been doing just fine dealing with Carey’s substantive arguments. I just want to quickly hit one of his non-substantive attacks, an all-too-typical smear against people who dare question delivering education through government schools: Preferring a system of private provision of education is “un-American.”

That is utter, utter bunk, and the history of American education makes this abundantly clear. I’m on the road right now on borrowed computer battery time so I offer only one tiny timeline to illustrate this. There are lots of good histories, though, that Carey and others can–and should–read for more in-depth discussion. Anyway, the tiny timeline: The U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1789. Horace Mann began his common schools crusade in 1837. That means that the nation was founded almost five decades before the basic seed of the modern, government-dominated, public-school system was planted. And, of course, the basic building block of the nation wasn’t government schooling, but quite the opposite: individual liberty. The Declaration of Independence–written more than six decades before Mann went to work–explains that.

So what seems “un-American” now?