“If I’m not happy with my public park, should I get a voucher for a country club?”

“If I don’t like the highways, should I get money for private roads?”

“What if I don’t like the fire department? Should I get taxpayer dollars for my own fire service?”

If you’ve been involved in the school choice debate for very long, you’ve almost certainly seen these objections to choice. Basically, we would never “voucherize” these things – that would be crazy! – so why should we let people use public funding for private education?

The obvious answer, as I’ve explained before, is that education is about far more – for some people, infinitely more – than where you take a walk and have a picnic, or lay asphalt. It is about nothing less than shaping human beings, which inescapably involves deeply held, diverse convictions about the goals and meaning of life, and the very nature of the world and universe. It encompasses beliefs that no government should be in a position to decide can – or cannot – be taught with the education tax dollars that all people must pay.

That education deals with nothing less than the formation of human beings is why religion has been so central to the choice movement and debate, as one can see in our new School Choice Timeline. Arguably nothing is more intertwined with the meaning of life, and how one should live, than religion, and it is a major reason that public schooling cannot be squared with a free and equal society.

The huge difficulty of aligning religion and government schooling has been encountered from the earliest days of state education. The Prussians – infamous for their use of public education to bind people to the state – had to make accommodations for families to get either Protestant or Catholic instruction. Benjamin Rush, one of the earliest advocates of education to attach people to the new United States, wrote that children should receive education from the denominations to which their parents belonged. Horace Mann – the “father of the common school” – devoted a major chunk of his last annual report as Massachusetts education secretary to assuring people that he had no desire to remove the Bible – which he called “the acknowledged expositor of Christianity” – from schools, as he fended off objections that common schooling would trample crucial but controversial Christian tenets.

Of course, the content of the Bible itself, and who should interpret it, is in dispute. Among Christians, the Protestant version on the Bible typically has fewer books than the Catholic, and while Protestants tend to not see a central, earthly authority for interpreting scripture, Catholics believe the Roman Catholic Church has the God-given authority to do so.

This split is a major reason that the School Choice Timeline has numerous entries about Roman Catholics pursuing choice, or at least pleading for funding for their schools rather than just de facto Protestant public schools. Even lowest-common-denominator Christianity often could not bring the two together, which is why at their peak in 1965, Catholic schools – private schools funded by tuition and Catholic communities – enrolled about 12 percent of all school-aged children. That is a lot of families first paying taxes for public schools, then tuition for schools consistent with their religious convictions.

What about people with no religion? They, too, were long treated unequally by the pan-Protestant public schools, which sometimes began the day with the Lord’s prayer and had other religious expression interwoven. Many fought the imposition of religion, ultimately with lawsuits culminating in the Supreme Court’s 1963 Abington School District v. Schempp decision prohibiting public school prayer and Bible reading. But that rendered the public schools inhospitable to anyone who believed that religion was important to education, or central to life.

As Roman Catholics became more secular, moved to the suburbs, and saw declines in the ranks of priests and nuns, their schools entered a long decline. They still educate more than 1.6 million children, but Protestant private schools, particularly nondenominational, have been ascendant. More conservative Protestant families, as well as increasing numbers of Catholics, have also flocked to homeschooling. And all typically pay once for public schools, a second time for education consistent with their deeply held religious beliefs. And Christians are not alone – increasingly, Jews have turned to private schooling to instill in their children a rich understanding of their religion and culture, and Islamic schools are growing.

Because religion is, and has been, of such deep importance to many people, it should be no surprise that most private schools are religious. Nonetheless, when school choice bills are debated, many choice opponents suggest that this a problem for choice. But it is not a choice problem. It is a condemnation of public schooling – concrete evidence that such a system cannot treat people with diverse convictions equally.

As I mentioned on Monday, this has been recognized by no less a choice opponent than retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who has twice observed in dissents against pro-choice rulings that if government cannot exclude schools from choice programs for being religious – if doing so is discrimination against religion – then public schooling itself is guilty because it funds only secular education.

Religion makes choice essential because, constitutionally, government must neither discriminate in favor of religion nor against it.

But eking out basic equality under the law is a minimal reason to embrace choice. Far more important is fully embracing freedom and pluralism.

Universal choice would enable people to much more easily pursue education imbued with deep commitments and rich meaning, and to create from the bottom up a society filled with strong, diverse communities. That would not only make the country a more pluralist, dynamic – and frankly, interesting – place, it could give individuals greater opportunities to find communities that give them a powerful sense of belonging and fulfillment. It could also help people discover new ways of seeing the world, and discern what matters most in life.

Education is not a mere park or road. It is about nothing less than developing the minds – and for many, the souls – of human beings. As history makes clear, that is why religion is so central to school choice, and why a truly free and equal society must not have government decide what is, or is not, taught with education money that all are forced to pay.