It is officially an Odyssey summer. Matt Damon is Odysseus, box-office receipts have crossed $650 million in two weeks, and Homer’s actual epic poem, the one assigned in ninth grade and promptly forgotten, is suddenly outselling half the fiction table at Barnes & Noble. US sales of The Odyssey are up 76 percent since January, UK sales are up 70 percent, and searches for “learn Greek” have jumped 5,000 percent in the last two weeks. In Korea, book sales tagged “Odyssey” are up nearly sevenfold.
Everyone, it seems, has suddenly become an expert on the ancient song. Especially when it comes to the Trojan Horse. We know the shape of the trick: a gift so impressive, so seemingly beneficial, that the very people it was built to destroy dragged it through their own gates. Nobody forced the Trojans to do it. They wanted the horse. They celebrated bringing it inside the walls.
I would like to talk about a different horse. One currently being wheeled through statehouses under the name school choice.
READ Top 10 Misleading Claims of “School Choice”
READ The Research Is In: What Every Legislator Should Know About Homeschooling
READ School Choice vs. Education Independence: Why They’re Not the Same Thing
The Gift Troy Wanted
No one wheels a large wooden horse through a gate when it looks dangerous. School choice is not sold to families as a threat, and it is not sold as a compromise either. It is sold as a gift, wrapped in exactly the language parents have been starving to hear: empowerment, funding assistance, educational choice.
- Rep. Burgess Owens promises it “empowers parents to choose the academic options that best fit their child’s unique needs.”
- Corey DeAngelis, the movement’s loudest evangelist, calls it “the power wielded by parents to be the primary decisionmakers” in their children’s education, and has built an entire brand on the slogan “fund students, not systems.”
- Governor Greg Abbott quoted educator Shandranika Jones approvingly, as if it settled the matter: school choice “allows parents to have control over their children’s education.”
Empowerment. Funding. Control. Say it enough times and it starts to sound like a birthright being restored rather than a subsidy being offered. That is precisely the point. The Trojans were not tricked by an ugly horse. They were tricked by a beautiful one, built by people who told them that it was a gift.
READ Why “Fund Students, Not Systems” Still Funds the System
What’s Hiding Inside
Here is the trouble. You cannot own what you never took financial responsibility for. So, because we want to protect parents’ ownership over their children’s education, we must also commit to the principle of private funding of their children’s education. If the government is paying for your children’s education through vouchers, ESAs, or other means, then you have lost ownership over their education.
READ Who Really Owns Your Children’s Education?
Additionally, no government program can grant parents an authority they already possess by right. This new trend is only funding choices that were already completely legal for families to make anyway. As Education Independence has argued elsewhere, “if the government is telling parents what their options are, the perception of authority is only an illusion. If the state gives you choice, the state can take it away.”
READ Does School Choice Give Parents Choice Over Their Children’s Education?
The state rarely gives without asking something back, either. Of the sixteen major school choice programs created or expanded since 2021, Fordham Institute’s Michael Petrilli notes that fifteen carry testing mandates, and Cato’s Neal McCluskey warns that once Washington confers a benefit, “reporting requirements and red tape” tend to follow and reshape how private schools operate. In Arizona, homeschoolers who accept ESA funds surrender their homeschool affidavit and sign a Department of Education contract, legally converting their children into “public school at home” students.
LISTEN Arizona’s ESA Reality: What School Choice Really Looks Like, Refining Rhetoric with Robert Bortins
There is a third thing hiding inside this horse, quieter than regulation: dependency. Economist Ryan McMaken bluntly argues that “school vouchers are basically food stamps,” a subsidy model that trains families to expect government provision rather than lean on the free market or, more importantly, their own neighbors, churches, and each other’s voluntary charity. Food stamp use has only grown since that program’s creation. There is no reason to expect education vouchers to behave differently.
READ Educational Independence: A Free Market Perspective
Once the Horse Is inside the Walls
The Trojans were not conquered by force. They were conquered by their own hands, hauling a gift through gates they controlled, because they did not listen to the warnings about what waited inside until it was too late.
That is the danger here too. Not that school choice will be forced on us, but that we will welcome it ourselves into our schools and our homeschools, without asking what walls it is quietly built to break down. Independence rarely falls to a direct assault. It falls to a slow, popular, well-funded invitation, and by the time the regulations show up, the walls are already down, and the culture is already bought.
READ True Independence: What Would You Protect?
Are all legislators and school choice advocates sinister in their support for these programs? They are not. In fact, some of them genuinely believe that their ideas will benefit families and education. However, as free men and women, we have a responsibility to assess these ideas for ourselves. Once we do, it becomes clear that school choice will not bring educational benefits; it will only bring state control.
Learn from Troy
Odysseus won because the Trojans could not imagine the trick being played on them. We do not have that excuse. We have Fordham’s data, McCluskey’s warnings, and three thousand years of hindsight. Before you bring school choice into your state, school, or home, be sure to ask what is inside. Then tell your neighbors to ask too, before the walls come down and the war is already over.
READ Our New Year’s Resolution: Defend Education Independence!
READ The School Choice Debate: Is There a Third Option?
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