Esolen on Public and Religious Education

An excellent essay, at Public Discourse, by Anthony Esolen, "Public and Religious Education:  L'Etat C'est Tout".  From the conclusion:

It is a mistake to believe that a totalitarian State regulates all the actions of its individual members. The Communist Party, says [Whittaker] Chambers, encouraged promiscuity; and certainly the public schools of Providence do not discourage it with any effectiveness. Individuals may well be granted great leeway in habits that destroy the competitors to the State: the family, the community, and the churches. We drive “government” out of the bedroom, by which we mean that common people will have no say in the most determinative matter of their common life, in order the more firmly to entrench the State in the living room, the classroom, the town hall, and the sanctuary. For the State does not want to keep separate from the churches. It wants to absorb them.