We are entering a new ideological era. For the past century, American politics revolved around a familiar axis: the Right emphasized markets and individual choice, while the Left emphasized government action and social protection. That conservative-progressive divide shaped everything from tax policy to healthcare to education.

But that framework is breaking down.

As Fareed Zakaria argues in Age of Revolutions, the defining ideological divide of the coming era will not hinge on markets versus government. It will center on something deeper: whether societies remain open and liberal or become closed and illiberal. On one side are those inclined toward pluralism, individual freedom, and diversity. On the other are those drawn to centralization, control, and cultural uniformity.

This new fault line is already reshaping political coalitions and will force us to rethink our major institutions, including our schools. In an era of rising illiberalism, progressives may find that the closed, centralized education system they’ve long defended is ill-equipped to advance the open, pluralist ideals they’ve long pursued.

Reflecting the values of the industrial era, the American K-12 education system was built for efficiency and top-down control. That meant delivering a uniform experience, not just academically, but culturally. Shaped in part by Protestant suspicions of Catholic immigrants, and in part by a sincere republican commitment to democratic citizenship, public schools actively promoted assimilation and a common national identity. The goal was national unity; the cost was the marginalization of cultural minorities.

The original design logic of a single system delivering a common culture never really went away. Schools always privilege some values over others, whether implicitly or explicitly. A system, for instance, that emphasizes punctuality, compliance with authority, patriotism, and social order may feel benign and natural to some families. To others, that same system might look like a tool for preparing a compliant workforce for a capitalist social order.

Schools are never neutral. They always encode values. The question is who gets to decide which ones. In a more homogeneous society, that question can be settled with relative ease. In a diverse one, it becomes a source of constant tension.

Most liberal democracies have addressed the issue through what education scholar Ashley Berner calls educational pluralism. In pluralist systems, the state funds education, but a wide range of school providers, both public and private, are empowered to deliver it. So long as schools meet common civic and academic standards, parents can utilize public funds to choose among schools that reflect various cultural, moral and religious traditions.

Liberal critics of school choice argue that a fragmented education system produces a fragmented society. But Berner's research suggests the opposite: educational diversity and civic cohesion can go hand in hand. Pluralist systems make room for the views of cultural minorities while also requiring schools to teach shared democratic knowledge. Instead of leading to civic breakdown, these systems tend to produce highly knowledgeable and engaged citizens.

What makes these systems work is that they require mutual sacrifice. Pluralism demands something most of us find genuinely difficult: supporting, with public funds, schools whose values we do not share, whether faith-based, secular, classical, or progressive. That discomfort is not a flaw in pluralism; it is what makes it work. It binds everyone to the same constraints, ensuring that no single faction can impose its view of the world on others.

When a single system has the power to determine which values children absorb, control of schools becomes a proxy for control of culture itself. By dispersing authority across civil society rather than concentrating it in local school monopolies, a pluralist education system lowers the stakes of political conflict because no single victory confers total control.

Pluralism is not a compromise. It is a principle.

The United States is unusual among liberal democracies for how little publicly-funded educational choice it allows. America’s public education system is decentralized administratively but standardized in practice. Across the country, thousands of school districts have converged on a strikingly similar model — not just in structure but in the values they transmit and norms they enforce. That convergence is no accident; it reflects common mandates, compliance pressures, and a shared professional culture. What our education system lacks is not bureaucratic dispersion, but genuine ideological diversity.

The Right’s historic trust in markets and competition helps explain why conservatives have landed on the more open, pluralist side of education policy. The Left’s historic trust in government, by contrast, helps explain why progressives have landed on the more closed, centralized side. Under the old ideological order, liberal skepticism of school choice was at least ideologically consistent. But the world has changed.

As authoritarian forces use state power to shape culture and control information, the case for dispersing educational authority has never been stronger – and progressive opposition to school choice has never been harder to justify. The policies that shift power from central governments to civil society – education savings accounts and tax-credit scholarships – may have been championed by the Right, but that does not make them inherently conservative. It may simply mean that, in education, the old ideological map is no longer a reliable guide.

The power to shape children’s moral and civic formation should be shared among families, communities and civil society, not concentrated in a single government-run system.

The educational model best able to advance the liberal ideals that respect the needs of cultural minorities, balance the diversity of modern life, and provide a measure of democratic resilience, is a pluralist one.

Pluralism is both the price and the promise of living in a diverse democracy. That is why an open society requires an open education system.