And so it is that children actually spend a great deal of time with the state, and in a particularly contentious context. Because the purpose of public school is, in some sense, to make Americans out of children, public-school curricula and resources—whether overall learning objectives, specific lesson plans, or the books stocked on school-library shelves—cannot be agnostic as to what it means to be an American, and not just an American but a good American: a worthy, reliable member of our liberal-democratic society.

Naturally, this means that arguments about schools quickly reveal themselves to be arguments about all of the things that adults in liberal democracies prefer to leave up to the individual conscience—because the answers to those questions touch upon some of our most closely held beliefs about right and wrong, good and evil, truth and lies. And when we debate whether history instructors ought to teach, say, “The 1619 Project,” or if high-school libraries should offer books that speak frankly about sexuality and race, these are precisely the matters we’re debating—in a public forum, as matters of state, no less.

It’s not something we’re especially equipped to do, and not something that liberal democracy is especially well suited to. Liberalism has its necessary limitations—children can’t be given free reign over their own affairs, though that would solve the riddle of their simultaneous helplessness and agency, and neither can they be relegated to the private sphere until adulthood so as to elide the question of what to do with them in the public domain. Instead they force us to debate the merits of our own moral doctrines explicitly, despite the fact that we have little skill for it and less practice. Children foreclose the possibility of living and letting live; they are one of the chief reasons we can’t all just get along. They are people both public and private, dependent and necessary, creatures whose very nature places demands—beautiful ones—upon others, drawing them up and out of themselves and into the world.