Sweden has tried vouchers since the mid-nineties. It is an unmitigated disaster, far worse than the old fully state-run top-down system (for lots for reasons than just the vouchers, truth be told). A race to who can inflate the grades the most, meaning we at the university level discovered (15 years ago) that we suddenly had barely literate students aged 20+ who could barely read newspapers, much less actual textbooks - and yet, the private schools they had attended had awarded them top grades... because who puts their child in a school where the students get low grades? That must be a bad school. Moronic. And don't get me started on what the voucher system did to the correlation of grades vis-a-vis actual math skill/knowledge. Of course, perhaps you can study us to see where we went wrong using vouchers. Then we could point to you and fix our system too. As to answer your question regardless of the current unfortunate trend in the US (far as I can tell), what we teachers should teach is easily described: Knowledge and skills. That's it. To do that we need to have a disciplined school environment. And toachive that parents must raise children to comply with a few very simple demands: sit in your seat. Raise your hand when you wish to speak. Keep time. Do your homework. Study so that you can pass the tests and exams. Anything surplus to this has no place in the school. Want to be christian, moslem, communist, black, jew, martian? Leave it on the peg in the hallway, in my class you are my student, because that's the only interest I have in you. So when the subject is history of politics, I will teach about communism but I will not teach communism. And you can replace communism with whatever -ism you want: when I come to work, my personal opinions and preferences stay in my locker. Same principle as in armed forces: no homos, women, men, arabs, plutonians - only soldiers together. Anything else is surpus to the mission.