Editor, Gazette-Journal:

National School Choice Week is Jan. 26 through Feb. 1, and parents everywhere—especially in Gloucester County—should be paying attention.

The need for an educated citizenry in order to maintain a Constitutional Republic as this country was founded is without question. But recent publication of surveys should make us question the value of government schools where most kids attend. These surveys reveal that 57 percent of the nation’s 17-year-olds weren’t able to place the Civil War within the correct 50-year time period and 83 percent of college graduates couldn’t name the Gettysburg address as the source of the phrase “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

The nation’s founders and many who followed expected that schools would instill civic virtues. Yet when the word virtue is itself pulverized by a progressive culture that ignores concepts of right and wrong, ...