Meyer v. Nebraska

Summary

In April 1919, months after the armistice ending the First World War, Nebraska enacted a statute forbidding any teacher in a private, parochial or public school to teach any subject in a language other than English, and forbidding instruction in foreign languages as such until a pupil had passed the eighth grade. Iowa, Ohio and other states passed similar measures. On 25 May 1920 Robert T. Meyer, a teacher at the Zion Parochial School maintained by a Lutheran congregation in Hamilton County, was found teaching ten-year-old Raymond Parpart to read German from a collection of Bible stories. He was convicted and fined, and the Supreme Court of Nebraska affirmed, holding that the law was a valid exercise of the police power meant to make English the mother tongue of every child reared in the state. Meyer's side argued that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the liberty of a teacher to pursue a lawful calling and of parents to choose instruction for their children, and that knowledge of German threatened no one. Nebraska answered that the state has broad power to shape the education of future citizens, that communities living in foreign languages after the war were slow to assimilate, and that a child's limited school hours could reasonably be reserved for English. On 4 June 1923 the Court reversed, seven to two. Justice McReynolds wrote that the liberty guaranteed by the due process clause includes not only freedom from bodily restraint but the right to engage in common occupations, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, and to worship according to conscience. Education, he observed, had always been prized in America, and parents have a natural duty to educate their children. Since mere knowledge of German could not reasonably be considered injurious, the statute interfered with the teacher's calling, the pupils' opportunities and the parents' authority. He acknowledged the legislature's desire for a common people with American ideals, and recalled that Plato and the Spartans had proposed placing children under the state's guardianship, but held that such ideas differ wholly from those on which American institutions rest. The state might compel attendance, require instruction in English and set the curriculum of its own schools; it could not, in peacetime, forbid modern languages altogether. Justices Holmes and Sutherland dissented. Holmes's opinion, filed in the companion case Bartels v. Iowa, argued that reasonable people could think it desirable for all citizens to speak a common tongue and that the question should be left to the states; it is not part of the library text, which contains McReynolds's opinion without its notes. Meyer became a foundation for Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) and for later decisions recognizing the rights of parents, including Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) and Troxel v. Granville (2000), and its list of liberties was cited in later due process cases on marriage and family life.

Top Lessons

• What liberty includes

  McReynolds's catalogue of protected liberties joins economic freedoms with the freedom to learn, to marry, to raise children and to worship. The list gave later courts a starting point for asking which unwritten liberties the due process clause protects, and it is still debated whether such a list is best found in history, reason or the text.

• Parents, children and the state

  The opinion describes the education of children as both a right and a natural duty of parents, enforced by compulsory attendance laws. The state's interest in forming citizens is real, but McReynolds holds that it does not extend to forbidding parents to have their children taught a modern language.

• A common language and a free people

  Nebraska wanted every child to grow up with English as a mother tongue, and McReynolds called that aim easy to appreciate after the war. His answer was that a desirable end cannot be promoted by prohibited means. Holmes, in the companion case, thought the means reasonable enough to leave to the legislature.

• Plato's city and the American republic

  McReynolds quotes Plato's Republic on the common rearing of children and describes Sparta's military education, noting that great thinkers approved such schemes. He uses them as a contrast to show that American institutions rest on a different relation between individual, family and state.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The opinion touches health only to dismiss the suggestion that the statute protected children's minds from overwork, observing that early language study does not injure the ordinary child.