IF YOU THINK private schools can provide something to our state’s children that public schools cannot, why not just change the public schools so that they also provide those things?

Isn’t that the most obvious approach? After all, the public schools belong to us as citizens. We can do pretty much whatever we want with them.

That’s how we got such reforms as the Education Accountability Act, which forces the “education establishment” that backers of Gov. Mark Sanford’s “Put Parents in Charge” proposal complain about to meet academic standards that are among the highest in the country.

But some folks either don’t know about the Accountability Act, or think it doesn’t do enough.

Fine. I’m not satisfied, either. There are plenty of ways to continue improving public schools without derailing the EAA, and some would mimic the supposed virtues of private schools.

We can reduce the absurdly high number of school districts so we don’t waste so much money on duplicative administration, or change the way we finance schools so that kids in districts with low property values have the same quality of education as those in our affluent suburbs. Maybe you want smaller class sizes for more individualized instruction. That would be expensive, of course — all those additional classrooms and teachers. A less pricey reform would be to give superintendents greater flexibility to fire bad teachers.

You want to choose which public school your children attend? Fine. Plenty of districts in the state allow that already. If yours doesn’t, insist that it do so.

It’s entirely up to you and me. They’re our schools. We can do what we want with them, with two exceptions:

First, no stacking your stats by rejecting the weaker students, as private schools can do. Public schools belong to them as much as to you and me.

Second, public schools can’t provide religious instruction.

They can teach about religion, and they ought to do more of that than they do. South Carolina’s own Dick Riley, when he was U.S. secretary of education, set out a helpful set of guidelines that showed the many ways that religion can be at home in the public schools — from individual students’ (and groups of students’) freedom to express their religious faith to the schools’ freedom to teach about religion’s critical role in our society.

But if you want the schools to be an extension of Sunday school, to teach your children to worship the Almighty the same way you do at home and at the church of your choice, forget it. Public schools belong to all of us, whatever our creed or lack thereof, so they can’t show partiality to any brand of faith over others, any more than they can give preferential treatment to red-headed children. It’s not that they’ve got anything against red-headed children, but we parents of brunettes and blondes pay taxes, too.

I fully understand the concerns of parents who want schools to reinforce all the values they try to teach at home. Our popular culture does so much to lure children away from the straight and narrow that parents can feel pretty desperate for allies.

And I believe courts did great damage to our society when they banned school-sponsored prayer — not so much because kids need official prayers, but because such expressions of piety did no harm, and banning them unnecessarily alienated so many people from the public schools. That, in turn, alienated many from civil society altogether, since schools tend to be at the center of communities. I’d rather see a few atheists offended than legions of religious folk shunning civic life.

If I didn’t think religious instruction was important, I’d have trouble on the home front. My wife coordinates middle and high school religious education at our church. For years we had our children in Catholic schools, until we found that at least some of our children would actually be better served in the public school that was within walking distance of our house.

But if all-day, everyday reinforcement in your faith is more important to you than the things public schools can provide, the logical choice for you is to send your children to a private religious school.

That is indeed your choice, and no one can take that away from you. Just one thing: Don’t expect the rest of the taxpayers to subsidize your choice.

Set aside the constitutional implications, and consider the practical impact on your neighbors (I don’t know about you, but my religion sort of requires that I take such things into account).

Advocates of “Put Parents in Charge” appeal to libertarian impulses by saying the money parents would get back for sending their children to private schools is their money, so it’s nobody else’s business what they do with it.

That’s just not consistent with the facts. If you claim a tuition tax credit, it comes out of the state’s general fund. That means the state has less money overall for almost everything it pays for, including law enforcement, prisons, environmental protection and public health as well as schools. So when some get tuition tax credits, everybody else gets either higher taxes (a fat chance, with a Legislature that hasn’t passed a general tax increase since 1987) or more dangerous roads, less-secure prisons, etc.

Citizens are free to send their children to private schools. No one would curtail that. At the same time, they have an obligation as citizens to pay for the things only government can provide — such as universal education, and safe streets.

Provide your child with whatever sort of religious instruction you choose (short of some reasonable limit such as, say, human sacrifice), and I will adamantly defend your right to make that choice. Just don’t ask the other 4 million people in the state to pay for it. That’s not fair.

Write to Mr. Warthen at bwarthen@thestate.com.