I’VE SEEN “school choice” before. It was during the 1967-68 school year. I was a freshman at Bennettsville High School.

One day in homeroom, Coach Ward passed out some forms. At the top it said something about “Freedom of Choice.” It asked me to state where I preferred to go to school the next year.

It seemed an odd question. Where else would they expect me to go but the school I was already attending, the school my mother and uncles had attended before me? In any event, it was moot. Assuming my father returned safely from Vietnam, I knew I’d be living somewhere else the next year. I just filled in “Bennettsville High School” and turned it in.

It didn’t occur to me to choose East Side High School, the old “separate-but-equal” facility for black kids. I sincerely doubt it occurred to any other whites, either.

And I know it never occurred to me that the form I signed represented South Carolina’s latest attempt to dodge the effects of Brown v. Board of Education, which had been decided when I was only a few months old.

I thought Bennettsville High School was already integrated. They might not have been taking Latin or English with me, but there were several black kids in my P.E. class, and one on the junior varsity basketball team on which I served as manager. We called him “Hicks.” He was pretty good. Better than I was, anyway. (Coach Cox said I could participate in practices, and maybe I could make the team next year.)

There was no excuse for me to be so clueless. My yearbook shows that Charles Hicks was also the only black kid on the J.V. football team. Varsity football was all white, while there was one black varsity basketball player. Of 127 freshmen pictured, 14 were black.

Still, the reality didn’t hit me until 1989, when I attended the graduation of my cousin from B’ville High.

By this time, I was The State’s government editor, and I was aware, intellectually, that Marlboro was a majority-black county, or nearly so. So it was particularly idiotic for me to look around at the graduation and think, “Where did all these black people come from?”

That’s when I realized what “Freedom of Choice” had actually meant. And once I saw what full integration looked like, I realized just how effective it had been at dodging, however temporarily, the inevitable.

I also realized that those few black kids in my freshman class had to have been awfully brave to write “Bennettsville High” instead of “East Side.” Charles Hicks had to be extra courageous. I wish I had understood back then.

I don’t have a copy of that form from 1968, but the state archives had a similar one from Aiken County. It doesn’t have “Freedom of Choice” at the top the way mine did, opting for the more prosaic “Request for Assignment, Reassignment or Transfer.” The Aiken version went home to parents, asking: “Do you wish your child to attend the school he now attends? If not, which school do you wish him to attend?”

A letter about the policy from the district dated Sept. 14, 1965, does include the magic phrase: “The Aiken County Board of Education has adopted a policy of complete freedom of choice,” which it described as a “plan to desegregate the public schools.”

The letter boasts to a federal official, “In the Spring of 1965 we transferred 60 Negro students to nine previously all white schools....” Now there’s real integration. Almost seven whole black kids allowed to go to each all-white school.

But Marlboro and Aiken were apparently in the vanguard. Historian Walter Edgar would later write that “By 1969, only 12 of 93 school districts had permitted small numbers of blacks and whites to attend school together.”

In the fall of 1971, I attended the University of South Carolina, and ran into some of my former classmates from Bennettsville. Only they hadn’t graduated from BHS, but from a private “academy.” Something dramatic had happened in three brief years, but I had been living in Florida and Hawaii, and had missed it.

What had happened was that “Freedom of Choice” had died the death it deserved. Real integration came to South Carolina in 1970 —as a result of federal intervention.

And whites left the public schools in droves. The effect was devastating, as the folks with the money and the influence turned their backs on the public system.

My concern at this point is that “Put Parents in Charge” would accelerate South Carolina’s return to the two-tiered system that was still in place back in the 1960s. That’s because only middle-class parents would have the cash to put up the private school tuition to begin with, and enough income to pay enough taxes to get the full tuition tax credit months later. And only really motivated parents would go through all that rigmarole at all — just as only the most motivated black parents would have sent their children to the all-white schools under the previous “Freedom of Choice” policy.

There is good reason to believe that under Gov. Mark Sanford’s proposal, most private schools would look, demographically, a lot like Bennettsville High School in 1968, if not whiter. And many more public schools would look a lot like East Side.

It’s no accident that Put Parents in Charge gets much of its political support from folks who started backing away from public schools a long time ago. For the past 35 years, we’ve had this vicious cycle, in which such parents get alienated by the public schools and leave, causing support for the schools to decline, which causes the quality of the schools to decline, which causes more such parents to turn away from the schools, etc.

With the Education Accountability Act, we’ve finally been making progress in spite of that dynamic. And now this.

“Freedom of Choice” back in the ’60s was a lousy deal for the kids who needed public education the most. This latest manifestation of choice would be, too.

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