In all the conversation about Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay, few people have focused on what I think is the real lunacy at the heart of that story. Though Hannah-Jones mentions it in her piece, it comes out most clearly in an exchange, on This American Life, between Hannah-Jones and her daughter Najya:

Nikole Hannah-Jones: It’s not like I never had any doubts about my choice. I did. And the only reason I’m OK with my choice now is I’m like, you’re fine. I felt this was important. I tried to do the right thing.

Najya Hannah-Jones: And I think I’m fine because I’m in the school I am now. I feel like if I picked a different choice that you wanted me to, I don’t think I would be fine.

The lunacy at the heart of this exchange is the very idea that a 13-year-old child should be expected to choose the right school for herself. This isn’t Hannah-Jones’s fault at all. This is the way the New York City school system is set up, and honestly, from personal experience, I don’t think parents should be expected to choose for their child either.

My wife and I first had to run this obstacle course in a serious way when our daughter was in fifth grade, and we had to start figuring out which middle school she would go to. What people don’t often realize about big urban school districts like New York is that it is often not an option to go to a locally zoned school because there is no locally zoned school. We lived in District 15, and while we were guaranteed a slot in one of the many middle schools in that district, there was no locally zoned school for our daughter to go to.

Thankfully, the system was a lottery, which at least relieved us of one burden, which was doing everything we could to get our child into the middle school of her choice. But that’s the least of the struggle. How do you choose which school to put at the top of your list?

In coming up with our rankings, we were forced to run a gauntlet of questions: What kind of learner is your child? Does your child like the humanities or the sciences or math? Does she prefer small-group learning or expeditionary learning or traditional learning? Does she process information lexically or visually or who knows? Does she want to be a visual artist, an actor, a singer, and on and on and on.

When our child was in eighth grade considering a high school, we had to confront a similar range of questions, only now there was no simple lottery system. There were also screened schools, testing schools, lottery schools, audition schools, and more.

Imagine being a parent, not trained in anything about secondary school education or modes of student learning and all the rest, trying to answer these questions. And, mind you, not because we had sought out expert coaching on the process. These were questions you had to answer by virtue of having to choose a school.

You couldn’t not choose a school. You had to choose a school. And not just for your child, but your child understood as the most delicate vector of a thousand forces that determined what specific individualized type of learner she was. You would have thought we were all applying for PhD programs in physics, where you trying to match your ten-year-old to the absolutely perfect style of advisor.

We often think of school choice as something just foisted upon us from the right, and the right has certainly done a lot of that. But the NYC system, with all the ed-speak about learning styles, cognitive aptitudes, classroom environments, and all the rest, is not a system created entirely in the image of the right. It has its own particular centrist/neoliberal/Democratic wonk aspects as well. Which are absolutely maddening.

When I was first writing about Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, I quickly realized that we on the left had gotten the appeal of the right all wrong. We had totally bought into the idea that what the right is all about is “free to choose,” which is the famous title of the 1980 television series that Friedman hosted on PBS and that became a book, which Friedman co-wrote with Rose Friedman.

For the left, the point was that though the right promises freedom of choice, we don’t really have freedom of choice because of economic inequality and all the rest. The left fell into its favorite trap when it comes to arguing with the right, which is to pose equality as the opposite value of freedom, or, if not the opposite, than as the thruway to freedom understood as choice.

The left totally misread the problem with the “free to choose” paradigm. It’s not that we’re free to choose. It’s that we’re forced to choose. That’s what the right and liberals love about choice: hurling you into a sports arena where you’re forced to fight a thousand gladiators just to find your way out the door.

Some people like that kind of existence. I don’t. Most people don’t. In a way, our guiding spirit is Flaubert, who said that writers should be as bourgeois as possible in their lives so that they can be as radical as possible in their art. What I take that to mean is that all of us need some parts of lives that are easy, comfortable, stable, and assured, in order to engage in the experiments of living that are truly our life’s work.