Last month an alluringly outlandish news story crossed my various social media feeds, about a Florida charter school whose principal had been dismissed due, it seemed, to parental complaints about Michelangelo’s David being shown to children in a Renaissance art class. I called the chairman of the school’s board, an indignant right-winger with a chronic inability to not comment. As I transcribed the interview and built the post in Slate’s content management system, it did cross my mind that our conversation really revealed something notable about the way certain conservatives think about education. But mostly I thought, This is going...