This study represents an attempt to discern what responsibility the State should assume for regulating the education of the young, and what is the most defensible approach to fulfilling that responsibility. Analyses of this type could be timely, especially in the light of the spreading "alternative schools" movement; growing recognition among scholars that most educational experimentation remains discouragingly close to conventional practices despite dramatic differences in the educational needs of children; concern that cultural pluralism is declining in a society bombarded by electronic mass media; new attacks on compulsory school attendance laws and other time-honored mechanisms of educational regulation; and at least inchoate recognition that the nation's courts have not yet adequately balanced the interests of the State against the liberties that students, parents, and teachers seek to exercise in educational settings. These considerations are discussed and documented. The most pervasive and liberty-endangering regulatory approach used by State governments is the programmatic approach--the method of prescribing the programs, methods, or procedures by which children must be reared during the extensive periods when school attendance is compulsory. Little attention has been given to other ways of fulfilling government's regulatory responsibility in education. (Author/JF)