Admittedly, we don’t know where Miss Manners stands on the propriety of using public dollars on lessons in the arts of ballroom dance and social graces.

But we do know that the ladies and gentlemen at the Arkansas Department of Education have accepted an invitation to make the Little Rock Junior Cotillion an approved vendor for “Educational Freedom Accounts.” That means private school and homeschool families can waltz their way to poise and polish, all on the taxpayers’ dime.

Cotillion, that time-honored Southern tradition through which many of us have sweat at our mothers’ insistence, is no tonier than, say, equestrian lessons. And vouchers can be used for those! Plus, cotillion’s history as an institution founded with racism and elitism at its very core makes it akin to Arkansas’s

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