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Liberalism and Parental Control of Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Richard S. Ruderman  and
R. Kenneth Godwin
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Extract

Liberalism has always had a powerful concern with the education of its citizens. But who should exercise final authority over the education—parents or the state? The answer rests, in large part, on our understanding of the character of the self-rule or autonomy to be taught. For as “autonomy” comes to mean unpredetermined “choice,” it becomes ever more difficult to justify parental control of education. In fact, parental control, supported by the earliest liberals, is now thought to produce “ethical servility.” Liberal theorists—such as John Dewey, Amy Gutmann, and Eamonn Callan—break with thinkers like Locke and Mill in allowing the state to override parental preferences in the name of greater equality, preparation for autonomy, and democratic deliberation. We argue that taking educational authority away from parents and giving it to the state is an illiberal policy, meaning one that fails to abide by Locke's central distinction of political and parental power. This failure will lead both to greater ethical servility and to fewer reasonable alternatives from which autonomous individuals can choose.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , Summer 2000 , pp. 503 - 530
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2000

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References

1 We usestate to refer to all agents and institutions of the state, including local school boards.

2 See the work of Zuckert, Michael which contests the thesis that Locke and liberalism were essentially Christian: Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 91–93,187,261–72;Google Scholar and The Natural Rights Republic: A Study in the Foundations of the American Political Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), esp. pp. 154–59, 171–201.Google Scholar

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5 It is still less clear that most people are able to comply with postmodern liberalism's antidote to this problem: expanding their sense of “one of us” beyond their immediate family or kin to all Americans and, finally, to all human beings. See Callan, Eamonn, Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 130–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Callan follows Richard Rorty here, especially in insisting that the sense of solidarity so developed is the sole dependable psychological motive for moral action.

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43 Insofar as some contemporary liberals lack this confidence in rational self-interest, they undermine the basis of the liberal state to which they would turn to supply the defects of parents.

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79 Having denied us the chance to instill virtue in the political sphere (by replacing ruling with representative administration), liberalism now seems bent on denying it to us in the private or family sphere. It seeks to show, that is, that parents who wish to “raise” their children are repeating the same fundamental psychological or moral error that those who wished to “rule” societies exhibited in the past. Locke distinguished parental power from political power for the purpose, inter alia, of salvaging a subpolitical sphere (the family) in which the human longing to “govern” others for the other’ good could be carried on (see Second Treatise, sec. 170).

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81 Callan is willing to concede (in a contrary-to-fact mood) that “if the deepest sources of human good had little connection to politics, and if personal autonomy estranged us from these sources, then perhaps we should go back to the drawing board and revise our theories of liberal politics and civic virtue so that they do not recommend the promotion of so unfortunate a disposition as autonomy” (“Political Liberalism and Political Education,” p. 24). We hope to convince Callan to take these possibilities seriously.

82 For an example of how school choice might encourage the type of diversity sought by political liberals, see Godwin, Kenneth, Kemerer, Frank, Martinez, Valerie, and Ruderman, Richard S., “Liberal Equity in Education: A Comparison of Choice Options.” Social Science Quarterly 79:3 (Fall 1998): 502–22.Google Scholar

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93 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, bk. 1, chap. 11.