Anarchy, State and Ignorance

Your children are not your property. They’re not mine, either, thank Gawd, and just as important, they’re not the state’s property, either.

One of the problems of framing political theory in terms of fundamental or natural property rights (the naturalist fallacy aside) is that once we begin thinking of a person as having property rights in himself, it’s a small leap to thinking that one person can have some sorts of property rights in someone else. (Yes, I know, there are ways around this, but that doesn’t make it any less a problem, and an entirely avoidable one, at that, if we just abandoned the notion of property existing outside a legal system, itself a function of the ideally minimal state. But that’s another rant for another thread.)

Positive Liberty readers will have noted a certain amount of crankiness lately when it comes to schooling, education, creationism, Intelligent Design theory, Darwinian evolutionary theory, home schooling, etc. People do care about what is taught in schools and people do care about their children’s education and want excellent schools. Tempers flare, intemperate statements are made, feelings get hurt, my jokes get even dumber than usual, and so on.

Of course, when I say “people” I don’t mean everyone. There are many people who really don’t give a damn about excellent schools (we call these people NEA members) and there really are parents who don’t give a damn about their children's education.

There are people who believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God not only about matters spiritual but matters historical, too, including natural history. And there are people who believe that with the empirical sciences in one hand and Occam’s straight razor wielded deftly enough in the other they can whittle down language and the reality to which it ideally relates to a tidy little material ontology with a surprisingly handy analytic framework undergirding and making sense of both. We call the first sort fundamentalists and we call the second sort Richard Dawkins. They have much in common, not the least of which is an almost invincible ignorance of each other’s area of interest and expertise. But that’s another rant for another thread.

Back to school. School sucks. And public school sucks in the sort of way that can only happen when you start with something that sucks already and make it a public institution as well. Public schools are much like public prisons, which only makes sense, after all, since they both serve roughly the same sorts of functions; namely, warehousing uncivilized undesirables from the rest of the public and “socializing” them for their eventual release into the general population. In prison we call such socialization, insofar as there is any, rehabilitation. In school, [insert equivalent disclaimer here], we call it education.

Schools, like prisons, are institutions that don’t deal very well with the very best or the very worst of their inmates. Being government institutions, they trend toward the one-size-fits-all model. In reality, however, one size fits almost no one.

No wonder then that some caring parents who not only object to the ideological biases rampant in contemporary pubic schools but properly dubious of those schools' educational capabilities might well opt to home-school their children. I must say that the families of my personal acquaintance who have gone that route are far more as Mr. Babka describes than as Mr. Heath describes. But that almost certainly says more about the sort of home-schooling parents I happen to know than about the sort of home-schooling parents I don’t know. (In that respect, I am logically in exactly the same situation as the woman who was shocked that Ronald Reagan was elected since she didn't know a single person who voted for him.)

Typically, the glib libertarian response to public education’s panoply of woes is to argue for the abolition of public, i.e., state operated schools entirely and to let a market in, say, voucher-funded private schools arise. Yes, the anarcho-capitalists will chime in at this point and start whining about how they shouldn’t have to pay for your and my children’s education, but (1) an educated public is a public good, (2) an uneducated public is a public disaster and (3) children, not being the property of their parents, shouldn’t be victimized by their parents inability to pay for a decent education any more than they should be victimized by the state’s one-size-fits-nearly-nobody excuse for an education.

No, children do not have the right to an education. They do, however, have the right not to be prevented from an education even as they have the right not to be starved by their parents. (Or forced to eat nothing but healthy foods by the nanny state, for that matter.)

The fact is, moreover, that there are altogether too many parents out there who are not at all like Mr. Babka and who don’t give a damn whether their sons and daughters know any biology or math whatsoever, who don’t care whether their children ever read any books at all other than the Bible or Koran or whatever or, worse yet, would prefer they didn’t.

Contemporary society will not permit such parents to raise their children in such a manner and contemporary society is morally right not to do so. You have the moral right to share your religious beliefs with your children. It is less clear whether you have the right to insist that your children abide by those religious beliefs, especially as they grow older, but it is entirely clear that, regardless of whether you are motivated by religious beliefs or not, you have no right to keep your children ignorant. (And, no, I don’t mean the state should require graphically detailed sex education for eight year olds. Let’s keep some perspective here, folks.)

The point of all of this – leaving our anarcho-capitalist friends to wallow in their ideological purity while the adults seek real solutions to real problems – is that while voucher funded private schools would be a significant step toward both solving a certain set of problems with government operated schools (e.g., prayer in school), it remains vulnerable to certain remaining problems. Should, for example, a voucher funded school be permitted to teach exclusively Creationist natural history? Should society permit parents to home-school or send their children to a voucher funded school with no math instruction? No exposure to our larger cultural heritage including literature, history, etc.?

Because if we agree that the answer is no, and I certainly hope that at least most of us will agree to that, then we are stuck with the unavoidable conclusion that that there remains a necessary government role in ensuring certain minimum standards in the education of children.

The trick, I think, is to abandon the (to use Mr. Babka’s term) utopian belief that society can eliminate the role of government in education while devising a system by which its role is kept to a bare minimum consistent with an adequate solution to the problems that would arise in an anarchy that included not only capable, responsible parents like us but incapable and irresponsible parents, too.

But we’ll save that discussion for next time.