The following is excerpted from a symposium paper by James G. Dwyer, Professor of Family law at William and Mary.

The Liberal States Response to Religious Visions of Education

http://www.stjohns.edu/media/3/bf88cc425d6b44d9b89484d7f8e050af.pdf

There are several points to be made in response to the “parents know best” line of reasoning. First, as noted above, no one seriously maintains that the state should not set the parameters of parental freedom. This is in part because everyone knows that not all parents love their children enough to refrain from acting in ways that the parents themselves know is harmful to the children.

Second, the claim that parents know their children best is overstated. It is true that most parents are more familiar with the individual personalities of their children and with the past events of their children’s lives than is anyone else. But many aspects of children’s welfare are generic or nearly so—that is, certain things are true of all or most children. Thus, knowledge of those aspects of children’s well-being does not depend on intimacy. In fact, many generic aspects of children’s lives are known only by people who have devoted an extraordinary amount of time, even their entire careers, to learning about them. This is true of much of children’s development and health. It would be a rare parent indeed who was not only an expert with respect to her children’s personalities and histories, but also with respect to developmental psychology, educational theory, medicine, and nutrition. With respect to each major area of children’s lives, it seems safe to say that the vast majority of parents know quite little. Very few parents know as much about how to educate children as do professional educators, and most parents implicitly recognize this by seeking schools for their children that employ well-trained and credentialed teachers. Very few parents know as much about health care as do doctors. The state has agencies that employ and draw information from people whose careers are devoted to studying children’s welfare, including their cognitive development, and it is largely for that reason that we repose some trust in state agencies to establish minimum requirements for care and treatment of children.

Third, what is typically at stake in religiously-charged controversies over child rearing is not parental love or parental knowledge; rather, it is ideology and a clash of religious and secular values. Reference to parental love and knowledge is impertinent in these situations. The state’s objection to certain illiberal practices is not that it believes that the parents do not love their children, nor that the parents are ignorant; it is that those practices are harmful to the children from a secular perspective and that the parents are not entitled to say that their religious perspective must control. If one accepts the explanation above as to why the very idea of parents’ rights is misguided, one must, in order to defend the claim that the parents’ religious perspective must control, explain why children have a right to that outcome. The state’s position might be understood to assert that children have a right to protection of their secular interests until they become adults capable of deciding for themselves what religious beliefs, if any, they will hold, and what role any such beliefs will play in their lives, including whether they will sacrifice what is generally believed to be in their secular interests for the sake of religious duty or spiritual aspiration. Those who reject this position need to construct an argument to the effect that children have a right to have their secular interests sacrificed for the sake of what their parents believe to be required by religious command. And that argument needs to be one the state can accept and would find convincing, for as noted above, what religious objectors to state regulation of child rearing are demanding is not state inaction, but rather state action of a particular sort—namely, a state conferral on them of more extensive power over children’s lives. I am not aware that anyone has ever attempted to construct such an argument, and I very much doubt that it can successfully be done.

One way to think about the content of children’s rights that I find helpful is to imagine what rules I would want to apply to my situation if I were told that tomorrow I would be born again, in the temporal sense that I would start all over in my human life as a newborn child, and if I did not know anything else about my individual circumstances—in particular, not knowing who among the vast number of potential parents in our society would become my legal parents. The parents I will have could be people belonging to any one of the tremendous variety of religious denominations in America, people who have a very individualized set of religious beliefs, people who have no religious beliefs, or people who are atheistic. They could be Satanists or sun worshippers, people who believe that one should eat nothing but lettuce, or people who believe children grow spiritually through sexual intercourse with adults. In light of the enormous variety of possibilities, how would I want the state to go about deciding what the limits of parental power and freedom should be in the world I am about to reenter?

I believe this thought experiment would lead to a conclusion that the state should rely on widely shared secular views of children’s welfare or interests, but not on any particular religious beliefs per se. Unless one ascribes to a view that every child just has whatever interests are specified by the conception of the good of his or her parents, or that all efforts to identify interests of children are futile, one would want to guard against the possibility that the parents to whom one is assigned have beliefs inconsistent with one’s interests. Everyone involved in these debates concedes this possibility when thinking about religious practices that seriously threaten children’s health or safety, but without explanation, some refuse to acknowledge that the same possibility exists with respect to children’s schooling. I believe that anyone reading this essay who thinks seriously about the prospect of reentering the world and being assigned to parents of unknown ideological outlook—parents whose beliefs could diverge widely not only from secular views about children’s welfare but also from any religious beliefs the reader now holds— will come to endorse a legal regime in which the state adopts the prevailing secular views concerning children’s temporal welfare and imposes on all parents restrictions on their child-rearing choices that reflect such views.

That thought experiment is designed to model the reality of every newborn child today, to facilitate our putting ourselves in the place of each person who is actually entering the world now. It encourages us to see each newborn child as a morally distinct and equal person and to recognize the great hazard the state creates for children now by assigning them to parents adhering to any one of a vast variety of conceptions of the good without constraining in a significant way parental choices regarding children’s intellectual, psychological, and emotional development. Another useful thought experiment might be to imagine that your own children, or your own nephews and nieces are, for some reason—for example, a family tragedy—randomly reassigned to another set of parents in our society—for example, through the adoption process. How comfortable would you be with the thought that they could be assigned to fundamentalist Muslims, fundamentalist Christians, parents in a cult like the Branch Davidians, members of the Ku Klux Klan, or parents adhering to any other lifestyle and ideological view? Would you not want the state to impose some restrictions and requirements with respect to their upbringing, including the kind of education they receive, to at least ensure that they will develop the capacity to question the beliefs their parents instill in them and perhaps also to ensure that they are prepared—even if they are girls—to pursue whatever careers are well suited to their native talents and abilities and self-chosen values?

I will close by reiterating that ensuring every child a liberal education would not amount to standardizing children. Those adults who attended public schools ought to resent the frequent suggestion that state influence on education results in children being standardized, their individuality expunged. In addition, in and of itself, imposing certain requirements on private schools has no implications for children’s home life or for the freedom of parents to teach and model their beliefs and values. Again, the experience of the 90 percent of adults in this country who attended public schools is telling; the vast majority describe themselves as religious, and I have never heard of any who complained that they were deprived of the opportunity to have a religious upbringing insulated from liberal ideas and secular views and values. In fact, Catholic parents are increasingly comfortable sending their children to public schools, believing that their children can still have a Catholic upbringing, can still learn the tenets of the Catholic faith, and can still live their lives as Catholics, because these parents recognize that they still control most of their children’s daily lives and still have the opportunity to spend a great amount of time instructing their children and modeling their beliefs. I have argued simply that no parent is entitled to complete control over children’s intellectual development and that children cannot plausibly be said to have a right that their parents have such complete control. Rather, every child has a moral right that at least this one limited aspect of their lives—their schooling—be governed by liberal principles whether or not their parents accept those principles.

I am not aware of any religion whose basic precepts are inherently opposed to this position. I would be very interested to see a theological analysis within the religious traditions addressed by the other contributors or any other tradition of what adherents should believe about the respective authority of parents and the rest of society, as represented by the state, over child rearing, and of what specific restrictions the state ought to impose on parental freedom, if they accepted certain of the assumptions and conclusions relied on above—for example, that children are neither property nor appendages of their parents, that children’s separate personhood gives rise to some moral obligations both on the part of parents and on the part of the state, that some parents manifest little love for their children, that most parents are not experts regarding many aspects of child rearing, that the state cannot be expected to adopt any parent’s religious beliefs or assume that such beliefs are true, and that the beliefs parents in our society have about what God commands and about the spiritual interests of their children are infinitely varied and in some cases directly contrary to empirically supported secular views about children’s welfare. It is not obvious to me, based on my limited understanding of various faiths, that such an analysis would necessarily lead in many instances to conclusions much different from my own.

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