Do children have "rights" independent of their parents?

[elfs]

There's a paper circulating around the upper eschelons of education lobby groups entitled Testing the Boundaries of Parental Authority over Education, by Professor of Education Robert Reich of Stanford University. This paper apparently makes a lot of people, mostly homeschoolers, unhappy.

Homeschooling has gotten an interesting boost during the Bush years, one that I'm sure BushCo isn't at all unhappy to see. Conspiracy theorists have the following to say about BushCo's "Education Initiative": the unfunded testing and standards mandate will automatically cause some schools to close-- those schools that cannot meet the standards. Those students will have nowhere to go-- neighboring schools won't have the capacity to take them. Ultimately, BushCo will have the perfect excuse to provide vouchers and plenty of arguments to shoot down any objections. It's already happening-- middle-of-the-road parents are pulling their kids out of schools, alienated by the "test, test, test" attitude and "teach to the test" policies that deny their kids any real chance at an education worth its name.

Now comes the counter-blow to homeschooling. "Children are owed as a matter of justice the capacity to lead lives-- adopt values and beliefs, pursue an occupation, endorse traditions-- that are different from those of their parents." Seems more or less obvious to some of us; once they've left the home, our kids are free to do what they want. We only hope that the traditions we've shown them and the examples we've set for them serve them well enough. But Reich takes his contention futher: "Because the child cannot ensure the acquisition of such capacities and the parents may be opposed the state must ensure it for them."

By this latter part, Reich intends to formulate a theory of "just education" that requires home schoolers to follow social education mandates handed down to public schools. "The state cannot relinquish its regulatory role in education in cases where parents invoke their religious beliefs as a bulwark against secular authority," Reich writes. It's a direct attack against those who homeschool for religious or philosophical reasons:

"At a bare minimum one function of any school environment must be to expose children to and engage students with values and beliefs other than those they are likely to encounter within their homes. Because homeschooling is structurally and in practice the least likely to meet this end, I argue that while the state should not ban homeschooling it must nevertheless regulate its practice with vigilance."

I, for one, do not feel that the state has any legitimate authority over children, which is what is being asserted here. There is no compelling evidence that any given state's "secular authority" is functionally superior to the authority given in the home. The state no more has the right to make sure that kids get a "mandated" amount of exposure to "alternative points of view" then it does to ensure that kids get exposed to some arbitrary amount of advertising. Above and beyond the watchdog role of making sure parents do not visit upon their kids what they cannot legally visit upon other people by initiatory force, the state has no business "providing alternatives" to children.

Comments

[elfs.livejournal.com]

It depends on the state. There is no uniform federal guidelines for testing home-schooled students-- and according to G. W. Bush, that's the way it's supposed to be. The "No Student Left Behind" act tests the capability of schools, not that of the students.

The only uniform standard applied to those who are home schooled is survival, I'm afraid.