Family and state in education: What role for parents’ rights?

20.500.12592/96x9sq

Family and state in education: What role for parents’ rights?

22 Nov 2022

Parental Rights in Sparta and in Plato According to Plutarch in his biography of Lycurgus, the legislator credited with the development of ancient Sparta, Spartan children were held not to ‘belong’ to their fathers, but ‘to the state in common’.2 They belonged to the state in the sense that boys and men were bred to fight for Sparta, while girls and women were to produce offspring for the purposes. [...] Aristotle strongly and correctly believes that in order to reason well about morality, you must already have dispositions to love and respect the good and be shamed by the bad, dispositions which are best nurtured in the family.6 Crucial to the question of education is the fact that the bonds linking parents and children mean that parents will know their children and what suits them better than th. [...] Thus, the family engenders a small community, with links to the past and the future, ideally inculcating loyalty, virtue and love in a way that would not be possible in a larger, more impersonal and less naturally related setting.7 These considerations in the Ethics are resumed and developed in the Politics. [...] Remarkably, in 1796 in the wake of the American revolution, Benjamin Rush, one of the original signatories of the Declaration of Independence, said that ‘each youth does not belong to himself, but is public property in the cause of liberty’.14 Remarkable that Dr Rush thought that liberty would be served by a regime owing more to Sparta than to what the USA was becoming at the turn of the nineteent. [...] Galston argues his position from the point of view of political liberalism and value pluralism; I do so both from that point of view and from an analysis of the family which sees the family as a basic component of the liberal society, valuable in itself, but in its autonomy and separation from the state, a key element in a society which is essentially liberal.

Authors

R Neal

Pages
20
Published in
United Kingdom