Education Vs Liberty (Political)
I have long been conflicted on my stance of this important tension, the right to education and the belief in liberty. They do not seem at odds until one digs down just a little deeper. My heart reaction has been that one has the liberty to choose how their children are brought up; whether they choose private schooling, charter schooling, or even homeschooling. An assumption I tend to make is that all people have the same basic goals when it comes to their kids, to raise healthy and successful children who can do better than they have.
It is also my opinion that someone has a right to their own beliefs and a right to share them with their children, whether or not their beliefs are particularly good or not. It is an inevitability of all education that certain views and values will be transferred from educator to learner. I use educator here to cover all of the entities whom dictate education and education policy, from the state down to the teacher.
In America we argue back and forth about how much our education grants these values now and how much it should. There is a side that views it as an existential threat to their way of life, who in my opinion are a bit looney; I fail to see how modern education changes a child's gender or sexual orientation, and I have not seen much of the Marxist ideology being based down. But they are at least touching on something real. American schools all push a little l liberal ideology and distributes its values; successfully or not is another discussion. I don't see much of an issue here. Societies use education to proliferate the beliefs needed to ensure their continual existence.
But of course, this isn't all there is to it. Ostensibly, the main goal of education is also to transfer down skills and knowledge needed for an individual's success. The chief example in my mind being literacy, a skill needed for a democratic society to stay democratic. Of course, here in America the quality of an education tends to have a direct causal link to wealth, but this too is another discussion entirely.
I'd like to offer the least controversial opinion take imaginable: Children have a right to an education. But if we take this assumption, now we must place a hard limit on a parent's liberty. Of course we do this all the time: parents don't have the right to abuse or neglect their children, and often do not have the right to deny medical care if the danger is great enough. Still, this is a stumbling block for me. My understanding of a parent's relationship to their child is not sufficiently thought out. There seems to be an ownership dynamic there, one which give parents extreme control over those who are given little to no agency on their lives. Children do not have the agency to get a vaccine without their parents consent, move to a new place, control their obligations or even choose their education. They are at the mercy of another agent's decisions for sixteen to eighteen years.
In a lot of ways, this is mostly fine; kids are also not fully rational or conscient actors for most of their childhood, and can not be expected to think too deeply about their futures. This is not to say children do not have a willingness to learn, but they are not the greatest at choosing what exactly they should learn to serve them in the future.
But sometimes, I question whether this has to be asked about the parents. Should a parent be allowed to eschew the entire concept of formal schooling? This is a feature of many types of homeschooling, especially Unschooling. Does a parent have a right to teach their children to avoid society and stick with their own? This happens in a lot of small and isolated religious communities. Should a child be allowed to learn factually wrong information? Creationism in evangelical schooling is a great example. Can a parent teach their children Nazism? This happened in in Ohio, where about 2,500 members of a telegram group were given Nazi propaganda and Hitler groups to form their homeschool curriculum.
The consequences of full liberty in education can be disastrous. I don't even believe many of these parents are malicious. I do know that we have very little moral basis in common. I also know that their children will have to leave the world of their parents home and enter ours. Is it the fault of a child grown up who went through unschooling and can't read? How much can I blame the fascist who were raised with all the vile hatred a Nazi pedagogy could offer.
I don't know if I can offer even half-baked solutions. Preferably, we would create schools so good that no parent would choose to homeschool. Preferably, we could convince those mired in hatred to just, not hate. But that's a childish option. There are times when Liberty an Freedom do not offer us good answers. In my mind, this is one.