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Politics Resource Center |
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January 1, 2003 Something to Think About
by Gordon Francis Corbett
"Government has an obligation to ensure that children receive an adequate education." That sentence is a little tricky, so please bear with me while I explain some background. Then, I will analyze it. Ethics is the branch of philosophy that studies right and wrong and focusses on how to act correctly. It includes the natural law, which studies how men should treat one another. The natural law's foundation is the "right." Only individuals may own rights, and every person has exactly the same rights. Philosopher Ayn Rand said that "a right is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context." Mr. Sheldon Richman says that, when considered together, a person's rights create "a zone of sovereignty" around him. These natural individual's rights protect a person from violations by other people, and they let him do anything that violates no one else's rights. Natural individual's rights function only negatively. What we call the right to live, for example, actually prohibits immoral or negligent killing. One part of the natural law is politics. Politics studies how best to use force to prevent, deter, and redress violations of our rights by initiators of force or fraud. We may defend ourselves against force with fists, feet, or even firearms. Sometimes, though, we need more help than those means can provide; and, when we must use them, we need an impartial arbiter to review what happened, so that everyone's rights will have the greatest chance to remain intact. Also, we need help in protecting our rights against fraud. Therefore, we hire public guardians. They comprise: legislators, to write laws sanctioning the use of force to protect our rights; civilian police and armed forces, to use force to prevent and deter violations of our rights; and, judges, prosecutors, public defenders, and juries, to determine who violated whose rights, and to punish the guilty by making them pay money for the damage they do or even by sending them to prison. This sketch explains what rights are, how people violate them, and why we hire people to defend them. It sets the stage for my analysis of this essay's introductory sentence: "...government has an obligation to ensure that children receive an adequate education." Properly, there is no such thing as a "government." There are only the public guardians. Their only proper task is protecting our rights, and their only proper powers derive from that task. An "obligation" is an expectation, founded on a moral premise and, perhaps, backed by a legally enforceable penalty, that someone will, or will not, do something. Properly, anything that our public guardians do to enforce a given "obligation" must protect one or more of someone's rights, and cannot violate anyone's rights. Unfortunately for our purposes, the child's negatively functioning natural rights do not affect the issue of whether "government has an obligation to ensure that children receive an adequate education." Our public guardians could only have such an obligation if the natural law gives the child any right, first, that positive action satisfies, and, second, if that right is one that government must protect. (Individuals have a natural right to make contracts with other people. Contracts create obligations that either negative or positive action, or combinations of both, may satisfy. Nevertheless, the contractual parties create them; they exist only during the life of a particular agreement; and, they operate only within the scope of that agreement. Therefore, they play no role in our discussion.) There is only one kind of natural-right obligation satisfied by positive action: obligations created consequentially, as when a couple's conceiving a baby obligates them to care for their baby. Our issue is whether that obligation lets our public guardians decide what would make that care adequate, including what constitutes "an adequate education." Take a look at that word, "adequate." If we let our public guardians ensure that "children receive an adequate education," we let them set a supposedly enforceable standard of what would make education adequate. That power would give them control. Giving them control reverses the normal order. Normally, besides loving, sheltering, clothing, and feeding them, parents educate their children. They tell them how to use their rights best; they help them do their homework or even teach them at home; and, if only by example, they train them in logical thinking. They have a right to do these things because their children are theirs, and because these actions do not violate their children's rights. Parents set standards that fit their economic circumstances, their religious or philosophic convictions, and, naturally, their tastes. This variety enriches our culture and strengthens our freedom. Letting guardians set standards does the reverse. By encouraging a Procrustean egalitarianism and by violating the parents' rights to set their own standards, it perverts the purpose of having guardians in the first place: to protect individuals' rights. Therefore, except when parents beat their children, starve them, or do something else that violates their negatively functioning natural-law rights, our public guardians have no proper authority to intervene. Therefore, they cannot "ensure that children receive an adequate education," because that power rightfully belongs to the parents. That is why, when I became a teacher in the late "'sixties," I learned that we teachers work in loco parentis: "in the place of the parent." We teach what the parents would teach, if they had the inclination, the knowledge, the time, and the energy. I learned that parents, and not their public servants, were my rightful employers. Then, along came the infamous "'seventies." Just when it seemed that "progressive education" and all its trappings were dead or dying, many public schools discarded teaching subject matter for instilling "proper attitudes." They junked discipline for "democracy in the classroom." They reduced homework drastically or forbade it outright. Today, the situation is far worse. So-called "co-operative learning," that eschews individual study and facilitates cheating, is the order of the day. Texts push political viewpoints when, instead, they should describe both sides of a controversy so that students can build their minds by learning the disputants' arguments and judging for themselves. What makes all this possible? The political and praxeological cause is the use of tax money to support the schools. The philosophic cause is the idea that "government has an obligation to ensure that children receive an adequate education." Discredit that idea, and we will take the first step toward achieving educational freedom. Stop taxing people to maintain a school system, and we will complete the journey. At that point, working in private schools or as tutors, America's teachers will teach solid subject matter, and America's children will learn it. Every school will be a mental gymnasium, and every graduate will stand head, shoulders, and feet above those who graduate today. Given the freedom to choose, Mom and Pop America will not willingly pay for nonsense. They love their children very much, and they want them to live as free, independent, and learned men and women. They know that knowledge has paved our way from the swamp to the stars, and that a student begins to climb that road when he opens a book and begins to read.
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