Here’s a paper I presented recently that looks at some questions about parental authority using the idea of transformative experiences.

The number of American children who are homeschool has grown exponentially in recent decades, but remains comparatively low—a reasonable estimate would put it in the area of 4% the school aged population. Many homeschooling parents are conservative Christians who go this route in large part for religious reasons, and these parents dominate the self-identified homeschool movement and its largest and most effective lobbying organization. This is also the population that most readily comes to mind when the topic of homeschooling is broached.

It might be tempting, then, to imagine homeschooling as simply another facet of the conservative evangelical world living at the margins of mainstream American culture, of a piece with the rural religious private schools teaching creationism and abstinence before marriage. A Harvard Magazine article profiling the work of Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet published last year—and the culture war dustup that ensued—suggests there is quite a bit more at stake. Keep reading…

Historically religious liberty has been at the core of liberalism, reflecting its birth amidst protracted religious conflict. This helps explain why concerns about religious upbringings and education dominate recent philosophical discussions about the limits of parental authority. If we assume children’s moral equality, and add to that a desire to treat children in accordance with the same liberal values that we wish to see governing relations between adults, it seems right to suppose children should enjoy the same kinds of religious freedoms. The United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child asserts as much. It seems a short step from here to the conclusion that coercing children’s religious beliefs and practices is as objectionable as coercing the religious beliefs and practices of adults. Keep reading…

There is no war on parents, though if the work of a growing number of philosophers becomes known to certain kinds of political commentators we may very well begin hearing there is. Careful and creative philosophical work on parenting is increasing, which is wonderful, but it is striking how quickly a range of radical positions is becoming orthodoxy. These include claims such as:

1. parents have no moral right to impart their religious beliefs to their children;
2. parents should not have a legal right to have their children privately educated;
3. parents should not have a legal right to homeschool their children;
4. families where two biological parents raise their own children should not be favored over those in which any of a number of different constellations of adults are raising children;
5. the moral and perhaps legal standards of minimally decent parenting requires that children not be taught certain things, such as that homosexuality is immoral, or that traditional gender roles are justified by natural differences between men and women.

To be clear, one would be hard pressed to find a philosopher who endorses all these things, but it is easy now to find many thinkers actively arguing any combination of them. Keep Reading…

My book has been published–that’s a nice thing to be able to say. 

If there’s a sense in which Aristotelian parenting is impossible, there’s also a (different) sense in which it is inevitable. If we assume, as I think we should, that it is a fundamental duty of parents to protect and further their children’s interests, then it hard to see how good parents can not approximate a model according to which “wise parents, knowing the good, use their authority to instils habits of behavior which lead to moral development, a practice that in time turns their children towards the good and towards happiness”, as I put in the previous post. If this amounts to something in the spirit of Aristotle, then all good parents are Aristotelian, however they go about defining the Good. Keep reading…

Parenting is a deeply moral enterprise, both in being the locus of a lot of morally significant decisions and actions—it matters a lot how parents treat their children—and in the sense of leading to morally significant results—it matters a lot how children turn out. It is often remarked that despite its moral importance, (Western) philosophers seem to have little to say about parenting. This is true comparatively—philosophers actually say a fair amount about parenting, but much less than they say about many other things, even within ethics.

Aristotle is seen as something of an exception, at least insofar as his remarks about moral education and the acquisition of virtue seem readily applicable to parenting. His account of human flourishing, the role of the virtues in tending us towards the good, the good as defined in terms of human psychology (literally), habituation as the source of the (moral virtues), the taming of the appetites and feelings as a condition of genuine autonomy—all of it lends itself to a natural account of much of what parents try to do. Wise parents, knowing the good, use their authority to instils habits of behavior which lead to moral development, a practice that in time turns their children towards the good and towards happiness.

There’s something right about this, and those who turn to Aristotle for child rearing advice are on some solid ground. But there are also some things wrong with this. Keep reading…

Or so thinks Rand Paul. Or at least that what he said: “The state doesn’t own your children, parents own their children.” The context was recent debates about vaccinating children, and on that subject Paul’s comments are alarming enough. Hopefully though he doesn’t really believe children are literally the property of parents. I would guess he means parents have a unique or absolute right to make medical decisions about their children and that this trumps the state’s authority to make medical decisions about children. Keep reading…

I had a paper come out in the Journal of Philosophy of Education. Here’s the abstract: