Censorship

[richard duncan]

Sandy asks whether I think Nazi parents have the right to educate
their children independent of any monitoring by the state. The Nazi
homeschool story is certainly not a typical one, but Sandy's
question nevertheless deserves a response.

Steve Gilles had it about right in his Chicago piece on this issue:

""Provided their educational choices are reasonable (that is, do not
violate the core notions of the human good and of social
responsibility on which there is liberal consensus), individual
parents should be free to pass on their values to their children and
to reject state efforts to try to inculcate contrary values through
mandatory public schooling, curriculum regulation, selective funding,
or other coercive means....Rightly interpreted, the First Amendment
protects parental educative speech against viewpoint-based and
content-based state regulation; and the category of parental educative
speech should be understood to include both direct parental
communication in the home and indirect parental communication, in the
schools that parents choose."

63 U.Chi.L.Rev at 1033-34.


I do not believe that "agents of the state" always do bad things. Like
Sandy, I believe the state sometimes does bad things and (also like
Sandy) I tend not to put too fine a point on my criticism of these bad
things. Education is a good thing. State support for education is a
good thing. But state control over the content of education is a bad
thing. Sure, there is a very limited role for the state to ensure that
children are not suffering educational neglect at the hands of their
parents. But that role should be very limited; like Gilles I believe
that the state should have virtually no role in controlling the
viewpoint or content of education.

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             Rick Duncan (rduncan at unlinfo.unl.edu)

"There's no pleasure on earth that's worth sacrificing for the sake of
an extra five years in the geriatric ward of the Sunset Old People's
Home, Weston-Super-Mare." Horace Rumpole