Censorship

[Sanford Levinson]

I agree with Rick that Steve Gilles's article is very fine indeed.  I don't
think I have much problem with the quoted passage.  The rabbit in the hat,
though, is the notion of "reasonable" educational choices.  Is a member of
the Identity group "reasonable" in teaching his/her child that the
government of the United States is in the control of a Zionist conspiracy
and that the question is simply when, rather than if, the armed struggle to
"take America back" must begin?  I have no doubt whatsoever that Rick does
not subscribe to such views.  The question is which of those views that we
disagree with are we, nonetheless, willing to call "reasonable."  This is,
obviously, not a new question.  At least once a year (probably even more
often), I evoke the believers in Venusian space ships, etc.  (Perhaps this
is the occasion to ask about Contact, a movie that I thought seriously
flawed by its vulgar portrayal of religious fundamentalists.)

Sandy




>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.
>
>--
>                   ----------
>             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
>