More on education rights

In answer to my argument against the proposition that a person does not owe an obligation to the state to attend public schools in order to preserve the state, Ed Darrell writes, “that’s not what I said. The obligation I’m talking about is the obligation of citizens (beyond the general ages of education, we may hope) to support schools.” If he’s simply saying that people have to pay their taxes, that’s certainly true as a legal matter. Yet he goes on to say that education is “a duty of the citizen who pays for the next generation to learn, and not a right of the student, nor even necessarily a duty of the student to learn. Education is an obligation of the taxpaying citizen.” But if a person—or his representatives—may demand an enforceable obligation upon another person, then he must be said to have a legal right to that thing. That’s the definition of a “right”: an enforceable obligation to action by another person. If I have a duty to pay for another person’s education, then that person has a legal right to an education. The fact that this legal right violates my natural right to the property that I earn shows that this legal right is illegitimate, but it is nevertheless a legal right.

Mr. Darrell says that “[m]oney spent on a kid’s education is not a right the kid has, and the kid has no right to insist on a choice of how or where to spend that money; instead, money spent is an investment by the citizens who pay the money.” Certainly it’s true that children have no right to take that money from people who earn it, but the term “investment” is slightly misleading, since a person has a choice to invest, and one has no choice not to support government schools. If the state decides that it is wise policy to allow people to have more choice—say, that parents should be free to choose what school their children should go to—then that’s certainly legitimate. And if a student, as Mr. Darrell says, has “no right to insist on a choice of how or where to spend that money,” then neither does Mr. Darrell have such a right. So if people decide to allow parents to spend education funds at any school they wish, then Mr. Darrell has no right to complain about that. School choice programs still require taxpayers to support education, so they comply with the asserted taxpayer’s alleged obligation, so there’s nothing wrong, on Mr. Darrell’s own terms, with school choice.

In response to my point about the right to be ignorant, Mr. Darrell says “this is the distinction: Anti-science, anti-evolution views are inherently religious, and therefore prevented by the establishment clauses of state and federal constitutions.” But that’s not quite accurate. First, anti-science views are not inherently religious, since a person can be anti-science without being religious. Many hippies I know qualify. Nor does the Establishment Clause “prevent” such views. It only prevents the state from taking a position on religious issues. Hippie teachers are free to teach anti-science views in the classroom, so long as they don’t teach that a particular religion is true.

And, of course, private citizens are free to believe whatever they want to. When Mr. Darrell asks, “[i]f creationists insist their faith and their children cannot stand the test of truth and reason, should we listen to them?” We must be careful how we answer that. The answer is, yes, if we’re talking about what they do on their own private property, for instance. And, to a limited degree, the answer is yes, if we’re talking about what they do with their children. (The state rightly limits what a parent can do to a child in the name of religion, since the child has rights valid against the parent.) The answer might even be yes when talking about a student in a public school—the parent might have the right to withdraw a student from a class teaching evolution. (I’m not sure about this, actually. I’ll think about it some more.) And the answer is yes if we’re talking about a creationist who doesn’t want to read Panda’s Thumb. Such a person certainly has the right to go to some other website instead. On the other hand, the answer is certainly no if we’re talking about a creationist government-school teacher teaching that creationism is true. That is illegal.

But, of course, the fact that we must respect people’s rights to be ignorant, dogmatic boobs doesn’t mean that we have to shut up and stop teaching the truth. By all means, spread the light of science. We just have to respect the rights of the ignorant while we do so—and that’s not easy in the context of government education, which is inherently a violation of individual rights.