Plato's Republic

Nathan Newman nathan at newman.org
Thu Jun 20 12:59:27 PDT 2002


----- Original Message ----- From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com>


>So should a truly liberal state allow parents to educate their children
>free
>from coercion, including economic coercion, by providing vouchers for
>education as they see fit?

-Remind me why should pay for Mary Elizabeth's Catholic education? There's a -tradeoff of coercion here. Sure, we require ME to go to school, meaning we -send the truant officer after her if she doesn't. That's coercion. But if I -pay taxes that are spent by her parents on vouchers for a Catholic school, -that's backed by coercion too. So we have to choose here, and on balance IO -think the liberal choice is to keep the state out of the church.

You just made a big leap from liberalism to libertarianism here. Are taxes coercive? That assumes property is a right that is absolutely independent of society and thus society has no just claim on that property to sustain the mechanisms that made that prosperity possible.

There is an argument that property is required to some extent to keep the state from using economic threats to make free thought impossible, but that is a question where any uniform form of taxes is largely uncoercive, since it applies to all without relation to the beliefs of particular individuals. If you avoid the idiotic takings approaches to the 5th amendment, it is that restriction on arbitrary deprivation of property, not the absolute protection of property, that is embodied as the liberal ideal.

So having to pay for Mary Elizabeth's Catholic education is not coercive on you, unless you also buy into the whole "right not to speak" idea,which is a modern and I think degenerate first amendment approach. More and greater diversity of speech pictured as coercion is not a tenable liberal position.

And the coercion of giving Mary Elizabeth's family the choice between the yoke of ignorance for their child or the yoke of coercive education by the state looks to be a much larger degree of coercion. Or as uber-liberal John Stuart Mill once wrote:

"A general state education is a mer contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold that cast them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government...it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading to a natural tendency to one over the body."

Mill actually did worry about abuse of power by parents as well, since he thought education was a good absolutely required for a liberal society, so he saw state-paid education as not something a parent should be able to refuse on behalf of the child, but he did think that once standards were set for education, parents should be able to send children to whatever denominational school they wished within that framework.

The status of the child, the object of education and inculcation of values, is the soft underbelly of liberalism-- a point that Plato made in highlighting control of education as the key to his despotic Republic.

-- Nathan Newman



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