Against faith schools: a philosophical argument for children’s rights

Abstract

In spite of the fact that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights grants parents the right to an education in conformity with their own religious convictions, this paper argues that parents should have no such rights. It also tries to demonstrate that religious and cultural minorities have no rights to establish faith schools and that it is a child’s right in trust, to autonomous well‐being, which trumps any such claims. Faith schools, it is argued, represent a real and serious threat to children’s autonomy, especially their emotional autonomy. As such, they are incompatible with the aims of education required by a liberal democracy.

Keywords:

• Children’s rights
• Autonomy
• Open future

Notes

* Froebel College, Roehampton University, London, SW15 5PJ UK. Email: [email protected]

John White cites evidence to suggest that in 1998 only 21% of British people express a belief in God’s existence (see HMSO, Social Trends 30, in White, 2004, p. 151).

Montague relies on a distinction between ‘interest’ and ‘choice’ conceptions of rights developed by Sumner (1987). The interest conception depicts parents as beneficiaries of a network of protective and supportive duties shared by others. The genuine interest parents have in protecting the welfare of their children is worth protecting because their children’s welfare is worth protecting. The choice conception of rights, on the other hand, would grant parents the right to make decisions concerning their children’s well‐being only if there is a corresponding area of activity within which parents have moral discretion whether to act. Parents may have the right against society that they not be prevented from fulfilling their obligations towards their children, but this does not extend to denying the right of society to step in when parents fail to fulfil their obligations (cf. Brighouse, 2000, p. 85): ‘The right to be allowed to fulfil obligations is precisely that. It does not imply the right to refrain from fulfilling that obligation, nor the right to prevent others from fulfilling their obligations to the same persons.’

See, for example, McLaughlin (1994) and Noggle (2002).

Autonomous agency is something children acquire over a period and at different stages in their lives. David Archard (1993) provides an excellent account of this. See also Wellman (1997).

As Joseph Raz says: ‘(Autonomy) is an ideal particularly suited to the conditions of the industrial age and its aftermath with their fast changing technologies and free movement of labour … for those of us who live in an autonomy‐supporting environment there is no choice but to be autonomous; there is no other way to prosper in such a society’ (Raz, 1986, p. 391).

As Will Kymlicka puts it: ‘paternalistic restrictions on liberty often simply do not work—lives do not go better by being led from the outside, in accordance with values the person does not endorse’ (Kymlicka, 1995, p. 81). In similar vein, Raz goes to great lengths to demonstrate the importance for autonomy of participating in the authorship of one’s life.

Cf. Reich (2002, p. 457, n. 4): ‘(Brighouse’s distinction) strikes me as a classic case of a distinction without a difference. Even accepting Brighouse’s claim that autonomy is character neutral and just a set of skills, a notion of autonomy that I find impossible, it is still difficult to see how the teaching of a set of skills that will necessarily be deployed if the state is to be legitimate can be separated from actually promoting the use of the skills’. In a different context, Amy Gutmann argues that a civic education designed with the intention of merely teaching the virtues and skills necessary to deliberate about only political issues but not other domains of life, is hopelessly inadequate ‘most (if not all) of the same skills and virtues are necessary and sufficient for educating children for citizenship in a liberal democracy are those that are also necessary and sufficient for educating children to deliberate about their way of life’ (Gutmann, 1995, p. 573).

Fanaticism in an educational context is admirably addressed in Blacker (1998).

Citing the research by John Marks (see Marks, 2000), Robert Jackson points out that attainment in literacy and numeracy ‘shows the complexity and ambiguity of evidence for higher attainment in Church Schools over against Community Schools’, Marks reports that while there is a slightly better average performance in Church Schools than Community Schools, ‘there is a huge variation in standards between faith based schools’ (Jackson, 2003) (see also Schagen et al. (2002).

Indoctrination is similarly explicated by Ivan Snook (1972) and John White (1967).

The Humanist Philosophers’ Group presents a very powerful case against faith schools but relies on an account of ‘religious education’ as nothing more than ‘teaching about religion’ (2001, p.14, their italics). I have elsewhere argued that in order to be religiously educated as opposed to being merely informed or instructed, one needs to understand religious concepts such as ‘God’, ‘worship’, ‘salvation’ and so on which itself entails that one is to some extent—the extent depending on the depth of understanding—on the ‘inside’ of a religion. How could one understand such concepts in anything other than a superficial sense if one had not been initiated into their possible use? I would argue that to understand anything at all about the nature of God is to believe that there is something that counts as ‘God’—which is another way of saying that understanding presupposes belief. If true, and if it is not the business of a publicly funded system of schooling to get children to believe in the truth of propositions that are highly disputable, then it is difficult to see how there could be a legitimate place for a religious ‘education’ of this kind. Indeed it is difficult to see how it could be distinguished from indoctrination (Marples, 1978).

The Mozerts’ claim to have their religious convictions take precedence over an appropriate civic education is vigorously attacked in many places. Stephen Macedo argues that ‘children cannot be good citizens of a diverse liberal polity unless they are taught that critical thinking and public argument … are appropriate means of political justification. Children must … be exposed to the religious diversity that constitutes our polity for the sake of learning to respect as fellow citizens those who differ from them in matters of religion’ (Macedo, 1995a, p. 226). Macedo believes, correctly in my view, that ‘a liberal order does not and should not guarantee a level playing field for all the religions and ways of life that people might adopt … We have no reason to be equally fair to those prepared to accept, and those who refuse to accept, the political authority of public reasons that fellow citizens share’ (1995a, p. 227); (a view he defends at greater length in Macedo, 1995b). Similar arguments are deployed with considerable force by Arneson and Shapiro (1996). According to Gutmann (1995, p. 572), a well considered democracy, ‘expects us to exercise critical judgment in our willingness to take unpopular political positions, respect reasonable points of view that we reject, and respect public policies from which we dissent. A civic education that satisfies the Mozert parents’ objections … would interfere with teaching the virtues and skills of liberal democratic citizenship (such as the teaching of toleration, mutual respect, racial and sexual non‐discrimination, and deliberation)’ (Gutmann, 1995).

A majority verdict with one judge protesting that ‘it is the future of the student, not of the parents, that is imperilled by today’s decision … It is the student’s judgment, not his parent’s, that is essential if we are to give full meaning to … the right of students to be masters of their own destiny’.

Two interesting, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempts to defend the educational rights of religious parents are made by Shelley Burtt (1996) and William Galston (1991)—the latter by reference to liberalism’s commitment to toleration and diversity.

The Times Educational Supplement recently published a letter claiming that Paganism ‘is recognised as a religion by the NHS and the Prison Service, both of whom employ Pagan chaplains’ (7 November 2003).

For an account of what this might involve see Patricia White (1988).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roger Marples*

* Froebel College, Roehampton University, London, SW15 5PJ UK. Email: [email protected]