The Parental Rights in Education: Who Cares?

Anyone currently proposing to speak about the parental right in education must face a funda­mental reality: to a great extent parents’ rights are denied in theory, violated in practice, and treated with indifference — even by those one might ex­pect to be most active in their defense, I mean par­ents themselves. If there is a point at which the undermining of a right becomes so systematized that people stop noticing, we may be close to it now as far as the parental right in education is con­cerned.

I am not speaking of Albania or Rumania. I am talking about the U.S., where the most active defenders of parents’ rights now seem main­ly to be members of religious sects, fundamental­ists, and a hodgepodge of flat-earth people. Most Catholics and other mainstream religionists appear to have lost interest.

Maybe that is the problem. To the extent that vindicating the parental right is left to the cultural fringes, the secular consensus has an easy time per­suading us that the issue need not be taken serious­ly. It is a pity. Indeed, it is not unlike the state of affairs which would now exist in another area of social justice if 35 years ago most black Americans had decided to settle for separate but equal.

Back to basics is a familiar slogan in the edu­cational reform debate. I want to contribute my mite by affirming that parents are the primary edu­cators of their children — their right as educators comes first. And, as I shall explain, even before their right comes their obligation.

Parental primacy is a truism in the psychologi­cal order. Everybody knows that for good or ill what parents do makes the first and most lasting impact on children’s psyches. Psychology has condi­tioned us to hold parents responsible for a lot.

But that is very different from saying parents have the primary right to educate. This assertion flies in the face of prevailing assumptions to the contrary. Our ingrained positivism takes it for granted that somebody else — society, the state — gives parents such rights as they have in this mat­ter, and the same source is entitled to withhold or withdraw parental rights when it cares to. This is the philosophy underlying a string of Supreme Court rulings on involving parents in the decisions of their minor children about contraception and abortion. The court’s message to parents: Butt out.

Thanks to Oliver Wendell Holmes and others, positivism is dominant in American jurisprudence. The problem extends far beyond the parental right in education and concerns the fact that natural rights in general are not recognized and respected by secular culture. From this perspective the dimi­nution and denial of the parental right in education are symptoms of deeper philosophical confusion about the nature and source of all human rights.

Evidently, then, discussion of the parental right has to begin at a fundamental level. Suppos­ing for the sake of the argument that there may be such a thing as a parental right to educate, where might it come from?

The Catholic Church has a traditional answer, repeated in the Second Vatican Council’s Declara­tion on Christian Education: “Since parents have conferred life on their children, they have a most solemn obli­gation to educate their offspring. Hence, parents must be acknowledged as the first and foremost educators of their children” (no. 3).

There are several interesting things about that, including the fact that the Council starts with the idea of obligation instead of right. This is not moralism but clear thinking. Rights talk often takes it for granted that rights come first, but they don’t. The obligation to pursue a particular human good or purpose has existential primacy, and it is the ob­ligation which generates the right. Starting with rights is no favor to rights, since it leaves them un­grounded in antecedent moral principle and vulner­able to assault.

The Council’s statement is also interesting be­cause it links the obligation to educate to the be­getting of children. It seems likely that this idea is incomprehensible to many Americans today. Whence comes this obligation which parents incur in begetting a child? Although the answer is not complicated in itself, it involves a way of thinking about procreation which is alien to many current ideas on the subject.

The ethicist Germain Grisez expresses it this way: “To be a father, to be a mother is more than physical reproduction. The parent not only must give the beginnings of physiological life, but he must give all the beginnings…. Education is the psy­chic and spiritual equivalent of concep­tion. To withhold education is to com­mit a kind of psychic and spiritual abor­tion. Thus education belongs to procrea­tion as its psychic and spiritual aspect.”

It is at this point that psychology and moral philosophy intersect and reinforce each other. Pro­creation takes in more than physical begetting; the nurturing of new life in its psychic aspects as well as its physical ones is intrinsic to procreation. It is hardly surprising that, as the good of procreation has been radically devalued by the contraceptive mentality, there has been a decline in recognition of the parental right to educate. Yet by freely choosing to pursue the human good of procreation, parents make an implicit commitment to nurture the child in his psychic as well as his physical de­velopment; they take on an obligation — the grounding of a right — to educate.

This obligation and this right come before the obligations and rights of other educational agents. That is so because parents have an impact on the formation of the child which begins earlier, goes deeper, and lasts longer than any other. Irritable parents may impose a permanent psychic disability on their children just as genetically handicapped parents may transmit a physical one. “Their role as parents,” the Council says of parents, “is so deci­sive that scarcely anything can compensate for their failure in it” (ibid.). Quite so. Hence the pa­rental obligation and right.

Affirmations of the parental right exist in many places besides Catholic social teaching. For example, Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the U.N. General As­sembly in 1948: “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.” Even the Supreme Court once saw things that way. In the famous Oregon School Cases of 1925 it declared: “The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for ad­ditional obligations.” Things have changed a lot since then.

Parents of course are not the only educators. Catholic thinking on these matters recognizes that the Church and civil society (equivalently, though not identically, the state) have large educational obligations and rights. A nontraditional but realist­ic view today must also take into account the edu­cational impact popular culture has on children and young people. It may well be that in the U.S. at the present time popular culture, via the media, is a more influential educator than either church or state. In any case, it is instructive to evaluate all three — church, state, and popular culture — in re­lation to the parental right. Do they help or do they hurt?

Start with popular culture. The unvarnished truth is that it is bad for the health of multitudes of American children. Nor is there any indication that the people who control its content feel any re­sponsibility toward parents’ rights. Indeed, much of the message of popular culture is an assault on parental authority and values.

Although virtually everyone knows this to be so, it is part of the social pathology of the times that the reactions generally range between apathy and despair. Except for people on the cultural fringe, the problem is rarely addressed for what it is: a national crisis requiring immediate remedial action. Americans would not tolerate the systemat­ic poisoning of their children, but many take for granted their intellectual and moral poisoning by television, movies, and popular music.

In contrast with the paucity of attention it gives to popular culture, Catholic social teaching has a great deal to say about the educational re­sponsibilities of civil society. The most important role assigned civil authorities is that of supporting and assisting parents in the fulfillment of their ob­ligation and the exercise of their right. In the U.S., however, we appear to have gotten this backwards. In retrospect the Supreme Court’s decision in the Oregon School Cases was a momentary aberration in the direction of clear thinking; it has been down­hill since.

At present the consensus in the U.S. is that the state is the great educator. Its principal educa­tional embodiment is the public school. “If the state desires to take over our children,” Chesterton once said, “let it begin by bearing them and giving them the breast.” Government in the U.S. seems all but literally to have accepted that challenge through the institution of the comprehensive pub­lic school. Other agents of education, including parents, are required to conform themselves to the situation according to the pleasure of the state. It is this which accounts for the frequently ruthless hounding of nonconforming sectarians who refuse to comply with the state’s notions about how their children should be educated.

Educational totalism expresses itself in other ways, however. One which has touched directly on Catholic sensitivities for well over a century con­cerns the question of government aid, direct or in­direct, to private education. The core of the argu­ment as it pertains to parental rights is that such as­sistance is required in justice as a carrying out of the state’s obligation to make possible and support parental choice.

There is no point in reviewing here the long, painful history of this argument in the U.S. At present, due largely to the Supreme Court, govern­ment aid to private education at the elementary and secondary levels amounts to a thin and grudg­ing trickle, and the debate has been reduced to a sterile squabble about church-state relations. The notion that justice to parents is at stake seems scarcely to have impinged on the thinking of the courts over the years. And precious few people, in­cluding parents, seem very concerned about the matter. It is widely accepted that the state does all it needs to do, or even should do, by providing public schools.

But what about the public schools? Again without entering into the details of a tangled and acrimonious argument, the fact is that many re­sponsible people consider them inadequate at best and at worst dangerous to children on health, mor­al, and religious grounds.

The Catholic Church’s record vis-à-vis the pa­rental right presents a more complex picture. On the positive side, official documents continue to af­firm and defend the primacy of parents as educa­tors.

But there are problems. Perhaps the main problem during the last 20 years concerns the evi­dence that the Church’s own educational pro­grams — schools, religious education — have often enough taken little account of parents’ interests and concerns. This also is a large and tangled argu­ment, not subject to easy summary and analysis. Part of the reality nevertheless seems to be that parents with reasonable grounds for questioning the orthodoxy or adequacy of church-sponsored religious education have consistently been patron­ized and dismissed by teachers, administrators, and religious authorities.

There are several explanations. One is the deep-seated clericalism of the ecclesiastical system, an attitude which has little to do with polemical categories like “liberal” and “conservative.” An­other, tending to reinforce clericalism, concerns the professionalization of Catholic education, a welcome development in principle but one easily subject to abuse when “experts” are routinely as­sumed to know more than mere parents about how and what children should be taught. And of course parents themselves are in some cases at fault: through ignorance, indifference, or inability to dis­tinguish between what is new and what is bad.

Without belaboring the point, it appears that we are a long way in the Church itself from realiz­ing the ideal expressed in the Code of Canon Law: “It is incumbent upon parents to cooper­ate closely with the school teachers to whom they entrust their children to be educated; in fulfilling their duty teachers are to collaborate closely with parents who are to be willingly heard and for whom associations or meetings are to be inaugurated and held in great esteem” (can. 796, 2).

The conclusion which emerges from these gloomy reflections is clear. It would be pleasant to be able to report that the parental right in educa­tion is widely understood and respected in the U.S. That, however, is not the case. Nor is there any foolproof way of correcting the situation. The idea of the “parental right in education” is uncongenial to dominant modes of thinking and behavior. Per­haps that fundamental problem must be solved be­fore significant practical improvements can be ex­pected.

Historically, the Church’s contribution to the vindication of parental rights has been clear and helpful on the level of theory but more or less am­bivalent in practice. A well-articulated vision of the source and implications of parental rights neverthe­less constitutes an important part of the Catholic tradition. Fidelity to that tradition, with all its countercultural implications, now seems the big­gest service which the Church can render to parents seeking, in the face of many obstacles, to do what they are obliged — and therefore have a right — to do.