What’s Wrong with the World

This is just one step removed from totalitarian regimes that think ALL people belong to the state to do with as it will. But this is proof positive that the liberals who had claimed that the CRC wouldn't lead to these sorts of eviscerations of rights were flat wrong.

It's this way with virtually everything they do. Were he alive today, John Locke would probably write a treatise justifying the use of preemptive force against modern liberals on the grounds that since their "unintended consequences" always manifest, all force used against liberals would be either justified on the grounds of proactive self-defense or tyranicide.

Bravo, Tony.

As ol' Acton once said, power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. The very idea that a centralized authority can and should be setting up policy for child rearing all around the world should be recognized as dangerously silly.

This, I really want to pound home, is why centralization is to be resisted qua centralization. The minute somebody starts saying, "Hey, let's have a world-wide policy enforced on everybody for x," no matter how well-intentioned it might appear to be (and in this case, I honestly believe it was at least partly _not_ well-intentioned), we should be yelling, "Whoa, Nellie!" at the top of our lungs.

But this is proof positive that the liberals who had claimed that the CRC wouldn't lead to these sorts of eviscerations of rights were flat wrong. The proof is in the Koolaid, and most nations have drunk it.

Maybe it's proof positive that they're liars. Isn't that what Cultural Marxists do more naturally than they breathe?

What a breathtaking stupidity. Once more.

CRC effectively implies that children belong to the state more than they belong to parents. This is just one step removed from totalitarian regimes that think ALL people belong to the state to do with as it will.

1. By opposing home schooling, one does not "effectively imply that children belong more to the state than to parents", let alone that the state can do with children "as it will". That's just demagogy.

2. One step removed from totalitarian regimes? Baloney. Modern Germany and France where home schooling is not allowed are just one step away from becoming totalitarian regimes like North Korea, the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany? Are you kidding? Are these the kind of history lessons you teach your children?

3. Do you really mean that children should without exception or restriction "belong" to their parents, irrespective of the latter's religious or political lunacies? That parents when it comes to education/indoctrination can do with their children "as they will", but that it is a shame when the state wants them in school? And that anybody who thinks otherwise is ipso facto a political extremist?

To be sure, a case can be made for the right of home schooling. But you should stop demonizing your opponents.

Grobi, do you know anything about the Melissa Busekros case in Germany? How about Domenic Johanssen in Sweden?

Yes, the actions of the governments in these cases were (and in Domenic's case continue to be) totalitarian. I wrote about Melissa's case extensively here at W4.

In any event, Tony was not _only_ talking about the impact on home schooling but about an overall set of assumptions about the relation of the child to the state embodied in the CRC.

For a good survey of this general approach via "comprehensive liberalism," here is an article that everyone should read. I've referred to it here before:

http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=300

Hmm. Looks like I blogged only very briefly about the Melissa Busekros case here. Apparently it happened so long ago that my longer post was at Right Reason, which is more difficult to locate.

And yes, by the way: Having a blanket ban on all home schooling is draconian and unreasonable and does proceed from a creepy and wrong-headed view that the state has primary control over the child's education.

Grobi, I didn't know you still dropped in! I am going to assume for the moment that your first comment deserves a modicum of an answer.

1. By opposing home schooling, one does not "effectively imply that children belong more to the state than to parents", let alone that the state can do with children "as it will". That's just demagogy.

It's not just "opposing" homeschooling, it's how they did it. The government here isn't claiming that the state has a right to school kids because there is some definite defect in THESE parents' home education that the state has to overcome, nor because they are worried about some special deleterious "overall impact" this particular instance of home schooling would have on the community so that the state is "taking into account" the social needs in overturning the parent's otherwise valid rights. The government is claiming that

homeschooling “disrespects the Constitution, the Penal Code, the National Education Guidelines and Basic Law

Not this kind of homeschooling, or homeschooling under degenerate conditions, or homeschooling that is abusive: just "homeschooling" period.

The question is, WHY would the legislature conclude that the practice "disrespects" all these things, not because of defects in how it is carried out, but of its very nature? What sort of thinking would give rise to such a conclusion? I don't know what arguments they actually put on paper (I can get the legislative history of US Congress acts, but this is a bit far afield for me), but whether they were willing to put their real concerns on paper or not, we have SEEN the sorts of arguments that liberal statists have already used in other places to get to just the same sort of conclusion about homeschooling. One of the first ones is: we want to make sure that the kid is given the sort of indoctrination and inculturation that ensures he fits well in our notion of the culture.

Implicit in that premise is that the state's view of the culture is the correct - nay, the _definitive_ one - and that the state's need to ensure the child is inculturated in just the manner the state desires supercedes the parents' authority to (a) decide on the culture they want the child to imbibe, and (b) how that shall be accomplished. What if the parents actually agree with the state about the cultural objective, they just think that state schools are pedagogically unsound and they want to achieve the state's end-goal in their own (in their judgment) better way? Nope, sorry, the state's authority to demand not only a lock-step result but to enforce lock-step compliance with their methods is paramount. And why? Because, because, because of the "wonderful things it does" for the child, of course: the state's relationship to the child is inherently more definitive than the parents', because what the state is going to give is more important than any parental choice about the matter. Which is just another way of saying that the child belongs more to the state than to the parents - at least under this matter of 'what and how shall the child be educated'.

Or, because the presumptive location of all authority is in the state, and only when the state decides to grant a limited authority to parents do those parents have a role.

The second approach is definitively totalitarian, of course, but it sheds light on the first as well: where is the presumption of authority when there is no evidence that some specific evil is being perpetrated? Here in the US, the 4th amendment says that unless the police have reasonable suspicion (i.e. evidence) of a crime, they cannot simply enter a man's home: he has presumptive security from search and seizure. Similarly, unless there is actual evidence leading to reasonable suspicion that a child is being abused or neglected, the parents have presumptive authority over the child. The presumption is that authority rests with the parents, and it is up to the state to make a rationale to justify removing that authority. In Brazil, according to the words of the legislative committee, there does not appear to be any recognition of any presumptive right in favor of the parents at all for educating. So, at least in respect of forming the child's mind and crafting his ability to think (thus ensuring that he won't think thoughts that eventually might discomfit the state), the child belongs more to the state than to the parents.

1. By opposing home schooling, one does not "effectively imply that children belong more to the state than to parents", let alone that the state can do with children "as it will". That's just demagogy.

By opposing home schooling without consideration for actual capabilities, the state is very much putting a forceful veto on parental authority over their children in that area.

I find it ironic that when the free market fails to provide more than 2 broadband internet service providers, liberals get up in arms about choice and freedom, but when the state limits parental choice to only a limited set of public and private schools, liberals are fine with that.

Modern Germany and France where home schooling is not allowed are just one step away from becoming totalitarian regimes like North Korea, the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany? Are you kidding?

BTW, I'd like to note the irony that most European states have domestic intelligence agencies that do things which make the NSA spy scandal under Bush look like it has the Thomas Jefferson Seal of Approval. France is closer to Israel than the US in terms of having a robust domestic intelligence network that keeps tabs on "nogoodniks" like Islamic extremists that not even J Edgar in his wildest dreams would have asked for.

...that not even J Edgar in his wildest dreams would have asked for.

Hoover wasn't usually in the habit of asking, but on the occasions he did he would fabricate numbers out of thin air in order to not alarm Congress or the public.

As a bit of trivia, Hoover did compose one very memorable quote: "There's something addictive about a secret."

One more for the Is-there-a-single-libertarian-bone-remaining-in-the-Left? file.

AFAIK, homeschooling has not been allowed in Brazil since the 1988 Constitution. I'm sure the CRC and the Child and Adolescent Statute are both crap, but they both developed what was already there.

By the way, Tony, I suggest you be a bit more careful with wordings such as "the 1937 constitution had model language", for the 1937 Brazilian Constitution was Fascist. Fortunately it lasted only 9 years, the years of Getúlio Vargas's "Estado Novo" dictatorship. (It was superseded by the democratic Constitution of 1946 after Getúlio was overthrown by the armed forces). Of course, this doesn't mean that the specific regulation about children was objectionable, and I know your intended meaning was OK, but - it's best to be careful about this...

By the way, as befits a Fascist-leaning dictatorship, the "model language" of the 1937 Constitution was a dead letter. "Parents had primacy" according to law, but in practice the state closed down or took over all the schools of the immigrant communities of southern Brazil during Vargas's tenure, as part of a forced assimilation campaign. So even that didn't work.