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The other day, I started Edu­ca­tion and the State by E.G. West. It is some­times argued that state funded, state reg­u­lated, and state pro­vided edu­ca­tion is jus­ti­fied by the neces­sity of  pro­tect­ing chil­dren from igno­rance. So, West begins with two chap­ters explor­ing this argu­ment philo­soph­i­cally and assess­ing how well this “pro­tec­tion” works in prac­tice. These chap­ters hooked me right away, because I have always believed that pro­tect­ing chil­dren from var­i­ous harms is one of the more legit­i­mate func­tions of the state.

I want to share with you what I found to be the most impor­tant point made between the two chapters:

“If the funds now spent by the local author­i­ties were not in the first place taken away from the gen­eral pub­lic via taxes… it is pos­si­ble that in many areas much more would be spent on the edu­ca­tion of every child. To the extent that this is true there is a new need for the ‘pro­tec­tion of minors’ prin­ci­ple to come into oper­a­tion, but in the oppo­site direc­tion to that which is so often invoked. The rel­e­vant pro­tec­tion in this case is directed not against the neg­li­gence of par­ents but against the neg­li­gence of the local author­ity and its offi­cials.” (empha­sis added, West p. 22–23)

An objec­tion to this argu­ment imme­di­ately comes to mind. You might ques­tion the spec­u­la­tion that par­ents would ever actu­ally choose to spend more money on their children’s edu­ca­tion that the state does, even if they were pay­ing less in taxes.

Notice that peo­ple don’t believe that edu­ca­tion is impor­tant because the gov­ern­ment tells them so. They thought that edu­ca­tion was impor­tant before the state became so involved, and they would keep think­ing it is impor­tant even if state involve­ment in edu­ca­tion were reduced. There is inter­est­ing work in this area, such as “Mar­ket Edu­ca­tion: The Unknown His­tory” and “The Beau­ti­ful Tree: A Per­sonal Jour­ney Into How The World’s Poor­est Peo­ple Are Edu­cat­ing Them­selves.” Also, keep in mind that spend­ing on edu­ca­tion doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily track edu­ca­tional out­comes.

But, assum­ing that spend­ing really mat­ters, and even if it were true that par­ents wouldn’t fork out for edu­ca­tion in the absence of coer­cive taxes for edu­ca­tional pur­poses, that leaves untouched the the­o­ret­i­cal point that a prin­ci­ple about pro­tect­ing chil­dren can count not only for but also against state inter­ven­tion in edu­ca­tion. Here are some other pos­si­ble applications:

1. State schools’ fail­ure to teach stu­dents basic civics may con­sti­tute a fail­ure to pro­tect them from igno­rance of their rights and respon­si­bil­i­ties as cit­i­zens. (See this shock­ing report from the Gold­wa­ter Insti­tute).
2. State schools’ refusal to teach stu­dents about evo­lu­tion may con­sti­tute a fail­ure to pro­tect them from igno­rance of the basic prin­ci­ples of con­tem­po­rary sci­ence. (An exam­ple from my home­town)
3. Pro­tect­ing chil­dren from igno­rance is a spe­cific aspect of the more gen­eral duty of states (and per­sons) to pro­tect chil­dren in gen­eral. The most obvi­ous and least con­tro­ver­sial harms from which chil­dren need to be pro­tected are phys­i­cal harms. And it’s a well-known fact that many pub­lic schools in the United States just aren’t that safe. State schools’ refusal (or maybe inabil­ity) to main­tain decently safe learn­ing envi­ron­ments runs seri­ously afoul of the more gen­eral Pro­tect­ing Chil­dren principle.

So basi­cally, par­ents are not the only poten­tial vio­la­tors of the Pro­tect­ing Chil­dren From Igno­rance prin­ci­ple (and its par­ent prin­ci­ple, the Pro­tect­ing Chil­dren principle). State schools can and do fail to pro­tect chil­dren in a vari­ety of ways, not lim­ited to those deal­ing with equi­table fund­ing. As such, the prin­ci­ples cut both ways. Some­times Pro­tect­ing Chil­dren From Igno­rance will weigh in favor of mea­sures taken by the gov­ern­ment to pro­tect chil­dren from the igno­rance that would have been imposed on them by their par­ents. But, other times, Pro­tect­ing Chil­dren From Igno­rance — or even just Pro­tect­ing Chil­dren — will weigh in favor of reduc­ing the government’s role in edu­ca­tion, or with­draw­ing stu­dents from the sys­tem, when pub­lic edu­ca­tion itself threat­ens to harm chil­dren, intel­lec­tu­ally or otherwise.