Children’s Rights Defined and Defended

C Bradley Thompson:

The fundamental question of our time is: who is responsible for educating children, parents or the government?

And only after we answer this question can we address two related questions: what should children learn and how should they learn it? The “who” determines the “what” and the “how.”

But the “who” question is partly dependent on how we answer an even more basic question: do children have a right to an education, which is in turn dependent on the most fundamental question of all: do children have rights and if they do what kind of rights do they hold? This last question is the subject of this essay. In the next and last essay in this series, I will address directly the question of whether children have a right to an education.

In my seventh essay in the series on “Who Shall Educate the Children?” I demonstrated philosophically that parents—and only parents—have the sole right, authority, and responsibility to determine how and in what their children will educated. I have made it clear in this series that government should have no role in the education of children. The very idea is grotesque and immoral.

And in the eighth essay on “The Redneck Guide to Children’s Rights,” I established, in a general way, the metaphysical conditions of childhood and how the concept of rights applies to children given their natures.

But now we need to drill down much further than we have thus far to determine what sort of claim, if any, children have on their parents to be fed, clothed, sheltered, and educated? 

Children and the Right to Life

With the birth of a child a complex amalgam of interconnected and interdependent rights is created. Let’s begin with the foundational right—the right to life.