Child Education Rights Versus Parental Preferences: A Paradox Between United Nations Conventions and Alternative Schooling Methods

Introduction: Children and Rights

Adopted in 1989, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is the most seminal treaty on children’s rights, including the right to education. Based on the CRC, we argue that all children are entitled to a minimum standard of education regardless of what type of education they receive. Children merit investments from society for their own sake, so that they can flourish and have self-determined lives, and also so that they can contribute as the next generation of workers and citizens. However, despite being the most ratified international human rights treaty, the United States is the only United Nations (UN) member to not ratify the CRC. This perpetuates a situation in the U.S. in which some children are legally denied their full educational rights. We argue that the guidelines for children’s educational rights spelled out in the CRC should be followed in the U.S. We use some of the most egregious cases, including that of educational exemptions for the Amish and the ongoing debates over possible sub-standard schooling in some Orthodox Jewish yeshivas, to demonstrate cases in which parents’ religious concerns are privileged over children’s rights, but we also include the more nebulous example of homeschooling that could be problematic in some cases but meet educational standards in others. Ultimately, all alternative schooling, whether private, religious academies, or homeschooling, must be evaluated by educational administrators to ensure that U.S. children’s rights are not abridged.

Like all members of society, children are deserving of rights, and yet they need a special layer of protection because they may not understand what their rights are, and even if they do, they cannot access their rights on their own. Children are in a unique position because they are unable to exercise their rights without an adult’s assistance. They rarely enroll themselves in school, especially at younger ages (Gran, 2021). Some adult rights are not clearly afforded to children, such as the right to practice or not practice a religion of their own choosing rather than what their parents practice (Gran, 2021). Although children’s right to education can be framed as a positive for a society that could help parents lobby governments for educational resources for their children, some parents see children’s right to an adequate education as an impediment to their parental authority. Highlighting perceived threats to parental authority, school choice options, such as homeschooling and religious schooling, have been staunchly advocated and practiced by parents who are disillusioned by government-sponsored public schooling and want to take personal control of their children’s education (Averett, 2021; Carpenter & Kafer, 2012). While many of the parents in the past several decades lobbying for nontraditional educational options have indeed been religious conservatives, not all parents want to engage in alternative education for their children for religious reasons. Some parents, for instance, have pulled a child out of public school due to bullying, racial discrimination, or a learning disability. And given recent state intervention and censorship of diversity and sexual education curricula in schools, more parents in some states might elect to join other liberal parents who already use alternative forms of schooling for their children to socialize them into more inclusive ideologies and practices.

Alternative educational paths can certainly meet CRC requirements, but some children who are homeschooled or educated in religious institutions may not receive an adequate education. In addition to issues around gender and diversity, there have been documented concerns about the curriculum of some forms of alternative schooling that do not meet basic English literacy and numerical standards needed to negotiate with mainstream society (Okin, 2002; Saiger, 2020). If children are denied equitable education because parents and their government are failing them, they may be ill-prepared to function in society when they are grown. They are less likely to be smart consumers and informed voters, and they are more likely to find themselves doing precarious and exploitative work for a living (Gran, 2021). Ultimately, adequate education is necessary to help children reach their potential and for protecting them from vulnerability as adults. Thus, we stress the need for stringent federal government oversight surrounding educational standards, especially the quality and content of the curriculum used in independent schools and by homeschooling parents, to ensure that all children in the United States receive an adequate education that meets human rights conventions.

United Nations Conventions

At the global level, the UN works to set universal standards. A perennial conundrum is how to handle conflicting rights. For instance, although the right to hold a belief is widely upheld in most Western countries, the right to exercise a belief may be restricted for a variety of reasons generally tied to the greater good of society as a whole or to protect others’ competing rights. Article 18 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion; this right includes freedom to change his [sic] religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his [sic] religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance.” The limitations on this right appear in the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) 18(3): “Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitation as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.”

In 18(4) the ICCPR specifies: “The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.” Similarly, Article 13 section 3 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) states: “The State Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents…to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.” However, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) aims to provide children with an education that matches certain standards. According to Article 29: 1:

States Parties agree that the education of the child shall be directed to: (a) The development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential; (b) The development of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and for the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations; (c) The development of respect for the child’s parents, his or her own cultural identity, language and values, for the national values of the country in which the child is living, the country from which he or she may originate, and for civilizations different from his or her own and (d) The preparation of the child for responsible life in a free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship among all peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups and persons of indigenous origin (e) The development of respect for the natural environment.

The CRC’s Article 28: 3 emphasizes “the elimination of ignorance and illiteracy throughout the world and facilitating access to scientific and technical knowledge and modern teaching methods.” As Rentlen (2004) points out, various UN statements are contradictory and do not resolve the “hierarchy problem” of competing rights claims (p. 213). For instance, would parents have a right to educate their children according to their beliefs if these beliefs preclude “scientific and technical knowledge” or specifically teach that the sexes are not equal?

Not Meeting UN Goals for Education

Many children around the world are under-educated because their families’ need their labor or because school fees are too expensive for them to afford. To ensure proper education, the state must provide it for free or with financial assistance at the secondary level, as stated in CRC Article 28, and countries should implement programs that help adults successfully support families with less reliance on children’s paid labor. In other cases, there is an ideological component to removing children from school. This could be about gender norms, thinking that girls require less education than boys, or religious beliefs, or both.

After Somalia ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 2015, the U.S. is the only remaining state that has failed to ratify it, despite the U.S. playing a role in drafting it and President Clinton signing it in 1995. Opposition in the U.S. comes primarily from conservative organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, The Family Research Council, and the Home School Legal Defense Association (McClain, 2009). Religious groups that take issue with the CRC are primarily Christian Evangelicals but also some Catholics and Orthodox (Witte & Browning, 2012). They argue that the CRC (and also the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women [CEDAW]) deny religious rights and will lead to the breakdown of the family. These entities are particularly concerned about interference with parents’ ability to parent as they see fit.

Some groups argue additionally that UN conventions are an affront to national sovereignty (Cohen-Almagor, 2021; McClain, 2009). Given the focus in the U.S. on negative rights or freedom rights (e.g., freedom from arbitrary detention; freedom of religion) rather than positive rights or welfare rights (e.g., right to healthcare), many conservatives reject the CRC’s mandates that governments help ensure the economic and social well-being of children (Witte & Browning, 2012). In fact, the U.S. has only ratified part of the International Bill of Human Rights; while the U.S. did eventually ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which primarily focuses on negative rights, it has never ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights that includes many positive rights including education and healthcare (Stark, 2009). The stance under former President Trump was to side with conservative religious organizations. Even if the U.S. ratified the CRC under President Biden, however, it would not guarantee children all the protections they need. Despite being criticized for setting a standard, international human rights instruments have limited ability to improve the lives of children in particular countries. National laws are important too.

Dwyer (1994, 1996) is chagrined that U.S. courts do not do enough to protect children. Dwyer (1994) points out that “…lower courts have continued to advance an interpretation of free exercise rights that effectively treats children as non-consenting instruments or means to the achievement of other persons’ ends, rather than as persons in their own right, with interests of their own that are deserving of equal respect” (p. 1389). He advocates two different avenues for judicially improving a lot of U.S. minors. In his 1994 California law review article, Dwyer contends that free exercise should only apply to the individual, not the individual enforcing something onto another person, even if that person is his or her son or daughter. Thus, an adult Jehovah’s Witness may refuse a blood transfusion for him or herself, but not for his or her minor child. Dwyer (1994) ultimately argues that parents should have child-rearing privileges not child-rearing rights and that we must accord the rights to children themselves. In his 1996 North Carolina law review article, he suggests a different tack to accomplish the same goal, asserting that children should legally be protected from their parents’ poor educational choices or medical neglect due to religious reasons by virtue of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protections Clause. He reminds us that because the children rarely come forward as plaintiffs in these cases themselves, we must do it for them. Given this, we need to ask some basic questions: Should parents be able to halt the education of their children? If so, at what age? And to what extent should homeschooling parents and religious schools be able to differ in the curriculum from public schools?

The Proliferation of Non-Secular Private Schools

The development of private schools in the United States was chiefly so that members of minority religions could educate their children according to their own beliefs. Private school choice, as many scholars define it today, is a government-sponsored program that allows parents to take their children out of neighborhood public schools and enroll them in private schools as alternative forms of education (Carpenter & Kafer, 2012). In the “common school” era of the 19th and early 20th centuries, school choice practices allowed Catholics to establish and attend schools that followed Catholic teachings rather than the Protestant-oriented public school curriculum, which they argued was incompatible with Catholic teachings (Carpenter & Kafer, 2012). As the Protestant-oriented common schools morphed into government-run secular public schools, the conversation on private school choice turned to a larger and broader movement against secular schools rather than a debate over the validity of teachings between denominations (Gaither, 2009). This paradigm shift was not only a result of a switch to secular schools, but the result of two U.S. Supreme Court cases, Engle v. Vitale (1962) and School District of Abington Township v. Schempp (1963), which banned organized school prayer and school-sponsored Bible reading in public schools (Elifson & Hadaway, 1985; Gaither, 2009). The two court cases devastated religious conservatives’ hopes of maintaining a non-secular aspect of public schooling. They consequently sought to find ways to enroll their children in schools that would be better in line with their religious beliefs. The tide would turn in their favor.

By the late 1980s, encouraged by court cases such as Mueller v. Allen (1983), which permitted state legislatures to create tax credits for education expenses, and by neoliberal politicians, such as President Ronald Reagan, who supported legislation that established federal tuition tax credits for parents to send their children to private schools, parents had many opportunities to dislodge their children from their neighborhood public schools and enroll them in private schools (Carpenter & Kafer, 2012). Those who take advantage of school choice options argue that such programs give parents a voice in their children’s education. Parents can remove their children from local schools if they deem their schools to be inadequate at educating their children (Apple, 2007). While some private schools, especially secular institutions such as Montessori schools, appeal to non-religious parents, and parents at times choose religious private schools when they are perceived to have better academics than the local public school even if they are not in line with the parents’ religious beliefs, many private school proponents use a religious framework to justify and advocate for the proliferation of school choice policies (Apple, 2007; Coughlan, 2018; Lauen, 2007).

Several religious proponents of school choice highlight the lack of biblical teachings in the public school curriculum as evidence of the decay of public schools. Apple (2007) notes that religious advocates believe that school choice offers a chance to enroll their children in private religiously affiliated schools that center on “traditional” family values and morality. They argue the necessity of these options as the only way that “our culture” can be “saved.” By 1990, a year after the Reagan administration ended, there were over 3,000 Christian schools in the United States compared to 102 in 1967 (Gaither, 2009). While school choice is colloquially used to refer to the practice of sending children to private schools, school choice must be thought of more broadly to include parents who “homeschool” their children.

The Resurgence of Homeschooling

While it is hard to know the exact number of homeschooled children as some states do not require them to be registered and advocacy groups may over-represent them, estimates from education scholars vary between 1.5 to 2.2 million or between 3% and 4% of school-aged children (McQuiggan et al., 2017; Schafer & Khan, 2017). Homeschooling can be broadly defined as an approach to schooling in which rather than sending their children away to public or private institutions taught by professional teachers, parents commit to teaching their children in a different setting, usually at home, and often, although not always or exclusively, are the instructors themselves. The practice of homeschooling, much like the private school choice movement, has existed for centuries and was conceptualized differently in the past than it is today. In the past, “homeschooling” referred to the use of the home as the primary, and sometimes the only, place to educate children (Gaither, 2009). The practice was done for pragmatic reasons. Gaither (2009) argued that formal schools made little sense during the colonial era and western frontier eras because of the sparse population and limited resources. However, homeschooling today is frequently practiced for ideological reasons rather than pragmatic reasons. Despite massive reliance on public school education since the 1970s, similar to the private school choice movement, homeschooling gained renewed momentum during the neoliberal, anti-government era of the 1980s.

Unlike the private school movement, which primarily was championed by religious conservatives, homeschooling is an attractive option for those on both the right and the left of the political spectrum (Gaither, 2008, 2009). Kohn (1998) notes that children’s education, specifically giving one’s own children access to quality education, seems to be one of the only topics that conservatives and middle-upper and upper-class liberals seem to agree on. While there were many reasons for the rise in the popularity of school choice, one of the main reasons was parents’ disillusionment with government-run schooling (Gaither, 2009). Averett (2021) points out that the homeschooling movement stems from a lack of trust in the government as a main motivating factor.

It can be argued that the left’s support of homeschooling started with the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and protests at Kent State University in 1970. The nation, including leftist peace activists, watched in horror as police brutality and student revolt were publicly displayed in full view on their TV screens (Gaither, 2008). As a response, leftist activists concluded that the best option was to create an alternative society. These ideas turned into the creation of small-scale communities akin to those of the early pilgrim settlements. These counterculture communes believed that personal autonomy was the solution to the world’s problems because it was the antithesis of rules and regulations (Gaither, 2008). Personal autonomy was also extended to education. Many of these communes created their schools separate from “establishment” schools; some of these communal schools later turned into homeschooling ventures. Although initially, homeschooling was a way for the counterculture left to break away from mainstream society and its inability to address the world’s problems, more recent generations of progressive parents who homeschool have moved away from viewing their children’s non-traditional educational paths as a collective, socio-political enterprise.

Currently, parents on the left are complaining about the new politicization of schools. As local conservative parents with support from larger organized conservative groups, such as Moms for Liberty, organize school board take-overs, and governors pass censorship legislation, such as Florida Governor DeSantis’“Don’t Say Gay” legislation, liberal parents living in red states and towns lament how political their children’s education has become. According to Averett (2021), a liberal parent living in Texas complained that permission slips had to be taken home when the school wanted to broadcast a speech by the then-president, Barack Obama, but no permission slips were handed out when the town’s mayor, a Republican, came to speak to the school children. For him, this was an act of politicization because the school district naturally assumed that parents in a red state would not object to a Republican speaking to the school children, but would object if the children heard from a Democrat. Other progressive parents feel that they can better inculcate feminism and respect for sexual and gender identity at home than what children encounter in public schools (Averett, 2021). When they choose this option, they are typically doing it with a focus on their own children rather than on changing society more broadly. The current focus of homeschooling parents on educating one’s own child as an individual rather than a collective good tends to be true for those both on the political left and the political right (Brewer & Lubianski, 2017).

Although homeschooling attracts parents for a multitude of reasons, a majority of homeschooling parents today are still doing so based at least partially on religious convictions. While only 16% of homeschooling parents picked religious reasons as the main impetus for homeschooling in a 2016 nationally representative study, with dissatisfaction with the school environment being the primary reason at 34%, when given the option of multiple reasons, 51% wanted to provide religious education and 67% wanted to include moral education (McQuiggan et al., 2017). While private religious schools are an option, they present many problems including being too expensive, incompatibility with particular religious beliefs (e.g.: Evangelical Christian vs. Catholic), and/or the inability to address students with special needs. Furthermore, some people on the conservative right believe that the Bible gave responsibility for education to parents, who would be forfeiting their Christian duty if they allowed professional teachers to educate their children (Gaither, 2009). Many conservative religious parents in the 1970s and 1980s were also concerned that their children would be exposed to liberal sexual norms and what they saw as the morally harmful youth culture of the era (Gaither, 2008). Conservative Christians today have additional doubts that the state can properly educate their children; the state, they argue, has political agendas that are incompatible with their beliefs, and like some liberal parents, they decry what they also see as the recent politicization of schools but for very different reasons. According to Averett (2021), parents protest that public schools are teaching their children about different religions in addition to Christianity (e.g., Islam) outside the context of history class. They argue that schools should prioritize reading, math, and science, rather than religion or morals, and view the mode of teaching sex education in many schools as harmful (Averett, 2021). Some parents complained about schools showing speeches by Barack Obama, the then-President of the United States, which they argued highlighted the liberal bias of schools (Averett, 2021).

Other parents disenroll their children from public schools as a last resort. Some parents find that the local schools are not adequately addressing a child’s particular situation such as a health condition, a learning disability, or being bullied (Kunzman & Gaither, 2020). These reasons underscore the results of Isenberg’s (2007) study that half of homeschooling parents only homeschool one of their children and many only do so temporarily with over one-third of homeschooled kids returning to conventional school after a year. Black parents may choose to homeschool their child in order to protect them from stereotypes and discrimination and to provide a curriculum that furthers the development of racial pride (Fields-Smith & Kisura, 2013; Kunzman & Gaither, 2020; Mazama & Musumunu, 2015).

Given the numbers of homeschoolers and increasing resources, many homeschooling families today incorporate structures beyond the family to educated their children. In addition to public libraries and programs at nature-centers and similar institutions, numerous homeschoolers participate in schooling cooperatives or take some classes at local k-12 schools or colleges. This is referred to as “flexischooling,” and Schafer and Khan (2017) found that 55% of homeschooled kids were availing themselves of traditional educational institutions to complement their instruction at home. Flexischooling can help homeschooling students access material in classes in which their parents or cooperatives have deficits and also provide socialization beyond the family or a narrow group of homeschooling students.

Several Supreme Court cases and policies have allowed homeschooling to flourish. Those who champion homeschooling point to Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), a Supreme Court case that struck down a law requiring all children to attend public school and asserted that parents have the right to exercise control over their children’s education (Kunzman, 2009). Parental rights were further bolstered by Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972) , a Supreme Court case allowing an Amish community to take their children out of formal education at an earlier age than state law requires (Kunzman, 2009; Renzulli et al., 2020). Arguably, Yoder was a watershed moment in the homeschool movement because it inspired the creation of homeschooling legal interest groups, such as the Homeschool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) founded in 1983, and legislation that enhanced parental autonomy in the sphere of their education (Renzulli et al., 2020). The HSLDA helped craft federal mandates such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to their advantage. For example, federal law specifically exempts homeschooling from the educational requirements of NCLB (Renzulli et al., 2020).

In addition to influences on federal legislation, Yoder has affected state policy. For example, in 1987, the homeschool lobby won a class-action lawsuit in Texas via Leeper v. Arlington Independent School District. In, the district court ruled that, under Texas state law, homeschooling was legal because homeschooling counted as private school; while Leeper was challenged by the state twice, it was reaffirmed by the appeals court and the Texas Supreme Court (Averett, 2021). With Leeper as an impetus, the homeschool lobby pushed to make homeschooling legal in all 50 states, a goal that was accomplished, with varying degrees of state regulation, by 1993.

Homeschooling mandates are far from uniform. In Texas, for example, homeschooling is extremely unregulated; parents are not required to register with the state, a fact that many parents are proud of (Averett, 2021). On the other end of the spectrum, New York has one of the most stringent sets of regulations; parents must submit an Individualized Home Instruction Plan to the state, file quarterly reports, and assess students through standardized tests every other year in grades 4 to 8 and yearly in grades 9 to 12 (Averett, 2021). Renzulli et al. (2020) note that while most state laws do require parents to inform the state of their wish to un-enroll their children from public school, they do not impose other accountability measures. Even in states with some accountability measures, these measures are usually designed with great leeway and little enforcement. In later sections, we argue that such leeway can be detrimental.

Religious Schools and Homeschooling: Academic Outcomes and Life Trajectories

Before laying out an argument about why we believe that private schooling and homeschooling are sometimes deficient, it is important to note that we do not argue that private schools, writ large, do not provide high-quality education. Indeed, private schools, including many secular private schools, have been shown to offer more rigorous and competitive course offerings than neighborhood public schools and to prepare students well for college work (Coughlan, 2018; Lauen, 2007). Homeschoolers who participate in flexischooling may well receive a varied curriculum with different teachers and peers. Our concern is those homeschooling parents and religious schools that provide inadequate academic preparation, privilege religious education to the detriment of standard education, and/or gives a different curriculum to girls and boys. These practices can be problematic because they violate the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child about developing children’s personalities and abilities as much as possible, providing modern and scientific learning, and promoting gender equality. In the following section, we lay out the argument that certain religious groups, such as the Amish, particularly religious schools, such as yeshivas, and homeschooling should be scrutinized and reformed so that they comply with the UN’s goal that all children have access to science, achieve literacy and numeracy, and receive education for sustainability, gender equality, global citizenship, appreciation of cultural diversity, and promotion of peace (United Nations, n.d.).

Conclusion: How to Best Educate Our Children

Different advocates and different countries approach non-standard schooling in a variety of ways. Kalev (2004), writing about England, is open to religious private schools that align with children’s religious identities, but still argues for limits set by the state that encourage tolerance:

[W]hat is required is a system that moderately controls even the internal policies of minority groups. A ‘modified pluralism’ in Britain, for example, would institute state-funded ‘voluntary-aided’ schools for all minorities…[that] would have to follow the national curriculum and include lessons on liberal social policy and about other religious and ethnic groups apart from their own, but they would still enable the ethnic minority group to preserve its cultural identity. (p. 343)

This solution would theoretically achieve the CRC goals of understanding and tolerance of people of different faiths while supporting parents’ desires to combine religion with education. As Bindewald and Rosenblith (2015) argue, however, some orthodox/fundamentalist believers of various faiths are deeply resistant to the pluralistic goals of national education as they view them as in conflict with their core tenants.

Objections to secular schooling and equality of the sexes are precisely reasons that some parents homeschool their children. In her conclusion to her study of homeschoolers, Averett (2021) voices particular concern about LGBTQ youth and girls homeschooled by religious parents.

I find disturbing the relative isolation of these children, whose social worlds are primarily made up of other religious homeschoolers, from adults who might counter their parents’ messages. Similarly, girls in these communities face a barrage of messages about their future only having meaning as a wife and mother, and about their subordinate position in relation to their future husbands, again, without a broader school community to offer alternate messaging. (p. 187)

Worries about the quality and lack of oversight in homeschooling have led Germany to allow private religious schools but not homeschooling. The European Court of Human Rights supported this in a 2006 ruling that a religious German family could not homeschool their children (Konrad and Others v. Germany). One of the issues raised by the parents and their lawyers, in this case, was that there was no private religious school for their particular denomination of Christianity. It is obviously not practical to have schools of every possible faith and denomination in all localities of a country.

Some advocates argue against religious private schools altogether. Fineman (2009) makes the case for mandatory public schooling in the U.S. so that young adults will be able to function in the secular world and prevent certain noxious beliefs, including the hierarchy of the sexes, from being a core part of children’s curriculum. In addition, diverting money to private schools takes money away from the majority of a nation’s children that attend public schools. Averett (2021) encourages examination of the neoliberal basis of school choice which puts great pressure on parents to be responsible for their children’s education and leaves kids whose families are under-resourced without choices.

Arguments about funding and religious indoctrination notwithstanding, federal lawmakers should, at minimum, provide oversight for homeschool and private school curricula and ensure that all capable children receive the equivalent of high school-level core subjects. All states should implement standards similar to those implemented in New York State which require an instruction plan, quarterly reports, standardized testing every other year in middle school, and testing yearly for high school aged students. If children do not meet proficiency standards, homeschooled children should be required to attend school, and private schools that underperform could be closed. This also means that the exemption for the Amish in the U.S. should be overturned so that they too attend school through age 16, and if they are attending Amish-only schools, the curriculum needs to meet state requirements. Given the increased need for technological acumen and literacy in today’s world compared to 50 years ago, we propose that all children should be required to stay in school or vocational training through the equivalent of high school. Otherwise, exit from religious communities for those who may wish it is rendered exceedingly difficult, and children are denied their rights. These steps are needed to ensure that children can function in a variety of settings as adults.

In the 1944 Supreme Court case Prince v. Massachusetts, it was determined that a Jehovah’s Witness who took her 9-year-old ward niece to a city street in the evening to distribute religious tracts for donations had violated child labor laws and that these laws trumped her religious rights. While the court’s majority decision which explains that parents are free to martyr themselves but not their children is routinely quoted, the decision also stated:

But the family itself is not beyond regulation in the public interest, as against a claim of religious liberty…[a]nd neither rights of religion nor rights of parenthood are beyond limitation. Acting to guard the general interest in youth’s well-being, the state as parens patriae may restrict the parent’s control by requiring school attendance, regulating or prohibiting the child’s labor and in many other ways. Its authority is not nullified merely because the parent grounds his claim to control the child’s course of conduct on religion or conscience (p. 166—167 of Prince v. Massachusetts 1944).

We concur with this argument. In the case of education, the state should mandate and enforce minimum requirements to ensure that all children acquire basic education and skills, including speaking and reading the language of the country in which they live, and learn the worth and dignity of those who do not share their sex or religion.