What’s wrong with this picture? (Apart from the over-repetition of a phrase I would be hypocritical to condemn).

It took me a little while to figure out why it bothered me so much. Take a look at the list of possible ‘policy violations’ and ‘inappropriate behavior’: no chewing gum or public displays of affection in this school. Who gets to decide what language is inappropriate, or what behavior is disrespectful or disruptive? Could not accepting “no” lead to – never! – independent thought?

I’m not insensible to the fact that children will generally grow up to be ratbags unless given boundaries while growing up. In fact, I would go as far as to say that parents have a duty to moderate the behavior of their children in the same way that they have a duty to provide them with food or housing. Yet this is too often taken to mean that children are a second-class kind of human, not yet ready for the rights of self-ownership and freedom magically endowed upon them us the second we turn eighteen. If parents have a duty to limit and guide their children, this unconscious logic goes, surely it is reasonable that they have the right to do so.

This ‘duty to infringe a right’ is true, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, the way our societies treat children goes far beyond the license allowed by this reasonable position, yet we are so used to seeing children as second-class humans that we completely fail to recognize it. We take it for granted that schools are authoritarian cages, because we know that without discipline most schools would be madhouses. Yet the need for discipline is a specific reason to allow for specific limits on the freedom of children; to assume that these specific cases excuse authoritarianism in all aspects of the life of a child is a case of faulty generalisation. The default status of children, as it is of all humans in the libertarian conception, is total self-ownership and freedom. Reasonable cases can be made for encroaching on these freedoms, but these must be argued one at a time and never taken for granted.

This is especially true when children are compelled to go to school. In adult life, we accept limits on our behavior when we are on or using other people’s property. Although we are free to smoke, we accept that a shopkeeper has the right to throw us out of the store if we light up against their wishes. Thus, the imposition of rules on in schools seems doubly legitimate: children need to have their behavior limited, and the teachers have the right to enforce standards of behavior on school grounds. Yet children are compelled to go to school, and rarely even have a choice in which school to attend. They are forced to spend a significant portion of their waking lives on somebody else’s property, and therefore to follow somebody else’s rules. If an adult was kidnapped and held by force on somebody else’s property, we would not consider it illegitimate for them to flout the property owner’s rules.

Again, this is not to say that all school discipline is illegitimate. I am simply pointing out that the criterion by which it can be justified is narrow and specific – namely, that the encroachment on the child’s freedom is part of the parent’s, and by extension the teacher’s, duty of care – rather than broad and unrestricted. The onus is on the adult world to demonstrate, in each and every case, why a right should be taken away. This includes an onus to demonstrate that there is not a better, more free way of achieving the same end. Libertarian paternalism tries to increase freedoms in the adult world by influencing rather than controlling behavior. Yet the idea of ’soft’ behavior modification often seems absurd in the school context, and not infrequently in parenting: we argue out loud that children will run wild given half the chance; and believe subconsciously that there is nothing really wrong with encroaching on their freedom anyway.

The second point I have already delt with. The first is, again, quite reasonable on the surface. Children get up to enough trouble in school and at home as it is; it seems natural to assume that, if the boundaries are lifted, their behavior would become correspondingly worse. Again, this is a faulty generalisation that breaks down when we look at specific cases.

Let’s go back to the detention note linked to at the beginning of this post. Assuming that the school is in the US, the code of ‘uniform violations’ is probably targeted at crude or bigoted slogans or images. (Most uniform codes at non-US high schools, such as the one I went to here in Sydney, cover such heinous sins as ’sleeves too long’ and is are not worth even trying to defend). Since dictating what a person can and cannot display on their clothes is a violation of their freedom of speech and expression, there must surely be a correspondingly weighty benefit to the child’s upbringing of this policy. It can’t be reasonably argued that this benefit accrues to the child wearing the clothing: they would have seen it anyway, so it’s not protecting them from any unsavoury ideas; and they are free to wear it outside school, so it’s not modifying their behaviour in any real way. Is it to protect other children from crude language, sexual content or so on? Anybody who thinks that children are not exposed to sex, drugs, violence, bigotry or crude language and could thus have their innocence shattered by a t-shirt slogan is a fool with a very poor memory of their own childhood. Is it out of fear that it will provoke unruly behavior in the other students? This is possible, yet unlikely; and it is a very thin premise on which to restrict so fundamental a freedom.

The most reasonable explanation for uniform policies, and ironically the one generally given to students in Australian schools, is to maintain appearances. School administrators have strong incentives to find simple ways to cause big gains in the perceived quality of their schools: private schools have money on the line, and public school administrators have their reputations, performance-linked pay incentives and ultimately their jobs. Enforcing a uniform policy is a cheap and effective way to present a more polished image. It costs only the freedom of students, which nobody cares about, and the cost of enforcement, which is marginal and accrues mainly to teachers. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and when a school administrator is given near-absolute power over their students, it is natural that they will frame rules in their own interest.

Not all school rules are of this type. Many are reasonable restrictions on behaviour which generally do advance the care of the child. Others, like ‘no littering’, are reasonable compromises between a school administrator compelled to maintain the property over which they hold stewardship and the compulsion of students to attend in the first place. Nobody has ever mastered the art of parenting or teaching, and there will always be difficulty in establishing what is genuinely worth forcing children to do. In general, however, the socially accepted level of control lies far, far over the line into unjustified authoritarianism. The rule against ‘public displays of affection’ (PDA) may have had the wrong-headed intention of preventing promiscuity among teenagers, but in reality simply curbs their freedom of association and social interaction while pushing out of sight what they’re going to do regardless. If you want a reality check when considering a rule imposed on children, consider the same rule being imposed on yourself, or upon an adult if you are a child. How would an adult react if forced to spend 6 hours a day on somebody else’s property, and then told that kissing their partner during that time was forbidden? It is not exaggeration to say that this is the kind of authoritarianism for which the west routinely condemns Islamic states, yet it somehow it can be imposed upon children without a hint of outrage. Many adults may find (or pretend to find) the idea of teenage sexuality repugnant, yet repugnance has never given anyone the right to tell another what to do.

Children are not second class citizens. They are humans with the full rights and freedoms naturally accorded to us all. The only difference between a child and an adult is that children are owed a duty of care from their parents, and that when well justified, this duty can extend to putting boundaries on the child’s freedom. These boundaries, however, must be constantly justified, and the least freedom-infringing methods constantly sought. This doesn’t come naturally. The second-class position of children is ingrained into our culture and our institutions. This does not, however, make it right. Worse, children do not have anything like the voice that adults do in defending their rights. Power corrupts, and adults routinely exploit this defenselessness to take what rights from children they can. This does not make it legitimate, and it does not make it right.