Harms < Rights

The University of Maryland puts out a publication called the Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly. In the last issue, one Robin West waxed fearful of the dangers of homeschooling free from government control and restriction.

HSLDA already put out a decent response.

There are plenty of holes to poke in West's criticism, but I just want to mention one that HSLDA didn't address. Throughout her essay she voices skepticism of the existence of a right of parents to homeschool, primarily through excessive use of quotation marks. However, her secondary attack on the concept of a right to homeschool can be summed up in the following excerpt:

The main purpose of this essay is to criticize this “right to home-
school” that the religious parents and their lawyersand lobbyists have claimed, or created, over the pastcouple of decades. My criticism will rest primarily on the basis of the harms such a right might inflict upon the children so educated.

Never mind that most of the harms listed later are laughable. The lapse of logic that occurs here (the evaluation of a right by the weighing of possible harms) renders even serious harms irrelevant to her point.

Any right has serious potential harms. The right of a wife to make medical decisions for a husband, or for herself, even, leaves open a distinct potential for harm, intended or unintended. The right to keep and bear arms, the right to express one's opinions, the right to keep one's property, the right to one's person and property to be free from unconstitutional search and seizure all carry with them the potential for grave harm. That a right under review could result in harm or risk of harm to an individual is largely irrelevant to the determination of wether or not it is an actual right. What IS relevant is whether or not the excercise of that right would conflict with the already-established rights of others.

I'll give you an example. You have a right to self-defense; that means if someone begins to attack you, you can attack them in response to neutralize their attack. Is there a potential for harm in your excercise of this right? Sure! Are you encroaching upon the rights of your attacker? Nope!

There is an ongoing argument over whether or not children have a right to a public education provided with a humanistic worldview, a right to a curriculum that is free of Christian influence, etc., but West doesn't bother to develop that argument.

As an aside, even if harms DID trump rights, West's position would still be fatally flawed. That's because she only evaluates the potential harms of unregulated homeschooling, and ignores all of the real, observed harms of regulated schooling. Kids get killed, molested, beaten, bullied, emotionally abused, indoctrinated, and educationally neglected by the millions every day in public schools, but West has been trained to believe that this shouldn't count when evaluating the rightness of state-run education. She'd probably tell you that all that just shows that public schools need more money.