In the secular, highly visible society that most online Americans inhabit, children have become the public expression of adult virtue.
This is bad for liberalism, and really bad for children.
The defining characteristic and main contribution of liberalism (and I’m drawing heavily from Deirdre McCloskey’s thesis in the Bourgeois Values here) is a radically different idea: the notion that all human persons are equally dignified by virtue of their being human. Neither status, nor ability, nor any immutable characteristics detract from the equal dignity value of a human person.
How do children fit into this worldview? In her latest for The Atlantic, Elizabeth Bruenig astutely identifies the difficulty of discerning children's rightful status in a liberal society: they are wholly worthy, as persons, even though their immaturity obligates adults to negate fundamental aspects of children's personhood and act for them.
Americans who are heavily involved in public life and "discourse" appear to take this as a duty to inculcate their children into a very specific worldview, the purpose of which is to ensure that the kids grow up to be Good Persons.
This is of course not new: parents have always sought to raise children who are conversant in social norms, and a failure to do so has always been perceived to bring great shame to a family.
What is new is that liberalism recognizes that there are countless ways to be a good person and live a moral life. For all its polarization and screaming matches, American society is genuinely pluralistic and tolerant.
Except when it comes to children.
Elizabeth Bruenig’s perceptive claim is that this is because, due to their dependent nature, children obligate both private persons as well as the State to actively care and provide for them. Whereas an illiberal state has a much easier task, because there is only one way to be, a pluralistic liberal democracy will struggle mightily: which of the countless paths towards being a good citizen should one direct a child towards? And so adults are forced to argue publicly about things they would rather be left to the individual conscience. This is uncomfortable, per Bruenig, and brings out the worst in adults.
I agree with Bruenig , but I think there is more going on.
Children necessarily bring out the most authoritarian impulses in adults. They do this by providing a constant, tantalizing tension between control and utter powerlessness. If you've spent any time with a child, you are familiar with the disorienting, whiplash-inducing changes between feeling that you know what you're doing, and feeling completely lost. On the one hand, children are small enough that you can physically place them wherever you want in space. On the other hand, they are indomitable enough that even an infant will not let you rest until their very specific needs are met.
The same applies to other people interacting with your children. As an adult, you have a great deal of choice over who your child socializes with, where they go to school, and what ideas they are exposed to. Even more, it is your duty as an adult to control such things, because children are too small to. But the world is wide and unpredictable, and even a small child will interact with it in unpredictable ways.
The debates over CRT in schools, and especially over whether "parents should have a say about what is being taught in the classroom", illustrate this perfectly. Well-meaning adults on each side feel they are entitled to decide what children should be taught. Children’s dependence inspires a moral imperative in the adults that care for them, whether or not such adults are kin. Evolution makes it so: humans have survived and flourished because of the devotion we are able to muster for children who are not ours. Not only are adults moved to act in children’s best interests, but doing so feels good and purposeful. We have evolved not only to care for children, but to think highly of those who do. Being a good caregiver is inherently virtuous.
But this instinct evolved to guard children against bodily injury or death, not unapproved ideas. While the urge to protect children against perceived harm does not discriminate between a potential kidnapper and a teacher talking about systemic oppression, this is where the adults need to act like, well, adults.
Disagreements about what children should learn in school are important: both parents and educators have a stake in producing a competent citizenry, but they have different skills and perspectives. The more these perspectives come into contact with each other and the more information is exchanged, the better: to roughly paraphrase Matt Ridley, we acquire better ideas when we allow existing ideas to be promiscuous with each other.
Laws aiming to ban the teaching of various controversial topics are the absolute worst way to handle curricular disagreements. The legislators who introduce these bills claim their goal is to prevent children from being exposed to “divisive concepts” or “harmful ideas”: a virtuous attempt to protect the young. But ideas are not predators, and they cannot be contained, let alone eliminated. For their part, politicians or school districts who aim to prevent such bans by taking the position that parents have no say in what happens in the classroom are equally misguided. Theirs is not a virtuous position, either: children do not need to be protected from their parents’ influence.
The tension between vastly different solutions to a common problem is a feature, not a bug of democracy. Disagreement brings us closer to the truth. When it comes to school curriculum, it is the adults’ responsibility to take a deep breath, tone down the rhetoric, and approach the matter democratically, through vigorous, good-faith debate.