Thank to this panel. Thanks to all of you. Our our time has come up gone out. I’ve, when I attend conferences, especially in Europe, they have this practice that the person presiding goes through the entire agenda and notes devotes about three or four sentences to what everybody said.
And it’s extremely tedious and usually misleading and incomplete as well. And you lead I’m not going to even try to do that. But I am, I’m really inspired, especially by this last panel and and as to, why is this so hard? And I think it’s hard because, we’re all, most of us anyway, liberals and children are just a problem because liberalism doesn’t know what to do with children.
Plato didn’t know what to do. Plato didn’t know what to do, and it was not, and it was not to be a liberal, but, and so there Pierce presents, I think essentially three, maybe four actors. There’s the child who can’t be the decision maker, at least until, a certain age.
Sometime I don’t know when. Exactly. And so we can put them slightly to the to the side. They’re the parents. There’s the state, and then there are the institutions of, it might be schools, might be churches, the institutions that are. And involved. And if any of those could be trusted, it wouldn’t be a hard problem.
But we know that all of them can’t be trusted. And I think the real impulse in, in peers is to say parents might actually be of the various imperfect vessels of responsibility for the children. They may be the best. Comparing and say to the state the parents are most likely to love their children and therefore to want what’s best for them.
They are most likely to know their children and what’s different about them, and be able to figure out what’s best for them. But we all know that in the real world, some parents. Are really quite terrible. Lots of really bad parents. Some parents are just are not just bad, but abusive.
And at some point you can say, they’re not being so good. But then there’s the state. And I think there’s sometimes as a tendency to think that when there’s a problem out in the world we just need to bring the state in as if it’s the seventh cavalry, you order to solve the problem. I think Pierce is a nice, warning against that because it’s not as if the state is without its own problems just as parents or sometimes terrible parents, what is the state? The state has, first of all, it’s run by people. So the state is often self-interested. I look at the way schools are run. And they seem by and large to be run in the interest of the teachers unions and the administrators.
And just Stanford has run in the interest of the faculty and the administrators. Fortunately, the, the students as consumers, have a certain influence. But so you have the state is not, a, some sort of pristine entity that can be counted on. And then on top of that.
You have, the state is subject to being controlled by factions. And the factions. They may have ideological interests to use their power over education. It might be a religious faction so that you get an establishment of religion that uses the schools in order to inculcate, for example, Protestantism as we had for so long in most of the public schools in America, and now, other things.
And it certainly is true that especially in the younger years, the education in school is extremely influential. I remember when my kids would come home from public school and they became the recycling police in our family’s daddy, you didn’t you threw that that beer can and the garbage, you should have put that in the recycling.
And and I didn’t even try to argue with, I just, okay, I’ll put it in the recycle. They’re, the schools are very effective, even with something as silly as as that. And so the ideology I is another temptation that I think the government has. And then I think there’s one other thing that makes.
Parents maybe. I don’t think we wanna say all parent and, Nomi Stolzenberg was so great on this yesterday, and you don’t wanna say unconstrained one thing, or unconstrain, and actually Steve was just repeating this with this anti-monopoly pencil. Principle, not all one thing or all the other, but maybe we might wanna lean in the favor of par in favor of parents, not only because they love the children and know more about them but also because there’s, there are lots of different ones and they’re gonna be doing different things and the existence of our society as a free society.
So depends upon having a diversity of views and ways of life and, and by le e even if we assume lots of those parents are teaching things that are not particularly great. Some of them may be Amish, some of them may be sedum, some of them may be Methodists for all I know. And so they may all, so we may get all kinds of be knighted views.
Being pro. Not everybody can be a Presbyterian, right? But. The having the diversity is so important to having a republic, at least a liberal republic. And one way we can get help guarantee that, or at least move in the direction of that, is having a lot of the formation of our citizens and diverse hands and parents are gonna be diverse.
That’s why those schools and those churches also should be diverse. And so that fits in here as well. Knowing that lots of kids are gonna be brought up in bad ways as a result of that, but at least they’re gonna be brought up in different ways. And from a social point of view, it seems to me the difference is as important as anything.
And so that’s why, even though I don’t really understand the. Constitutional theory and the doctrinal theory behind Pierce against a Society of Sisters. The thought that the fundamental theory of liberty upon which our country rests has something to do with not standardizing our children just rings true for me.
With that, I’d just like to thank not just this panel, but the rest of the speakers and the audience for, your participation and what has been for me an intellectual feast. Thank you.