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Political basis for child-raising

University of British Columbia

A political philosopher developing a justificatory system for his society has a responsibility for providing principles which can be applied to all the necessary social arrangements within his particular society. It is difficult to imagine a society which does not include the social arrangements for child-raising among its necessary arrangements. Yet the principles proposed by various philosophers in justification of the social arrangements for our North American society are not sufficient for determining our social arrangements for child-raising. This thesis is an attempt to interpret some of those philosophical principles in such a way that they can also act as the principles for child-raising within the context of our general society. Since the various systems of principles used to justify our social arrangements differ in the way that they treat the relationship of the individual to the group, it is necessary to locate a common reference point, that of the endowment of opportunity to the child, and then proceed along the selected paths of the argument to derive a valid set of principles for child-raising. The preliminary stage is an examination of the general requirements of a system of justificatory principles for a society's institutions. The political philosophies of Robert Nozick and John Rawls are then examined to determine the limits placed on interference with the child and child-raiser for those in the Conservative and Liberal Positions. The action-guiding principles for child-raising which emerge from these two positions, when taken together, appear to be reasonably close to our commonsense notion of child-raising. However the differences between the Conservative and Liberal Positions are the cause of some of the tensions that develop in our attempts to establish policy. These differences are the source of the value conflicts which arise when we are endowing children with opportunities.

Text

2010-05-25

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/24999

Educational Studies

University of British Columbia

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