Why Parental Authority Matters

Parental authority has become a divisive issue. As political polarisation intensifies, the willingness of regular citizens to endorse and even encourage the “protection” of children against their parents is gradually normalized. This has extended far beyond the purview of unambiguous cases of abuse. Parents are also finding themselves with less and less power to influence their children’s education programs.

The matter of parental versus state authority is not a new phenomenon; it is an ever-present question mark in the field of political philosophy, science and ethics. Arguments against parental authority manifest in various modes, and are always logical extensions of certain ideologies. For example, Plato was concerned that any child bound to his or her parents was a less reliable member of the collective, continually torn asunder by the conflicts between familial commitments and social contracts. More recently, the project to democratise education has been forced to contend with the nepotistic substrata associated with privatized institutions.

Countless regimes and philosophies throughout history have attempted to weaponize children, as surveillance drones, or cogs in a machine, or both. This is often where people feel the greatest repulsion at state-run education, as it conflicts with liberal ideals of individual freedoms. I am not of the opinion that the mere association of a certain political strategy or world-view with an “immoral” regime is cause for its disavowal without proper analysis, though it can certainly raise some concern.

Rather, this essay argues for something more fundamental. That an inherent asymmetry is present in the capacity of parents and the state to instruct and enable children to thrive, particularly in domains outside of pure academia. While parental influence tends towards expansive frameworks, evolving alongside the strengths of their children, state influence is far more likely to create suffocating environments that stifle potential.

The very structure of the state is self-effacing. In seeking short term control, it erodes its own foundations and produces a society less capable of sustaining itself over a significant period. State-run systems of education need not be abolished, however the balance is in urgent need of correction.

In the 1800s, schools began to institutionalize and normalize the profiling of parents. Neighbours would be questioned about other parents’ activities, the child’s attendance would be closely scrutinized, and there would even be inspections of the household itself to ensure proper cleanliness and order. This power to intercede in the parent-child relationship could not be easily achieved in an unadulterated rhetorical dialogue, for it had to contend with the natural bond within families granted by nature. So, how did this radical reversal occur?

At the dawn of the Enlightenment came an increased emphasis on reifying certain modes of thought through rationality (making abstract ideas appear concrete and real). Through this, a novel discourse was officialized. The new paradigm relegated anything that could not be quantified (turned into a numerical or falsifiable fact) to the realm of mere “subjectivity.” The word concept, “Subjective,” contains a negative connotation, as something artificial, synthetic, and perspectival, while its antithesis, “objective,” is explicitly stated as the highest principle of Enlightenment—a reality that all of us can converge upon and organize around for the common good.

While this was enticing in theory, the thinking of this era turned everything from relationships to feelings into “subjective” aspects of life, thus diminishing them. Given the inferior perception attributed to “subjectivity” in Enlightenment, the importance of parent and child could now be undermined by the “objectivity” of quantization.

School systems, seeing the window of opportunity born out of this era, began seeking to outmatch the parent by documentation, vigilance, and even a monopoly on the child’s time. In doing so, they supposed a quantifiable justification to “prove” that they were the most qualified to make decisions for the child.

In the modern day, this has become a sophisticated art. At the same time schools attempt to gain information on students, they make sure to conceal information from the parents. This is seen in current laws which allow schools a type of student-teacher confidentiality, including in medical decisions. It is also apparent in the structure of society which separates parents and children in three major ways: laws around truancy to ensure parents send their children to school, economic pressures ensuring that both parents are working to survive, and safeguarding rules which prevent parents from entering schools without permission.

All three of these can be justified quite easily, especially when one presupposes good intentions within the educational institutions. Ostensibly: the first ensures children are not deprived of opportunity, the second is excused by deference to economic experts who explain why inflation and financial issues are inevitable, and the third highlights the issue of child-safety. However, these processes also have a destructive side, playing a critical role in widening the knowledge divide between the parents and the institution. By depriving the parent of both contact and the details of their child’s upbringing, the state artificially produces its own weapon: ignorance. The ignorant parent, versus the all-knowing state.

Now, the riposte: I posit that the subjective/objective divide is not the silver bullet which Enlightenment once believed. We continually see that “objectivity” struggles to account for the myriad complexities of life. It functions only when all variables are known and all goals agreed upon. When language operates by consensus and all collaborators agree on the definitions, to whatever degree this is possible.

Unfortunately for those who would like life to be simple, the problems that face us form a vast expanse of unknown variables, and the goals of each individual are even more illusive. One person seeks the satiation of hedonic pleasure, another the triumph of mastery, the other the warmth of charity. Not a single one of these would please every person alive, nor would they guarantee a positive or negative impact on the final analysis. All our scientific progress has failed to dissolve the problem of values and reveal the “good life.” In other words, we cannot use science or rationality to decide our values, only how to achieve them.

But, for argument’s sake, let’s assume that we have all converged on the same answer for how to live and, by some miracle, succeeded in expressing it through mutually comprehensible terms. The state monopoly on authority still runs into a deep problem from a purely rational accounting.

Quantification must necessarily reduce the world into solvable problems, which means cutting away things that are as yet unsolvable. The major problem is that what is removed is likely to contain far more value than what remains. Here, I will transition into mechanistic language, specifically in order to highlight what is lost when action is forced to correlate with solvable problems:

A parent encounters an astronomical number of data points on their children, and their intuition organises them into actionable principles. For example, one determines by observing their child’s facial expressions whether something is being concealed. One anticipates whether their child is about to engage in a harmful or beneficial action based on countless past behaviours in similar situations. One learns to attune oneself to their child’s words, while filtering needs from wants; all of these factors comprise a far higher number of quantities and “if, then” conditionals than any procedural documentation achieved by statistics. However, the state ignores this fact, formalises the quantities it observes, and mocks the parent for having no such documentation; accusing them of holding a series of null values. The state does not account for the informal, intuitive, and nonetheless more complete database contained within the parent’s unconscious and conscious faculties.

This is consistent with neuroscientific revelations. A holistic base of knowledge is not quantifiable, however, Dr. Ian McGilchrist would argue that it is superior. This does not have to be considered a mystical proposition; it is simply an assertion that the right hemisphere of the brain is compiling far more data points, and with greater processing power to do so. In short, the parent tends to have a disproportionate advantage in the assessment of their own child’s needs, due to their concentrated focus and genuine investment in the outcome.

This is in stark contrast to the data points which concern grades, punctuality, and normative behaviour. These classifications are intentionally as disinterested as possible… as universal as possible. Such a metric collapses the child into a unit, rather than a person, inevitably oversimplifying their multi-various needs and often becoming antithetical to the child’s future flourishing.

Parental advocacy, such as emerging parents unions, form a bulwark against the State’s natural proclivity to expand its powers. Through action and rhetoric parents can prevent overreach or take back ground from educational institutions in the determination of their children’s future. Even if one prefers a state-organised system of education in general, parent advocacy is a useful part of challenging them to improve. A natural selection pressure. The more competent and effective the actions, the more a school is forced to adapt. The most likely outcomes are that the school attempts to appease parents by increasing the standards of education, or tries to cynically outmanoeuvre the demands. This latter approach is far easier, but only if parents are too passive or incompetent (in the most technical sense) to affect a change. Thus there is a predicament. The same students being filtered through schools are the ones eventually becoming the parents influencing the system. By incrementally making students less competent in areas of true significance, the state gains the upper hand, but robs itself of one of its most valuable selection pressures. This is a lose-lose situation for everyone, except those with extremely short-term ambition.

The situation becomes particularly dangerous when parents become passive spectators. If a parent can be convinced that the ideology present in a school system is culturally or morally aligned, they will be less likely to keep a watchful eye and challenge its authority when it pushes boundaries.* The specialisation of many fields from psychiatry to medicine has helped to produce this passivity: the parent cedes their own power, ashamed by their own “ignorance” in the face of a more competent practitioner—despite having the advantage of proximity and specific details of their child’s life. Such excessive self-doubt leads to an abnegation of parental authority and therefore collapses a core pillar of childhood development.

* While discernment concerning the passivity produced by propaganda and cultural shifts could easily constitute its own essay, there is a conceptual tool which can re-empower parents to a certain degree. Namely, to resist the division of the world into ideological and non-ideological in the first place. This dichotomy leads one to take action only when a threshold is reached and the school shifts from “politically neutral” to “ideological.” Parent action becomes curative rather than preventative, reactive rather than active. To understand that even the desire to steer one’s own children is a form of ideology, albeit an affirmative one, parents naturally increase their agency and engagement.

The average school system’s many failures are very difficult to condense into one article. The danger is that they are not taken seriously until parents are already in a weak position and can no longer influence their children’s education. By critiquing this fundamental flaw in the way we make judgements, namely the use of quantisation in areas far beyond our knowledge base and the surrender to dispassionate assessments, it reignites the possibility of change. The question is not about whether the system is currently making good decisions, but whether it is structurally effective over the long-term.

Parents who want their children to evolve into competent adults should resist capitulating to the machine, with its compulsive desire to churn out data points, and seek a structure more harmonious with reality. This involves learning to trust one’s own observations and intuitions. Letting science and theory be guiding forces, rather than totalising systems. It involves participating in their children’s education, even if things are not yet dire. When parents reclaim their position as competent, active and self-affirming agents, the entire system becomes more effective at nurturing coming generations and is protected against imbalance.