Pluralism run amok

Anyone interested in parental rights, civil society, or subsidiarity should read Laura Rosenbury's paper, Between Home and School.  It's a fine and creative paper (selected for the Stanford/Yale junior faculty forum), but its conclusions are troubling.  Prof. Rosenbury laments the law's focus on parents and school as the only relevant child-rearing authorities, and she works to expand the law's vision to include sites "between home and school" that are part of the child-rearing project -- e.g., Boy Scouts, summer camps, religious activities, youth sports.  She asserts that, while the state should let these groups operate as they wish for the most part, the state should step in to foster certain key child-rearing values.  The problem she identifies is our half-hearted embrace of pluralism:

Pluralism currently exists only between families . . . . Our society is pluralistic because many types of families are permitted to exist largely free from state indoctrination.  In contrast, pluralism rarely exists within families.  Children are generally exposed to just one belief system within the family, or at most two.  Therefore, although children may not be standardized by the state, they often are standardized within their own families.  Pluralism may exist on a broad, societal level, but children rarely experience pluralism on a micro level, within their own families.

And to drive the point home:

[B]ecause the space between home and school often provides the most meaningful opportunities for children to experience pluralism, these actors would not be permitted to operate completely outside the zone of state power.  Rather, the state should intervene in a limited way to ensure that the actors do not thwart the potential of these spaces to expose children to diverse ways of life within the broader civil society.

My second-grader has been reading her Children's Bible a bit too much lately, I confess; tonight I think I'll supplement it with some Nietzsche.  Pluralism demands no less.