"To Whom Do Children Belong" by Prof. Melissa Moschella

I've just ordered Prof. Melissa Moschella's (CUA, Philosophy) new book, To Whom Do Children Belong?  Parental Rights, Civic Education, and Children's Autonomy.  (It's good timing, since I will be talking this afternoon about Justice Douglas's troubling opinion in the Yoder case!).  

The book is reviewed by Prof. Chris Tollefsen here, at Public Discourse.  Here are the opening paragraphs of that review:

Melissa Moschella begins her new book on parents’ rights and children’s education with a quotation from Melissa Harris-Perry that might be familiar toPublic Discourse readers: “we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”

The implications of such a claim are breathtaking. If Harris-Perry is right, where the rearing and educating of children are concerned, the community—and in particular, the political community—should determine both the ends of such care and education and the means to be pursued. The community, in other words, possesses primary authority. Even if that authority is not complete—if, for example, parents also have some authority over their children—such familial authority is at best only partial, derived from an implicit grant from the state.

Such claims strike traditionally-minded persons as outrageous. They seem to be precisely backwards—the reverse of what is true. Families, we think, are prior to the state, which exists to protect families. Within families, parents have primary authority over their children, and even if that authority is partially shared with the state, the primary role of the state is to help parents, not to take over tasks that are properly parental.

Moschella’s book is a vigorous defense of this traditional view.

For other discussions of these issues, check out this book review, by our own Michael Scaperlanda, or this short article of mine (from 2000!  Time flies!).