Tonight, I am headed to Pittsburgh to give a paper entitled, “Compulsory Schooling and Preventative War: A Comparative Analysis” at the American Educational Studies Association annual conference. I originally wrote it for a summer seminar in ethics (in the analytic tradition of normative ethics) and, since then, I find it to be a fun side-project. Coming from a continental tradition of philosophy it amuses me to play at being an analytic philosopher. Maybe you will be amused too. I would post the whole paper, but, as I plan to publish it at some point, I can only post my abstract. If it interests you feel free to request a copy by providing your e-mail in comments.
Here is the abstract:
In this paper, I will be using the language and resources of analytic political philosophy to say something like the following: Forcing people to do things before you have present reasons to do so may or may not be a good idea, but it is most certainly not an innocent thing, to be sure. Since compulsory schooling does this non-innocent thing, we should always be aware of the guilt of the thing in question when we try to analyze it. This argument will be bolstered by an analogy to preventative war (in the abstract) and the Iraq War (in the concrete). I will claim that compulsory schooling is the moral equivalent to preventative war. In other words, that forcing custodians—who may or may not be parents or guardians, and may even be the students themselves—to relinquish custody in advance of an actual offense is the moral equivalent of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003: It may be justified, all-things-considered, but it is certainly unjust.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In