Justice envers les enfants et légitimité politique en éducation

Few deny that children have fundamental interests of their own and that they are the direct subjects of considerations of justice. Yet, the work of the most influential theorists of justice contains no systematic discussion of the moral and political status of children. My dissertation contributes to filling this important gap by considering four main questions. (1) What does the liberal state owe children as a matter of basic justice? (2) Which types of educational policies are morally legitimate? (3) To what extent (if at all) is it morally permissible for parents to deliberately shape their children’s values? (4) What criteria should govern the teaching of controversial moral issues?   This thesis consists of four articles. The first, “Political Liberalism and Children’s Education”, examines the questions of the grounds and implications of political liberals’ often-undefended claim that the state should refrain from adopting educational policies designed to promote a particular conception of the good life. I defend the thesis that the ground for this commitment is solely parent-centric, and not children-centric. Against the charge that political liberalism is thus ‘bad for children’, I argue that political liberals have the resources to advance a robust agenda of political interventions in children’s education.   The second article, “On the Permissibility of Shaping Children’s Values”, considers the question of whether parents have a right to enroll their children into a comprehensive doctrine and, as such, to deliberately shape their children’s worldview. The paper expands and amends the case against the anti-perfectionist account of legitimate childrearing and develops a novel argument in favor of the permissibility of comprehensive enrolment. It also proposes a crucial and as yet overlooked distinction between comprehensive enrolment and comprehensive education.   The third article, “Common Education and the Practice of Liberal Neutrality: The Loyola High School Case”, focuses on the legitimacy of specific educational policies. I defend three main claims. First, it is in principle legitimate for the liberal state to favor a strong common schooling system. Second, the widespread view according to which neutrality as an educational approach is both impossible and undesirable is based on an implausible understanding of liberal neutrality. Third, there are nonetheless strong reasons, including reasons of justice for children, to accommodate most religious parents and schools.   The fourth article, “Which Moral Issues Should be Taught as Controversial?”, challenges the dominant ‘epistemic criterion’ for determining what issues should be taught ‘as controversial’ in schools and, more generally, the way in which the philosophical debate on this topic has been framed in recent years, both from a substantive and a methodological point of view. I defend an alternative way of approaching the issue, which is sensitive to the plurality of educational aims and to a larger set of moral considerations that, I argue, are essential to good normative policy analysis.

Keyphrases: John Rawls, Political liberalism, Political legitimacy, Parental rights, Children, Common education