Caring improves decisions by keeping the adult's attention focused over a period of time. Caring flourishes in permanent and intimate relations, but professionals cannot afford such a continuing relation with each client, nor would it be appropriate. Though professionals who serve children are marginally affected for good or for ill by the fates of their clients, making the right decision is most important to the person who must live with the child. Thus parents are also the most accountable. The parent best satisfies these three criteria in the vast run of cases, at least with respect to the child's liberty.
Parental sovereignty is the principal generator of civic virtue.
Children best learn the importance of commutative and distributive justice in an environment in which adults whom they know and trust are in command. In a pluralistic society, there can be no collective vision of the good life, and hence no clear moral teaching function for government. Outside math and the physical sciences, the course of study in government schools will and must be confined to a narrow set of political ideas. The really interesting ideas about human happiness must be politically censored to avoid offense. This vacuous narcissism may be politically unavoidable, but it makes no contribution to the common good.