> There is no one way of being a good citizen. This isn't the PRC.

I don't recall claiming there was one way. There's generally one curriculum, of course, for public school (at least since we decided standardization was valuable), but the standard for social studies tends to include things like teaching critical thinking and how to evaluate multiple competing viewpoints. In my high school, we studied Hobbes, Locke, Marx, Adam Smith, and several other authors whose names currently escape me.

> Telling people how to raise their children or what to think is absolutely not justified in defence of fundamental liberty, so it's out.

Again, the government can and will tell you you may not set your child on fire or starve them to death and will deprive you the liberty of raising them if you try. This is, of course, in defense of their fundamental liberty. Sometimes fundamental liberties clash.

Pure liberty doesn't exist in a society as large as ours. It is always walking hand-in-hand with responsibility.

> What is the source of moral authority that gives strangers more control over child rearing than parents?

Speaking in the broadest sense? The fact those children will be partially deciding the fate of those strangers in the future because they'll vote. This is real "we live in a society" stuff and I think you can't see it because your moral code may be incompatible with living in the kind of collective post-1930s society that has adapted to avoid Great Depressions and the like. This is why even if you raise your kid "in a forest school," as you said, the state will require you to teach some minimum standards and you can be stripped of homeschooling rights for failure to comply (varies from state-to-state).

> If you want to sell your kidney to fuel your heroin habit or feed your children, who is anyone else to tell you that you can't? What is their source of moral authority over your kidney that supersedes your own?

Are you postulating absurdities now? You know this society does not allow you to sell your kidney, right? The state has a vested interest in not allowing for the creation of a market for kidneys in a similar sense to its vested interest in not allowing for the creation of a market for child pornography. Is this an issue you want to discuss? Take it up with someone else.

> This seems to be a common thought, but where is it codified? Who imposes this responsibility on parents? What is their source of moral authority to do so?

State laws, each state, we live in a society and the state has obligations to make good citizens of the children of the state. You can have all these qualities in a free society without it being the PRC; perhaps you didn't know, but while the PRC happened a continent away, the US had a "Great Society" project and a lot of modern philosophy of governance came of it (along with some nifty things like social security, an arts endowment, some pretty neat civil engineering projects...).

I don't know what point regarding domestic culture you mean, so I'm going to merely re-assert that (a) you have a great plan for if parents are good at their jobs but no idea what to do for people who's parents didn't get with the program like yours did (and those are people who, in a fair society, deserve a chance just like you do) and (b) the numbers show that the average case looks a lot more like "they aren't with the program" than your experience.

I appreciate this discussion. It helps me test my priors to have someone from such a radically different worldview call them into question.