The Radical Ambiguity Of Parenthood

I sometimes wonder if people who wish to become parents have taken into account how fundamentally ambiguous, from a moral point of view, the notion of 'educating' young children is. Consider the following maxim, 'Do not inflict unnecessary suffering'. Whether or not we should inflict any suffering on other people in a specific situation, and precisely when this suffering would become 'unnecessary' are extremely delicate questions that will have to be debated by all the people concerned under two main regulative conditions guiding the discussion. First, one of moral respect : we must recognise the rights of every individual to be participants in the moral conversation; second, one of mutual reciprocity : we must allow that everyone has symmetrical rights to ask questions, to seek explanations, and to examine one another's presuppositions.

Now consider this : a girl, 6 years old, wants to go out and play, but her parents force her to stay at home and finish her home-work. Does this constitute a case of 'inflicting unnecessary suffering?'

The difficulty in answering this question is that the two conditions do not quite hold : though the parents would accept the first, the girl does not possess (as yet) the breadth of a sufficiently contextualised moral imagination that an agent must possess before she can fulfill the second condition. Nevertheless, let us assume that she is capable of making at least some elementary attempts in this direction, so that the following conversation ensues.

Girl : Why are you shutting me up in the room? You are inflicting unnecessary suffering on me.

Parents : What is this 'unnecessary suffering' that you are talking of?

Girl : Suffering that is caused by the lack of freedom to go out and play.

Parents : Yes, but sometimes one has to accept a bit of pain in the present for future gains.

Girl : But what if I refuse to accept that truth? What if I just don't care for gains in the future? What if my present and immediate happiness is all that matters to me? Why should I not be allowed to live for the moment?

Parents : I am sorry, but you have no option, young lady. I shall force you to accept this truth!

And that is where the conversation finally breaks down and the brute force on which the parental argument is based suddenly reveals itself in its brutality : all education, either implicitly or explicitly, is a form of violence inflicted on little children. The usual 'justification' for this violence of course is that it will help to bring them 'in line' and mould them into 'civilised' citizens for tomorrow. But should we not first ask the children if they want to choose this future for themselves? And if they are not in the position of being able to answer this question, should we not simply leave them to play with the birds and the dogs in the park instead of forcing them into studying when they do not wish to do so? And if they say that they do not want to study at all, should we not respect this wish of theirs?