Abstract

The right to education can be defended as a right to teaching dependent essential education. Theoretical difficulties faced by attempts to argue for this right include the normative classification of needs. An independent basis for an obligation to educate is identified as a special case of the obligation to render aid. I explain a concept of "essential knowledge," the sense in which education is a need, and the basis of the obligation to educate. ;Finally, it is argued that compulsory essential knowledge education for children and adults can be defended. But the notion that they may be compulsorily educated for the sake of ornamentation, or to protect the conservative interests of the state, or to facilitate socio-economic goals is rejected. The reconciliation of children's rights and the compulsory education of children requires that weighty, and relevant paternalistic or other moral reasons be adduced for the justification of compulsion. ;Philosophers who inquire about the rights of human children are often led to conclude that small children do not have moral rights. In many ways this conclusion is a natural outcome of posing the question of the rights of children from a point of view which in effect "fragments" their lives. I claim that this particular fragmentation is artificial; that given the known historical and psychological continuity of human beings as adults and as children we may non-arbitrarily pose the question about their rights from a "whole" individual perspective instead. The resultant unified view of the rights of human beings as children and as adults is theoretically attractive and can be defended against several important objections. Without assuming the so-called "potentiality principle", the unified view defended assigns "adult" rights to children and "children's" rights to adults. Interference with the liberties of children becomes justifiable only where paternalistic or other morally weighty reasons can be given. More extensive "parental paternalism" is unjustifiable. ;I maintain that the theory of rights figures importantly in defensible moral theories. The notion that all rights are justified by appeal to ideals of freedom or distributive justice is rejected. It is urged that rights to well-being also be recognized as rights in their own right. I sketch a consequentialist moral theory which takes rights to well-being, along with rights of liberty and special rights, to be ultimately justifiable by appeal to the general and moral requirement to promote the well-being of moral patients. All rights, I claim, are analyzable as moral entitlements whose practical meaning can be explained by reference to the prima facie obligations they imply. ;This dissertation centers around three related questions. Do children have moral rights? If so, is a right to education one of them? May their education by compulsory? The answers offered to these questions are held together by a certain theoretical understanding of rights, and a certain philosophical view about how to pose questions of children's rights