Abstract

The aim of the dissertation is to determine the basis of, and thus to justify, children's rights to education. ;The dissertation surveys and exposes the failings of a variety of arguments purporting to justify children's rights. Several of these arguments fail for a common reason. They conceive a threshold of personhood, a developmental boundary signifying the acquisition of a special moral standing. On this view, the purpose of education is to bring children across the threshold, to form them into persons. But if individuals acquire rights in virtue of crossing the threshold, and children start out below the threshold, then how can we explain how children have rights to be brought across it? The problem arises because this standard conception naively assumes that being a person is an all-or-nothing matter. ;The dissertation denies this assumption and reconceives the problem. It argues that: personhood is an achievement, but it is achieved incrementally; the concept of personhood as normally employed refers to a large array of capacities, each of which has moral significance; although normal adults tend to have all of these capacities, children do not; but children might have some; thus, the question to ask is not, "Are children persons?" but rather, "Do children have any characteristics that can serve as the basis of educational rights?" ;The answer presented involves the following claims: Young children have current rights in virtue of their sentience. As child-rearers respect these rights and care for children, children unavoidably develop capacities that entitle individuals to personhood rights. If they will have such capacities, then they will have personhood rights. And children can have rights in advance to have those future rights protected. ;The dissertation concludes by outlining constraints on how child-rearers may restrict children's freedom