Susceptible Minds

"Liberal States, Authoritarian Families

By Rita Koganzon

(Oxford, 208 pages, $74)

My childhood school in Toronto is developing an "anti-racism and pluralism strategy." In an update to alumni, the institution acknowledged "systemic forms of oppression in our school community" and pledged to create "an environment where the visibility, the strength and voices of the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) community is actively cultivated, mentored and promoted through equitable admissions, a diverse curriculum, and hiring of diverse faculty." Icons, traditions and monuments will all be reassessed.

The school claims it is leading the way forward. In fact, it is following, catching up to the ritzy American schools and adopting the fashion of our day. If administrators think this makes them good liberals, they are mistaken -- or at least the founders of modern liberalism would say so. As Rita Koganzon demonstrates in her valuable book "Liberal States, Authoritarian Families," key early liberal theorists relied on parents and teachers to steel children against "the worst tendencies of liberalism -- the tendencies to be ruled by fashions, custom, and the opinions of the majority."

John Locke, the father of liberalism, sought to divide and limit the authority of the state, but he strengthened the authority of parents to act in the best interests of their children. While championing liberty and tolerance, Locke, no relativist, knew they "threatened to make wrong opinions more powerful by removing all the social mechanisms that had previously suppressed them, leaving the highly susceptible minds of children especially exposed." Since the state can't safely or effectively shield citizens from error and direct them to better ideas, Locke gave the authority to parents and teachers.

Ms. Koganzon, who teaches politics at the University of Virginia, points out that Locke wanted children to learn habits of skepticism and reflection, preparing them to later resist erroneous intellectual fashions. "Lockean education," Ms. Koganzon argues, "is thus more accurately understood as a corrective for the excesses of liberalism than as an assembly line for compliant subjects."

In "Some Thoughts Concerning Education," Locke does not advise indoctrinating children in the "right" ideas. Instead, he sets out a plan for what Ms. Koganzon terms "an individualistic training of the mind." Locke believed that "men firmly embrace falsehood for truth" because they never learned to "contest the empire of habit," which would allow them to question their beliefs. Accordingly, "where habit insinuates itself naturally, Locke directs parents to break it, but where it does not, he enjoins them to introduce it." Denial is the first step to self-denial and then to self-mastery.

Authoritarian parenting isn't popular these days, but what is so awful about adults exercising authority over children? Ms. Koganzon quotes Hannah Arendt: "By being emancipated from the authority of adults the child has not been freed but has been subjected to a much more terrifying and truly tyrannical authority" -- that of fellow children. The peer group's constantly changing but maliciously enforced standards of "cool" teach submission to fashion as a way of life.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's approach isn't as straightforward as Locke's. In the ideal republic, Rousseau wanted children raised and educated in common, with families shunted off to the side. Yet in commercial republics, mothers or tutors were needed to educate children to withstand the prevailing social corruption. Rousseau shows them how in "Emile." "The first tears of children are prayers," Rousseau writes. "If one is not careful, they soon become orders." Whereas the Lockean child learns to resist his desires, the Rousseauian child will have no excessive desires. This is achieved through what the author calls "benevolent deception," practiced by a dedicated tutor who foresees everything. "Let [the child] always believe he is the master," Rousseau advises, "and let it always be you who are."

"Education requires either parents or superhumans," Ms. Koganzon summarizes. While most readers fixate on Emile, the title character, and his impossible tutor, she redirects our attention to Sophie, a secondary character. She was taught by her parents, in a modest, practicable and Lockean manner, to "negotiate public opinion." She knows that her reputation matters, but does not permit the opinion of others to rule her. Emile would hardly seem an unqualified success to the educated mothers to whom the book is addressed. Independent to a fault, "he knows no attachments other than those of habit," Rousseau writes. "He loves his sister as he loves his watch." "Emile" can be read as an argument to mothers to educate their own children: Sophie chooses her domestic role, marries Emile, and ultimately convinces Emile to educate their son.

Late in the book, Ms. Koganzon acknowledges that the ideas of Locke and Rousseau are not a perfect fit with the common schools that developed after their time. "Every school will let in more of the majority's opinions" than the family would have -- even if John Dewey, the inspiration for many progressive educators, "saw no apparent conflict between Rousseau and mass schooling." America's "liberal compromise" with the needs of a commercial and democratic society, she concludes, is to send children to schools but remain suspicious of those schools. Parents retain authority through local school boards and exercise it when professional educators overreach.

"Liberal States, Authoritarian Families" is a scholarly book, and parts of the chapters on early-modern political theorists are quite involved. Ms. Koganzon's introduction and conclusion are more accessible, and together present a powerful indictment of progressive educational theory. Contemporary theorists and educators want the public sphere and the world of adults to be inclusive and egalitarian. They err, Ms. Koganzon argues, by attempting to refashion the private sphere and the world of children to mirror the same values. Schools as liberal as our political regime can't protect the regime from its weaknesses.

In a sense, these progressives repeat the errors of theorists of old, who believed absolute paternal authority at home would prepare subjects for an absolutist political regime. Today, we have children rehearse left-liberalism in schools and in private so they will perform it in public as adults. The tragedy is that training children in woke, egalitarian social relations prepares them not for liberal citizenship but for conformity." [1]

1. Susceptible Minds
Kaufman, Elliot.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 26 Aug 2021: A.15.