Schools and the principle of non-intrusion into the private

Abstract

In this article, I argue that parental privacy has often been given too much weight in theorising about justice at schools. Susan Okin famously stated that as the family serves as the children’s ‘first school of justice’,¹ it should also be internally just. However, she agreed with John Rawls on that interfering directly within the family life, even in the name of equality and justice, would risk causing injustice to those who do not share these liberal ideals. I ask in what sense this principle of non-intrusion into the private should be extended over the school institution. If the principles of public justice and private morality came into conflict in school education, which set of principles should be given priority? I pose Rawls’ suggestion concerning children’s schooling against his depiction of the family and claim that these two are normatively at odds with each other. Of the two, the latter seems paradoxically to allow for more extensive public regulation and therefore his view of the school must be modified accordingly. Moreover, I revisit one of Okin’s main arguments that countering injustices requires active and explicated countermeasures where education plays a key role. Therefore, it is justified to prioritise principles of public morality, and teach related substantial values at schools, given that they accord with the demands of justice. Parental privacy applies to schools only in a limited sense.

Introduction

Liberal thinkers agree that every (adult) individual ought to be capable of deciding on the matters that directly concern them. These personal matters are often referred to as ‘private’ and they consist of one’s values, ethical or religious convictions, as well as one’s bodily, physical or mental integrity. The sphere of the private denotes all the matters that the individual is morally justified to withhold from others, be it other individuals, groups, institutions or governmental agencies. Or, alternatively, matters that are considered to be ‘private’ demand protection from any unwarranted intrusion. The private sphere marks off the normative limits of an individual’s sphere of freedom: matters that are theirs and only theirs to decide about. In this article, I have called this moral requirement of privacy the ‘principle of non-intrusion into the private’ (PNI) and I have asked in what sense should this principle be extended to the school institution.

The school provides an intriguing test case for this central liberal principle, because the school is treated as a public institution within the liberal tradition, but at the same time, the private sphere of society overlaps with school education because the children are very much part of their families. The state often regulates, directs or straightforwardly provides children’s basic education. The school also faces normative demands from the wider society as all citizens have legitimate interests in children’s formal education. Whether parents or not, all citizens share the interest that children will grow up to become competent and cooperative members of society. That is, as a result of their upbringing and education, they develop both a sense of justice and capacity to form their own view of the good (Rawls, 2001: 18–19). One of the main tasks of the school is to prepare children for meaningful participation in society, and therefore the content of formal education and school practices must be concomitant with the principles of social justice. At the same time, child-rearing practices are at the core of parents’ or guardians’ private life and intimately connected to their most dearly held ethical beliefs and convictions about the good, the right and the valuable. Therefore, the school is morally obliged to cooperate with the guardians (usually the parents) of underaged pupils. Because of these two normative requirements, the protection of private parental views on one hand, and the preparation of children for the public life on the other, it as an institution faces profound ethical and political complications. ² Therefore, education for civic values, such as appreciation of democratic decision-making, or remedies of social justice, such as anti-sexist or anti-racist attitudes, can come across as an illegitimate intrusion to the private sphere, if parental values or life-choices conflict with these public aims of education.

The ‘private sphere’ is the main arena protected by PNI. John Rawls reiterates the private/public split in his theory of political liberalism by making a distinction between two kinds of institutions. This is to ensure that true value-pluralism, or an extensive variety of what Rawls calls ‘comprehensive’ views and doctrines, that is, religions or other moral outlooks based on substantial or even metaphysical stances on the valuable and good life, can exist in a just society. The principles of politically liberal justice are not supposed to permeate every life-sphere, but space must also be left outside direct state regulation. Only the ‘basic’ social institutions, which include the political constitution, the economic regime and the legal order, obliged to follow the main principles of justice: Respecting a maximal, mutually compatible set of basic individual rights and liberties for everyone ensuring that a substantial equality of opportunity exists in the society and prioritising the least well-off (Rawls, 1971, 2005). In contrast, non-basic institutions, that among others include associations of the civil society, non-governmental and religious organisations, business firms, labour unions and universities, are exempted from internal regulation by the principles of justice. This means that non-basic institutions are also allowed to follow other, more comprehensive values and principles than solely political ones. They are exempted from following strict equality: Universities may thus restrict admission by the application of meritocratic guidelines, and churches may define that only men can serve as priests (Young, 2011: 66). However, Rawls (1971: 7) does not follow the most conventional public/private split as he places the family institutions among the basic institutions (Okin, 1994: 27–28).

Curiously, although the school serves as John Rawls’ (2001) prime example of what distinguishes his theory of liberal political justice from more comprehensive liberal views, he never considers the institutional placement of schools more closely. Rawls argues that value-wise, the school is justified in teaching the children their legal rights and civic virtues of political liberalism but none of the more substantial or comprehensive values and virtues such as individuality or personal autonomy. In his model, the state’s legitimate interests concern children’s civic education only, while it is the responsibility of parents, the family and other private institutions to provide children more comprehensive values. However, this suggestion places the school uneasily in between public and private morality. It remains unclear which category of institutions, public or private, the school should primarily belong to, or how much control the parents should have over their children’s formal education. This unclarity concerns specifically any educational content that is more than minimally normatively substantial. Consequently, it is open to question which moral principles of justice, political or comprehensive, should guide the school’s normative educational aims, content and practices.

At the same time, Rawls’ latest formulation of the family institution seems to be in an important sense at odds with his suggestion concerning children’s schooling. In response to criticism from Susan Okin and other feminists, Rawls explicitly situates the family within the category of basic social institutions and thus sees it as being subject to the political principles of justice. However, after this theoretical shift, neither Rawls nor Okin reconsider the school from this new institutional perspective. As liberal political theorists, both Rawls and Okin value the ‘principle of non-intrusion into the private’ but neither of them explicitly consider whether the principle should extend to the school institution. This is what I intend to examine in this article. I claim that Rawls reformulation of the family institution also calls for reconsidering the school as part of the basic structure of society. Based on Rawls and Okin’s views of the family, I argue that the school is predominantly a public social institution and thus parental privacy can only have a limited normative bearing on children’s formal education.

In what follows, I will first formulate the moral principle of non-intrusion into the private and explain its significance in liberal and feminist theorising. Second, I present Rawls suggestion about the division of labour between parents and the school in children’s moral education. His suggestion, followed by many philosophers of education, extends PNI over the school institution. However, I claim that considering Rawls’s statements on the family institution, this is a misinterpretation. Thus, in the third section of the article, I present three objections to Rawls’ solution that arise from his more recent considerations on the family, from the institutional differences between the family and the school and from Okin’s argument on the need for active measures to reduce structural social inequalities. Based on these objections, I argue that PNI does not apply to the school in a same manner as to the family and, therefore, it is justified to teach children the kind of substantial values that coincide with the principles of political justice and advance the realisation of social justice also in formal educational settings. The teaching of values of social justice does not violate PNI and it would be unreasonable of the parents to demand ruling out the teaching of these values. Finally, I present my conclusions.

The principle of non-intrusion into the private (PNI)

The value of personal privacy is appreciated by a wide variety of liberal thinkers, because it is closely linked to personal liberty as the fundamental value of liberalism. Privacy ‘. . . involves the idea of having a domain or territory in which the self is sovereign’ (Feinberg, 1983: 452). By being able to make decisions that concern their own person or to confine personal information to themselves or trusted others, people are able to control how they relate to others. It is realised in individuals’ right to make decisions concerning their personal matters, life-choices and values, to conceal personal information from others, and to safeguard their bodily, physical or mental integrity from unwarranted intrusion (Allen, 2011: 37; DeCew, 2018). This ‘principle of non-intrusion into the private’ (hence PNI) draws the line of (non-)intrusion to matters of one’s private life. PNI states that there is a ‘core’ of privacy that other individuals, the society and its institutions, or the state are not allowed to intrude in without freely given permission from the individual in question, or without strong moral reasons, unless someone else’s central rights are at stake.

The scale of this sphere of personal sovereignty varies among liberal thinkers. In the terms of state interference, the neoliberal strand often advocates the widest possible sovereign sphere even where one’s children are included (Nozick, 1989: 28). In contrast, more socially minded liberals typically advocate a more limited sphere of individual sovereignty, in which one’s liberty can be restricted on the basis of preventing harm to others (Mill, 1909), or to ensure that everyone is also capable and has the means to take advance of their sovereign sphere (Courtland et al., 2022; Rawls, 1971, 2001). Regardless of the liberal strand, it is typically thought that PNI protects at least one’s bodily integrity, central moral convictions, personal possessions and their most important life-choices (DeCew, 2018). This principle has been given a range of names within the liberal tradition, such as personal sovereignty, autonomy or the freedom of expression, conscience and religion (Allen, 2011; Feinberg, 1983). John Rawls (2001) expresses this principle as the moral demand to respect everyone’s capacity to form their own (reasonable) conception of the good. In his wider theory of justice, Rawls aims to combine maximal individual liberty with extensive socio-cultural pluralism as one central precondition for liberty: In a just society, individuals must be allowed an extensive space for living by their own view of the good, free from the demands to adopt a specific moral outlook.

PNI is closely connected to the idea of separate private and public social arenas, where ‘the private sphere’ is seen as the realm of personal sovereignty (DeCew, 2018). This idea is also behind Rawls’ separation between the basic or public, and non-basic, non-public social institutions, although he does not adopt the traditional public/private division (Okin, 1994: 27–28). However, it is notable that the ideas of sovereignty or autonomy developed first not as a personal but a collective right: as the sovereignty of a state over its own territory and the people residing in it (Feinberg, 1983). As an individual right, privacy was first a privilege granted for wealthy men, while at the same time, women, children, servants, slaves and workers have been confined in somebody else’s personal sphere. This meant that numerous groups of people were simultaneously deprived of even the most basic privacy while being barred from entering the public spaces and offices (Pateman, 1988). The notion of ‘privacy’ has often been employed to enforce conventional morality. For instance, while heterosexual, married couples have always enjoyed protection by the PNI, non-married and homosexual couples have been deprived of legal protection and homosexual relations have been sanctioned even in private (Feinberg, 1983). Although such legal barriers no longer exist in current liberal, democratic countries, the history is present in the manner how minority groups, such as racial, religious, sexual or gender minorities, refugees, immigrants or women – or sometimes, children ³ – gain salience as if ‘being out of place’ when they as individuals or groups enter public space (Moody-Adams, 2022; Phillips, 2007). It is worth asking, how much of the older connotations still burden our understanding of privacy and PNI. For instance, are we prone to enclosing children and young people and those institutions involved in their upbringing the private sphere for some justified moral reason, or just out of convention?

The notion of personal privacy, and the private–public-split it is connected to, has been criticised from the feminist perspective (MacKinnon, 1989; Pateman, 1988). Nevertheless, the overlapping notions of autonomy, privacy and bodily and mental integrity have still been pivotal in every wave of feminist theory and politics, from gaining civic rights to conceptualising gender and combatting sexual harassment in all walks of life (Allen, 2011; DeCew, 2015). Feminist theorists have successfully contested the archaic interpretation of privacy as a group right that is granted to households, families or even to private businesses. They have emphasised that as with any other central right, the right to privacy is an individual’s subjective right. Feminists have thus restated the self-evident idea that privacy must be consistently and equally respected in all individuals despite their gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality or any other morally arbitrary quality (Allen, 2011; Diez, 1998; MacKinnon, 1989; Okin, 1998). At the same time, liberal feminists agree that PNI limits the legitimate tools available in society for ensuring social justice within the private sphere. For instance, to combat (gender) inequality in familial settings, Susan Okin proposes legislative changes in the financial and custody arrangements between spouses, the most importantly equal legal entitlement to all earnings, as well as good public childcare services. These changes would be justified on the same basis as the already existing governmental regulations on the family. The state already shapes the family institution by regulating the marriage laws as well as the ways in which single people, married and unmarried couples, and families are treated by fiscal authorities or employers. The state also mandates the formal rights and responsibilities spouses have for each other and the responsibilities and rights parents or guardians have towards their children (Okin, 2005). ⁴ According to Okin (1989), her proposals would only involve ‘the same kind of invasion of privacy as now is required by such things as registration of marriages and births, and the filing of tax returns declaring numbers and names of dependents’ (p. 182).

Okin argues that although it is justified to regulate the legal and distributive patterns of society to secure gender equality, such regulation should still not extend directly to the practices of family life. This is because tolerance of socio-cultural pluralism is a central liberal as well as feminist value, and a just society must thus respect and protect the private sphere and allow for a plurality of reasonable values and lifestyles to exist, even when they are not fully in line with substantial or comprehensive liberal or feminist ideals. This means that parents should be allowed to arrange their family life also contra, for instance, the public principle of equality – if no-one’s basic or civic rights are compromised. Okin (1989) was careful to propose only legal, formal changes to avoid any ‘unwarranted invasion of privacy or any more state intervention into the life of families than currently exists’ (p. 133, 18, 184–185). A direct public interference within the family institution, even in the name of social justice, might prove to be more harmful than beneficial:

The pluralism of beliefs and models of lives is fundamental to our society, and the genderless society I have just outlined would certainly not be agreed upon by all as desirable. Thus, when we think about constructing relations between the sexes that could be agreed upon in the original position, and are therefore just from all points of view, we must also design institutions and practices acceptable to those with more traditional beliefs about the characteristics of men and women, and the appropriate division of labour between them (Okin, 1989: 180).

My interpretation, then, is that Okin largely agrees with Rawls on the importance of PNI. Therefore, Okin’s discomfort with Rawls’ (2001: 10) expression that the principles of justice should not apply to the internal life of the family does not concern PNI itself: ‘. . . advocating justice within families is not equivalent to saying that such justice should be directly enforced by law. No household spies nor “kitchen police” are inherent in the notion of family justice [. . .]’ (Okin, 2005: 246). She is unsatisfied with Rawls’ unclear stance on the family institution (Chambers, 2013), but as this quotation shows, she does not question PNI’s applicability as a moral guideline.

However, more than Rawls, Okin stresses explicit condemnation of sexist practices and doctrines and defining of the tangible measures for their regulation. She emphasises that the aim of these legislative measures should be clearer than Rawls in her view admits: A just society aims at changing the social structures that disadvantage women ⁵ and other social groups. These structural processes that create systematic, group-based privileges for some and disadvantages to others are formed in the definition process of and interaction between public and private spheres. For instance, when care work, such as raising and educating children, or caring for the sick and elderly, is seen primarily as private enterprises, they easily, almost ‘naturally’, become the primary responsibility of women for cultural reasons. Or, when caring jobs are undervalued and underpaid, they can only entice those who already have a precarious position in the labour market, such as women, immigrants and people of colour. When various cultural understandings and prejudices concerning personal and private qualities such as one’s gender, skin-colour, religion, ethnicity, mother tongue, sexuality, economic standing or disability effectively prevent individuals with minority or low socio-economic background entering valued, well-paid or powerful positions, it is not only the basic structure, but also the social practices, prejudices and institutional decision-making processes that require reforming (Okin, 1994, 2004, 2005; Young, 2006). Without changing these social structures, social justice will be realised only halfway. When disadvantaging is systematic and runs through all social practices and institutions, it cannot be tackled by legal or formal changes alone but requires active encouragement and challenging, rethinking and reformulating the social roles and positions both in private and public spheres (Okin, 2004). ⁶

The value of PNI is upheld by a variety of liberal and feminist thinkers (see DeCew, 2015, 2018). Okin herself partially misinterpreted Rawls’ political liberalism and therefore her criticism appears as being more radical than it actually is (Chambers, 2013). Rather, both theorists mostly agree on the value of PNI. And neither considers even the family – the emblematic ‘private sphere’ – as completely protected from state regulation. However, neither Okin nor Rawls consider the relevance of PNI in relation to school education. Therefore, it is not clear where Okin draws the line of non-intrusion at schools, ⁷ and as I will claim next, Rawls’ remarks on the school institution are in contradiction with his views of the family as a basic institution. As he allows for an extensive regulation of the family, the same kind of regulatory principles must also be justified in relation with the school – but this stance is not apparent on what he says about schooling. I further argue that this contradiction is mistakenly transferred to the branch of philosophy of education that is inspired by his theory. As Rawls and Okin largely agree in the end, Okin’s criticism must also be valid in relation to his views on schooling.

The principle of non-intrusion and the school

The principle of the non-intrusion to the private marks off the private realm of life that is justifiably protected from the intrusion of others. At the same time, aggregated individual choices that are made in accordance with culturally conditioned expectations and prejudices have strong public bearing. When the interaction of the private and public results in profound structural social injustices, society ought to intervene with these injustices, but in a manner that respects PNI. However, even the principle was highly respected in relation to the family, how extensively should it be respected in relation to the school institution? A widely considered example of applying parental PNI over the school institution is provided in the well-known court case of Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972), hence Yoder) in which Amish parents successfully fought over their right to withdraw their children from the last 2 years of their mandatory basic education. Liberal thinkers are surprisingly unanimous in their resolution concerning the case. While some explicitly hail this and other similar court decisions as justified protection of reasonable comprehensive doctrines (Galston, 1995; Stolzenberg, 1993), ⁸ others give it a more tacit approval. For instance, after arguing extensively for children’s right to an open future for children, Joel Feinberg still concludes that the court resolution was not mistaken (Feinberg, 2007 [1980]: 117).

Rawls does not explicitly consider Yoder but presents a similar case when aiming to illuminate his theory of political liberalism. Rawls argues that to protect the communal existence of reasonable religious sects, children’s formal school education should not deliver any substantial values, only those of strictly political. For Rawls, the division line between public and private morality permeates right through the school institution. In his model, the state’s legitimate interests concern the children’s civic education only:

A problem now arises about their children’s education and the requirements the state can impose. The liberalisms of Kant and Mill may lead to requirements designed to foster the values of autonomy and individuality as ideals to govern much if not all of life. But political liberalism has a different aim and requires far less. It will ask that children’s education include such things as knowledge of their constitutional and civil rights, so that, for example, they know that liberty of conscience exists in their society and that apostasy is not a legal crime, all this to ensure that their continuous religious membership when they come of age is not based simply on ignorance of their basic rights or fear of punishment for offenses that are only considered offenses within their religious sect. (Rawls, 2001: 156)

He clarifies further:

Justice as fairness does not seek to cultivate the distinctive virtues and values of the liberalisms of autonomy and individuality, or indeed any other comprehensive doctrine. For in that case, it ceases to be a form of political liberalism. The state’s concern with their [children’s] education lies in their role as future citizens, and so in such essential things as their acquiring of the capacity to understand public culture and to participate in its institutions, in their being economically independent and self-supporting members of society over a complete life, and in their developing the political virtues, all this from a political point of view. (Rawls, 2001: 157)

Thus, in his example, Rawls divides children’s moral education into two different dimensions, of which the first is political or ‘public’ and included in school education. It consists of knowledge and dispositions associated with basic rights, political virtues, economic independence and constructive social cooperation. The other set of moral education is more comprehensive, as it concerns questions of the good, and is obtained in contexts other than the school. Although he does not specify whose responsibility it would be to assist children to form their view of the good, given the textual context, the underlying assumption is that it is the parents, the family or other non-public or private associations that are to provide children the substantial or comprehensive values associated with a particular view of the good life. The main normative idea is that by restricting the moral education that schools are responsible for to political values and virtues only, political liberalism respects the parental right to choose and follow their own lifestyle and view of the good in accordance with PNI. Despite using the school as a central example of separating his political liberalism from comprehensive liberal views, Rawls does not consider the school institution in any more detail. This is surprising, as he otherwise thinks that one of the main tasks of all basic institutions is educational:

If citizens of a well-ordered society are to recognize one another as free and equal, basic institutions must educate them to this conception of themselves, as well as publicly exhibit and encourage this idea of political justice. This task of education belongs to what we may call the wide role of a political conception. [. . .] Acquaintance with and participation in that public culture is one way citizens learn to conceive of themselves as free and equal, a conception which, if left to their own reflections, they would most likely never form, much less accept and desire to realize. (Rawls, 2001: 56)

I believe that Rawls suggestion on schooling should not be understood as a precise description but as a somewhat sketchy example. A closer examination reveals some central tensions in its interpretation. First, Rawls’s own list of political virtues (which he also defines as a legitimate content of school education) is quite extensive. Thus, in practice, educating for political virtues might involve extensive implementation in the curriculum, and without further specification, in turn become vulnerable to charges of illegitimate intrusion into the parents’ privacy. Even more fundamentally, some authors have suggested that including children’s education into Rawls’s political theorising reveals central tensions within his theory: that his theory implicitly presupposes the comprehensive value of autonomy both as a central liberal value and educational aim (Clayton, 2006; Levinson, 1999) or as the value that binds liberal and democratic ideals together (Callan, 1997b). This means that when children’s education is considered, the strict division between comprehensive and political liberalisms partially crumbles. Second, it might well be that children’s education necessarily involves taking a stance on the good and the valuable, because some value-based criteria must be applied to narrowing down the choice on appropriate educational aims (Winch, 2006). Furthermore, if no teaching of substantial values was allowed at school, some crucially important educational tasks such as opportunities to explore, understand and respect different conceptions of the good, promoting long-term flourishing of pupils or educating for environmental sustainability might be harmfully side-lined (Costa, 2004; Edenberg, 2018; Fowler, 2010; Postma, 2002).

Despite the objections above, many liberal philosophers of education following Rawls appear to give PNI quite some weight within formal educational settings, as many arguments concerning the school are thus justified through direct reference to the privacy of the family: ‘In treating the family as part of the private sphere the state effectively presumes that the parents are the most appropriate immediate guardians of the interests of their children’ (Brighouse, 2000: 11). The core idea is that to avoid any interference in the privacy of the family, the school’s purpose (value-wise) is to teach civic knowledge and skills with no accompanying dispositions or virtues. According to Brighouse (2000), the school is justified in delivering more substantial values or cultivating students’ developing capability for autonomy only indirectly. Otherwise, the state would give illegitimate priority to these more comprehensive values over other goods of enduring family relationship or non-autonomous but otherwise rich and rewarding life – or so the argument goes. Consequently, instead of including substantial values, dispositions and virtues into children’s school education, it should focus on delivering central sets of knowledge and skills as less controversial aims: ‘[. . .] the recommendation is for autonomy-facilitating rather than autonomy promoting education [. . .] the education is purportedly “character-neutral”, in that it seeks to provide certain critical skills without aiming to inculcate the inclination to use them’ (Brighouse, 2000: 80–81). Brighouse’s (2000: 82) take on schooling is ‘pragmatic’ in the sense that religious parents might in practice be better disposed to accept such character neutral education.

Alternatively, schools should educate only against servility but not to encourage the development of dispositions, skills and virtues of independency or individual autonomy if parents objected. According to Callan (1997a, 1997b), parents have a legitimate right to make bad educational choices for their children both at home and at school. Callan draws an analogy between parental decisions over children’s free-time activities and formal education. For instance, parents certainly have the right to invest money on a family trip to Disneyland instead of paying for piano lessons for a musically talented child, even if this was seen as a bad educational choice by many liberally minded parents, according to Callan. Analogously, parents also have a right to withdraw their children from school education if they do not agree with its normative content, even if this was seen as a similarly bad educational decision. Although the parents would not have a moral right to deny their child’s access to institutions of formal education that provide opportunities for children to interact and learn with peers of diverse socio-cultural backgrounds, the school ought not take an active role in delivering children any strongly value-based dispositions either (Callan, 1997a, 1997b).

But what justifies such normative symmetry between the family and the school? Why would it be justified to extend PNI in this manner to the school institution? Although parents may have the right to make all kinds of educational decisions concerning their children’s informal education within the privacy of their family, why would this right automatically concern children’s formal education as well? In the following, I raise three main objections for extending PNI to the school, starting from Rawls’s formulation of the family, the institutional differences between the school and the family and the need for structural changes to ensure the realisation of social justice. I argue that for these reasons, schools are justified in teaching more comprehensive values at school, but with the limitation of being concomitant with the requirements of political justice.

Three objections

Many feminist theorists, most notably Okin, criticise Rawls for his strict division between the basic or public and other private institutions and argued for a more substantial stance on gender equality. Okin points out that despite the feminist potential of Rawls’ theory, his work is oddly silent about gender, ⁹ and specifically unclear about the societal placement of the family institution. Furthermore, Okin successfully challenges the earlier tendency of Rawls (and other theorists in the political philosophy canon) to treat the family as a single unit, unquestionably led by a (male) ‘head of the family’. ¹⁰ She demonstrates that not only interfamilial relations, such as equality of opportunity between families, but also intrafamilial relations – the way how rights, goods, opportunities and burdens and responsibilities are divided among family members – are crucially important for social justice. The family functions as children’s ‘first school of justice’, but under the mask of ‘privacy’, the family can also be a site for crude injustice or even negligence and violence. Therefore, if society aims to be just, the family institution must also be regulated by the principles of justice and arranged so that children, as future citizens, can acquire a sense of justice instead of internalising an unwarranted gender-based feeling of inferiority or superiority (Mill and Taylor Mill, 1869: 142–145; Miller, 2009; Okin, 1994, 2005).

Rawls (1999, 2001) embraces the main ideas of the feminist criticism concerning the family institution and agrees with Okin that the family belongs to the basic structure of society. Rawls concludes that to satisfy the requirements of justice, the family cannot stand outside public regulation and it is thus justified for the state to outwardly shape the family institution by legal measures in accordance with the political principles of justice. Therefore, my first objection against extending PNI to the school institution arises from Rawls’s (re-)formulation of the family institution which in an important sense is at odds with his suggestion about the division of labour in children’s moral education. Siding with his feminist critics, Rawls argues that as the family is a part of the basic structure, the state is justified in actively shaping its form and functions. He states that the power of comprehensive doctrines must be limited: They ought not to have a say on the form or the structure of the institutions of marriage and family. For instance, religions or other comprehensive doctrines could not be used to justify restricting marriage only to heterosexual couples or to define what shape an ideal family should take. Family and marriage should be regulated solely by the liberal political principles of equality and equal respect for everyone’s basic rights and liberties with a special focus on the most vulnerable (Rawls, 1999: 595–601).

Furthermore, Rawls emphasises that all arrangements within the family that concern gender-based division of labour must be truly voluntary – that is, the practical arrangements must not derive from any existing injustice or be dictated by an economic necessity that is based on systematic gender-based discrimination. If a gender-based division of labour is adopted within a family, the arrangement ought not violate anyone’s basic rights and liberties inside or outside the family. Even more profoundly, according to Rawls, the state can justifiably shape the family institution towards greater equality to ensure the actualisation of the basic rights of the most vulnerable. The justification stems from the fact that in current societies, unequal financial arrangements within families often threaten the basic rights of women and children especially in case of separation or divorce, because women usually earn less while bearing the main responsibility for children and for the unpaid caring work in general. To break this vicious circle of dependency, poverty and injustice, the state is justified in regulating the financial relationships between the adult members of the family and to oblige spouses to share their income. Because basic rights are at stake, this regulation of the private does not violate PNI (Rawls, 1999: 595–601).

For both Okin and Rawls, an extensive state regulation of the family institution is thus justified within the liberal political framework. Therefore, if Rawls’ criteria on the family are applied to the school institution, comprehensive doctrines such as religion should be exempted from defining the institutional structure of schools or any of their central practices. Instead, schools should be regulated by principles of political liberalism and remain as neutral as possible in relation to comprehensive doctrines. The school should not be structured and managed by any faith, custom or value-based principle that favours gender-specific schooling (for instance), or for that matter encourage segregation by any other morally arbitrary quality, be it ethnicity, race, religion, class, language or disability. Furthermore, schools are not justified in imposing practices such as rituals, school holidays or clothing rules based on a comprehensive doctrine such as religion, political ideology or a custom, without demonstrating how they serve public justice. However, banning of individual religious, ethnic or custom-based clothing or similar habits simply on the grounds of another comprehensive doctrine would be unjustified at school (and such banning is not supported by the politically liberal view).

On the positive side, applying Rawls’ view means that, as in the case of the family, the state is justified in actively shaping the school’s institutional structure, form and functions, to better meet the requirements of social justice, equality and the respect for basic rights and liberties that form the moral basis for all institutions. I interpret this to mean that, as with the family, any existing inequalities in the society ought not to ‘spill over’ to the school practices, or vice versa. This means first and foremost that the public governance responsible for the formal education of minors, or the state, ought to ensure equal access to high-quality basic education for all children, irrespective of the socio-economic standing of their families. Put into practice, these ideas would surely lead to quite radical re-structuring of current schools and national schooling systems, but more modestly, at the minimum it would warrant a strict anti-discrimination policy that applies to both staff and students. In a similar vein, Okin (1989) and Okin and Reich (1999) propose a conscious hiring policy that enhances both gender equality and social diversity throughout the school institution. These two main suggestions – the exemption of comprehensive doctrines from schooling and the reshaping of the institution to better meet the requirements of social justice – nevertheless do not violate PNI and are thus justified from the perspective of political liberalism.

My second objection for extending PNI to schools is that the school as an institution is seen as serving different, essentially more public functions than the institution of the family. Even though both institutions are deeply involved in children’s education, their aims and tasks are different. The family’s task is to create and maintain lasting relationship goods for family members – and respecting PNI can very well be justified by appealing to this task (Brighouse and Swift, 2014). Although the school does provide important social relationships for children with peers and adults, these relationships are not normally thought to be as significant as the child’s primary relations within the family. I hold it as being uncontroversial that the school institution would never be able to be a substitute for the role of the family: Both children and parents would be wronged if the school took up the tasks of the family, let alone severed familial ties. Given especially the school institution’s sinister colonial history and its involvement in the genocide of many Indigenous peoples and groups (Adams, 1995; Hanson et al., 2020), this is a critical point to stress. However, it is similarly unlikely that the parents would be equipped (sufficiently motivated, talented or knowledgeable) to provide for their children’s knowledge and skills which are normally provided by formal education. The school institution was established exactly because home-schooling did no longer suffice. The school developed along with the modern, industrialising society. Although there are several competing explanations as to why the school institution came about, to provide an educated workforce for growing economies, maintaining social and political control, or to raise the level of general edification and living standards of the masses, they all point to some collective, public demands over the private (Canestrari and Foster, 2019; Tyack, 1976). The school’s main task is to equip children with formal education, that is, with the knowledge, skills and dispositions that are needed for meaningful participation in modern society. Even if parents mastered these skills themselves, an educational system based on home-schooling or private tutoring would lose some of the crucial benefits of collectively or institutionally arranged formal education. The most importantly, institutionalised schooling includes the idea of providing quality education for all children that is not affected by parents’ own level of education, talent or other educational resource in their possession. Even if it is true that the existing schools need to be improved from the viewpoint of equality, compared to home or privatised schooling, they have the potential to level-out educational differences brought by students’ socio-economic background and thus equalise opportunities for personal flourishing – a feature that can be argued as being at the core of the institution’s legitimacy (Kannisto, 2022; Leiviskä and Martin, 2022). Therefore, as schools in this sense are more ‘public’ social institutions than families, even a stronger means to realise the basic principles of justice in schools should be warranted than in relation to the family.

Furthermore, a schooling system that is not segregated by socio-economic, racial or cultural factors creates ‘a great sphere’ (Ackerman, 1982, quoted in Callan, 1997a): it provides children with the opportunity to interact, cooperate and acquaint themselves with peers and adults from diverse backgrounds. At the best, this socio-cultural diversity can help to develop the virtue of tolerance, intercultural skills and the abilities for constructive cooperation that are central dispositions and skills in any society. However, this requires that social diversity at schools is to be managed in a manner that does not allow for the more powerful groups to dominate (for critical views, see hooks, 1994; Merry, 2013). ¹¹ Still, it is in both children’s and society’s interests that the school institution exists, providing that it fulfils its normative and practical purposes adequately at least. The school belongs to the basic structure of society as does the family, but as an institution the school is more public than the family in the sense that it provides children with one of their first steps towards the wider society and independent living. Therefore, PNI does not apply to the school. Even in relation to the family, PNI has limited scope – thus, at school the relevance of the principle can be minimal at the most.

In my view, there are two main consequences to this kind of exclusion of PNI from the school institution. First, it narrows down the scope of arguments parents can legitimately refer to if they seek to influence or change school practices or the curriculum: They ought not refer directly to PNI. Parents could present many other arguments if they wished to influence school practices or educational content, based on pragmatic, ethical or social reasons, but not to the requirement of protecting the private family sphere as such. The second consequence of limiting the force of PNI in school settings, schools are justified in introducing practices and educational content that is in line with the principles of political justice but not agreed to by all parents based on their comprehensive moral views.

Before considering the third objection against extending PNI to the school institution, it is useful to keep in mind that Rawls explicitly suggested teaching of the central civic knowledge and virtues associated with the political conception of justice at school. Also, when arguing for the family institution’s placement within the basic structure, Rawls (1999) appeals to its tasks in ‘the orderly production and reproduction of society and its culture’ which include nurturing the sense of justice and the adoption of political virtues (p. 595). However, there still is no clarity about the justified degree of ‘substantiality’ of teachable values, virtues and dispositions, and the tangible pedagogical methods and content to deliver them through formal education. This leads me to my third objection to extending PNI to schools: namely, combatting structural injustice requires stronger political measures by the state than are allowed by PNI. Okin criticises Rawls for not being explicit about the measures that are needed for combatting existing structural injustices, that is, those institutional and social practices that effectively disadvantage girls and women within both the private and public spheres. She argues that as gender-based disadvantaging is systematic and runs through all social practices and institutions, it cannot be tackled by legal or formal changes alone but require active countermeasures in which education plays a key role.

Analogously to the abolition of slavery, the negative societal and psychological effects of gender discrimination do not vanish overnight, but their remedy calls for changes that permeate all levels of society (Okin, 1994, 2005; see also Young, 2011: 52, 96). As educational measures, Okin (1989: 177) proposes curricular changes such as the same education for all (in her words ‘both’) genders, discouraging gender-based stereotyping, including of women’s texts and histories to the curriculum, as well as educating children about the current gender-based inequalities and their positive remedies. Okin’s argument concerns gender equality and justice, but her arguments can also be generalised to other forms of prejudice and structural injustice, such as racism, homophobia and transphobia, ¹² and ableism. In a more applied article with Rob Reich, she suggests that as families do not always succeed well in children’s moral education, as a compensatory measure schools should aim to foster the virtues of empathy, responsiveness and the ability to nurture others (Okin and Reich, 1999). ¹³ Without education, justice as fairness might never be realised even when the basic structure is just, because injustices prevail in the more informal practices and structures of society. Education provides a central means for reducing harmful prejudices and shaping the more informal social roles and dispositions that systematically place some individuals and groups into a more vulnerable position than others. A society’s commitment to the equal value of all individuals, the respect for basic rights and the reducing of social injustices justify the teaching of values and substantial content that are in line with these moral principles of justice. ¹⁴

A connected viewpoint is that children’s education demands a stance on the good and the valuable for practical reasons, as it would be impossible to limit the educational content if all topics are considered to be equally educationally desirable. However, more fundamentally, education might demand a stance on what is morally desirable because as a practice its aim is to change individuals for the better rather than the worse. Educational activities are never value-free, neutral or purely anti-perfectionist (Winch, 2006). Thus, as normative activity, education seems to involve teaching some substantial values, virtues and robust dispositions by default. According to this perspective, the right question is not would teaching of some values be justified, but rather how the teachable values would be justified: among liberal philosophers of education, values such as autonomy at least in its minimal form (Levinson, 1999; Reich, 2002; Winch, 2006), well-being or flourishing (Noddings, 2003; White, 2005), critical thinking and rationality (Hand, 2020; Peters, 1966; Scheffler, 1973; Siegel, 1988), along with sociability and democratic or civic virtues (Dewey, 1916; Gutmann, 1999). These are the most favoured answers for the leading normative aim of schooling. In a society that is committed to the principles of political liberalism, and when the school is a part of the basic structure, the normatively robust or substantial aims of children’s formal education must be in line with political liberalism.

The teachers are justified in teaching more substantial values, dispositions and knowledge given that this educational content coincides with and advances the acceptance of the principles of justice as fairness or political liberalism. ¹⁵ It would also be both self-contradictory and unreasonable for the parents to demand the contrary because the societal toleration of the parents’ own moral beliefs and comprehensive doctrines depends on the wide acceptance of these principles. The substantial aims and normative educational content at school would primarily include dispositions of mutual respect and equality and should be implemented throughout school education, by educating students about the histories of minorities, for anti-racism and honing for intercultural and interpersonal skills. The justification of teaching these values is based on justice as fairness and not any comprehensive doctrine, although some doctrines might normatively overlap with political liberalism. Therefore, as the applicability of PNI is limited at school, no principled, normative complications arise from including some substantial dispositions, virtues and values into children’s formal education when this value-based content is in line with political justice. In practice, children’s school education can raise passions of various kinds, but this is not to say that compromises could or should never be made, just that there are no normative reasons to compromise children’s education on the basis on PNI.

Conclusion: Limits to the non-intrusion principle at schools

I have argued that the placement of school institution between the public and private spheres of society leads to some profound normative complications that concern the justified content of children’s formal education. Of these conflicts, the acutest concern is the teaching of the more substantial or comprehensive values, virtues and dispositions than the purely political ones at schools, because there is no consensus on the more substantial values among the citizens of politically liberal societies. John Rawls’ solution to this moral rift is to distribute the authority for children’s moral education to two discrete parties: to the school on one hand and to the family and other private associations on the other. According to Rawls, the school is justified in delivering knowledge about citizens’ basic rights and formal equality and to educate for public virtues, whereas the family and other private associations are allowed for providing children with the more substantial values or comprehensive doctrines. According to him, any other kind of arrangement would exceed the justified institutional tasks of schooling. He seems to think that teaching of comprehensive values to children that not all parents agree with would wrongly intrude their sphere of privacy – that is protected by a moral principle that I have named ‘the principle of non-intrusion into the private’ (PNI). PNI is as a moral principle valued by a wide variety of liberal and feminist thinkers.

However, in this article, I have argued against such an extensive interpretation of PNI based on Rawls’ reformulation of the family institution. I have claimed that PNI has been exaggerated in relation with children’s formal education among many philosophers of education following Rawls. There is no reason to normatively extend this principle to schools. This is because, first, Rawls’ theorization of the family institution is at odds with his suggestion of the justified state regulation of the school. Applied to the school, the very same principles warrant much wider normative regulation of schooling practices than suggested in his example on schooling. Second, I argued that as schools are more ‘public’ social institutions, they can justifiably be regulated even more extensively by the principles of political justice than families. The two educational institutions, the family and the school, serve different kinds of purposes or aims. Children’s formal education ought not aim to sever familial social ties, but similarly, PNI ought not to be illegitimately used to hamper the school’s main educational tasks, of which the most important is to enable pupils’ meaningful participation in the society. Third, in the presence of deep inequalities that permeate all societal spheres, a mere legal and formal equality does not suffice in safeguarding social justice. Therefore, institutions of formal education ought to aim to reduce the persistent prejudices and such stereotypical social roles that systematically place some individuals and groups in a more vulnerable economic, social and political position than others. In a society that commits to the equal moral worth of all individuals and respects their basic rights equally it is also justified to teach even some more substantial or comprehensive values at schools, given that these values and educational content support and are compatible with the political principles of justice.