Schools Are Not Parents

Children in Virginia Beach are suspended from school for playing with an airsoft gun at home.

The disquieting news that a pair of seventh-grade children, Khalid Caraballo and Aidan Clark, were suspended from school in Virginia Beach for the high crime of playing with an airsoft gun on their parents’ private property has been misinterpreted in almost all quarters as just another in the long line of the fringe skirmishes that make up America’s ongoing struggle over firearms. Yet insofar as guns are the issue at all in this case, they are but a secondary consideration; the detail, perhaps, but not the story.

In truth, the implications here are much wider and much more troubling, touching as they do on foundational questions about property rights, the remit of the public school system, and the nature of American civil society. Contrary to the now infamous beliefs of the likes of Hillary Clinton and Melissa Harris-Perry, children in America do not “belong” to the community — and nor would Americans be any better off if they did. In free societies, schools are not designed to serve as a mandatory means by which the Bismarckian state may seek to shape the young, but instead to act merely as a service to which parents can choose to send their kids for basic education if they so wish. This is to say that schools may well act in loco parentis, but they may not act as ipsi parentes.

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