I most certainly did not say that Bookshare, the government or any other organization or people should decide what anyone's children should read. That would be even worse. Unfortunately Bookshare does now decide what the children will not read. That is, unless the parents take action to remove the restrictions. It would be progress if the default would be to have the restrictions removed and to be added if parents object, but that is still not ideal. Now, where do parental rights end? In ancient Rome a father had the right to kill his children if he so desired and it did not matter what the reason was. He also had the right to kill his wife. Once his daughters were married off that right went to her new husband, but if the father of that husband decided for some reason to kill his son then the right to kill the wife would revert to her father. I don't think the exercise of that right was extremely common, but it was advisable to keep on your father's good side. I hope you will agree that it is progress that such rights are no longer legal anywhere in the world. Similar things are still practiced though. Have you read about these so-called honor killings in Pakistan and nearby areas? It seems that if a woman exercises her sexual autonomy it is not uncommon for the males of her family to kill her to defend the honor of the family. She does not even have to exercise her sexual autonomy. It can happen just because she is seen talking to a man who is not in her immediate family. The killers may be her father or her brothers. This is not actually legal, but all too frequently it is not prosecuted and if it is prosecuted the perpetrators insist that they were doing the right and proper thing and should be exonerated on the basis that they were upholding proper ethics. I certainly hope that you agree that fathers who do such things should be stopped and that the practice be abolished somehow. If you do agree then you agree that there are limits on parental rights. In North American law and culture there are other limits on parental rights too. You do not have the right to force sex on a child, for example, and the defense that it is your child and so you have the right to do anything with that child that you want to will not get you far in a court of law. Now, restricting the reading material of a child is a far lesser crime than any of the examples that I have just mentioned and it is not proscribed by law, but I have a problem seeing how that is very ethical either. Whether any parent wants to admit it or not a child is an autonomous human being and by being an autonomous human being a child has her or his own interests and those interests do not necessarily coincide with the interests of the parents. Parents who do not realize this do things like this. A doctor , for example, may want his son to follow in his footsteps and become a doctor too. The son is more interested in astronomy. The son may be interested enough that if he is permitted to follow that interest then he might become a really great astronomer, but if his father forces him to become a doctor then he will be only a mediocre doctor or even a poor one. I have just pulled that example out of the air, but very similar scenarios have played out over the centuries in the real world. In a case like that has a crime been perpetrated on the son? I think it is worth considering because it is something that effects the person's whole life and can determine whether the person lives a happy life or a less than happy life. Anyone has a much better chance of living a happy life if they can pursue things that they are really interested in rather than the things that other people demand that they be interested in and I have a hard time seeing that it is a parent's right to impose things on a child that do not interest the child and, similarly, I have a hard time seeing that a parent has the right to ban a child from pursuing the interests that the child wants to pursue. How can a child determine what interests to pursue? Obviously by having the freedom to investigate everything and anything that there is to investigate. A parent may be disappointed in the child's choices, but that is just too bad for the parent. There may be such a thing as parental rights, but it seems clear to me that parental responsibilities outweigh the rights. After all, you are dealing with a human being. You are not dealing with a piece of property. There has been some effort to narrowly define censorship here as meaning that certain material is banned from being published at all. However, if you allow something to be published and then prevent certain people from accessing it you are censoring it for the people who have been banned from accessing it and that is still censorship. Again, reading does no one any harm. As you point out, parents are responsible for the behavior of their minor children. If those minor children are out blowing up the local school then it is a very good idea to interfere with such behavior and to prevent it. If a minor is just reading, though, then what is the point of interfering? It is the interference with the child's free intellectual development. Then even if a parent does interfere with a child's reading why pick on the most harmless reading of all? I am sorry, but no parent is going to prevent his or her offspring from finding out about sex. At least it is not going to be prevented without some drastic action that strays into some serious types of child abuse like locking the child up in a closet for life. Once that child goes to school, once that child starts making friends, even once that child even starts walking down a street where passing conversations can be overheard then that child will start learning about sex. It is utterly ludicrous to think that it can be stopped and then there is the question of why should it be stopped anyway. There are a lot of human activities that involve interaction between various human beings. To grab another example out of the air, people gather together to watch sports events and they then discuss the sports events with one another. Personally, I find such events and the discussions that they engender boring, but no one has ever tried to prevent me from finding out about them. I see no effort to prevent anyone else from finding out about them either. Why not? I ask that rhetorically knowing full well that there is no good answer for why not. However, there is another human activity that people actively try to prevent certain other people from finding out about and that activity is sex. It could be argued that sex leads to trouble and I certainly know that it does from personal experience, but no matter how much trouble it leads to there is an innate urge in all of us to participate in it anyway and that urge itself makes efforts to suppress it futile. Participation in sports events lacks that innate urge except insofar as it is an innate urge to gather with other people to socially interact, but it does have a tendency to lead to trouble too. Every time I hear about a riot that breaks out over a sports event I am reminded of that. I have already said that I find sports events boring, but that is just how I feel about it. I would not make any effort to prevent anyone else from attending a sports event. If there was a really good probability of one of those sports riots breaking out I might advise someone from attending, but other than that it is their business. If the probability of a riot breaking out approached near certainty and I was in charge of a child who was planning to attend and ran the definite risk of bodily injury by doing so then that is another case of parental responsibility kicking in. I am saying that a parent has the responsibility to control a minor's behavior when there is a clear and present danger in that behavior. A parent does not have the right to restrict a child's behavior or choice of reading material just to be exercising power over the child. Parenting is a position of responsibility, not a position of tyranny for the sake of tyranny.
On 11/12/2012 2:35 AM, Cindy Rosenthal wrote:
I lost the "reply" I was writing so I'll start anew.Sorry, Roger, as a parent I must disagree with you. I think parents should have the right to decide what their children read or see, and not an organization like Bookshare or the government, or any one or anything else. We know the maturity level of our children, irrespective of their chronological ages and what may or not disturb them; I think it's appropriate that bookshare require parental o.k. for their minor children to read A.C. labeled books rather than that it make them available to them and require parents to request removal of the blockage; as you point out, otherwise parents may not know what their children are reading and the effect the books are having upon them; parents are responsible for the behaviour of their minor children a.
