Webster defines the adjectives “free” and “responsible” as follows:
Free: Acting of one’s own will or choice and not under compulsion or restraint; determining one’s own action or choice.
Responsible: Having a capacity for moral decisions and therefore accountable.
These two words, together, declare the status of every rational human who has passed the point of infancy into that hazy stage at which one becomes conscious of a difference between good and evil and of a personal call to decide.
The child thereby becomes “accountable,” though for what, to whom, and just how may remain enduring questions. Webster doesn’t elaborate; his profession was radically different from that of those savants of ancient times who had been variously defining good and evil long before the advent of dictionaries, perhaps soon after the Garden.
Adam had made a certain free and rational choice and enjoyed its immediate object; only then did he experience his accountability. Had he instead opted for obedience, the “accounting” part of the story would, I trust, have been different for him, if not for Eve – and perhaps for us.
Even before his or her own accountability begins to whisper, the infant experiences its reality as a feature of those adults who are “duty-bound to keep me free and happy; they owe me.” But soon comes awareness of his or her own duty of reciprocity that will keep ever broadening to maturity and then beyond. Over time, the child, then the adult, constantly accrues new roles of duty to his/her fellow humans, God (and animals?).
Early on, the child grasps that responsibility to another human can come without anyone’s having chosen so. A new sibling arrives to complicate things at home. Conversely, taking a Scout oath is (presumably) the child’s free choice. In either story, the child’s obligation is real, and his/her awareness of that reality clarifies and intensifies over time.
The course of one’s understanding of duty and free choice is constantly enriched by observation and experience of those adults – typically parents – who know and care, and to whom the child reciprocates (or does not). “They teach me; they are human individuals specifically responsible for my well-being. When it comes to my time for school, they will know what’s best for me.”
To this point, the story is a positive one of personal responsibility and love like none other in the experience of parent and child. But … not every child is lucky. Parents are imperfect; some will decide less prudently simply for lack of information or experience.
It is the duty of society to assist the natural love and unique experience of any less-ready parent to express itself in making a responsible decision for little George. The uncertain parent should have available such basic information of a school market as may be relevant to prudent decision.
The “market,” of course, should include those state schools, at last, truly “public,” plus private schools which agree to abide by a few necessary rules providing both the family and the unique mission of each school.
Such a system of prudent accountability for the benefit of parents already exists – that is, for the family of means. Well-off parents choose their residence in that specific neighborhood which they can afford, and which has a “public” school which they deem acceptable for young Bob. The likeness to the private market is inescapable: In this case, the buyer secures the best product he/she can afford – by choosing the location of the family residence.
But if these parents can’t afford to live anywhere besides the cheapest inner-city attendance zone, their freedom, authority, and responsibility for the child 180 days a year – their dignity as citizen – ceases. It is transferred to whom? To nobody.
There is no person in the state school system who ever heard of either Bob or you, his mother. Your poverty has prepared a cell for the child. It is called P.S. 62. Such seizure of authority from the lower-income parent may or may not succeed in teaching bob his 3 R’s; it cannot help but teach both child and parent that they are anything but “free and responsible.”
We have imposed this semi-detention system upon the un-monied family for nearly two centuries. Is it any wonder the inner-city parent and child have become a media symbol of our disorder and national distress? The child does his 12 years in a cloister run by strangers who, every so often, order his parents to come hear the news and get their orders for Bob’s improvement.
Young Bob listens. And he watches as, for that dozen years, the parents, liberated of responsibility and stripped of their dignity, too often take the message as an invitation to become that idle human that our state governments and the media, since the 1840s, have chosen to portray them.
Deliverance from this grossly impersonal (and inefficient) system by subsidies to parents (instead of government school) may at first seem “the same difference.” After all, the parent’s role is every bit as undemocratic. The decisive difference is that it is also uniquely and intensely personal; the comfortable family experiences it so, as well I recall.
Given choice for the bottom half, some of these newly liberated and empowered, responsible parents will, for a few years, need information and advice. Most will get it privately, many from friends and churches; but the state would have its resources available to help in the parent’s process of sophistication.
At all events, this will no longer be 1840 with the poor caste as a civic menace. If threat there be, it lies in today’s class division of the American mind.
Finally, the child’s own role grows with age. Well-off and caring parents have always increasingly valued their teenager’s waxing insight and readiness for responsibility. I cannot imagine that this same experience of reality and hope could be anything but good for child or parent, regardless of wealth.
