Kelly Swope

G. W. F. Hegel’s Elements of Philosophy of Right analogizes the unfolding of a people’s political self-consciousness to the unfolding of an education. Yet Hegel is somewhat unsystematic in accounting for how the process of political education unfolds in its differentiated moments. This paper pieces together a more systematic account of political education from Hegel’s scattered remarks on the subject in Philosophy of Right. I argue that, once we understand how political education fits into the holistic picture of Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie, we see that it exercises both a fortifying and a threatening influence on the state: fortifying the state insofar as it habituates individuality to universality in the form of ethical dispositions such as patriotism, threatening the state insofar as it represents a destabilizing tendency toward democratic judgment in the emergence of public opinion. I conclude by raising the possibility that political education poses an entropic, “democratic” threat to the modern state.

Treatise 2.3.6, “Of the influence of the imagination on the passions,” provides a magnified view into the relationship between motivation, morality, and politics in Hume’s philosophy. Here, Hume analyzes a “noted passage” from the history of antiquity in which the citizens of fifth-century Athens deliberated over whether to burn the ships of their neighboring Grecians after winning a decisive naval victory against the Persians. Hume finds the passage notable precisely because of a failure of the imagination to exert an influence on the Athenians’ passions during their deliberations, leading them to abstain from further military action. This paper discusses how Hume’s analysis of this event reveals new connections between his passional, moral, and political theories in the Treatise.

There is no fundamental right to education in the United States (Rodriguez, 1973), but there is a movement to force the federal courts to affirm one (Robinson, 2019). Advocates seek to push federal law beyond its equal protection of the child’s access to state-regulated schooling toward a full-fledged right to an educational minimum that facilitates the person’s incorporation into American society. Arguments for the right vary, but their common aim is to construe education as a “rights multiplier,” i.e., a positive fortifier of political rights like self-government and liberty. If one can prove that some educational minimum is a prerequisite without which the very idea of a free and orderly society is moot, then one can demand that the federal government guarantee it. This paper critiques the “rights-multiplier” theory for understating how the basic need that education addresses – the individual’s need for incorporation into democratic society, the need to grow up – is multifaceted and lifelong.

For decades now, the United States has been in an era of regressive structural reform of public education. One consequence of this trend is that the United States is now having to relitigate structural questions about public education that it has not asked in a long time. Is public education a basic institution that ought to have a corresponding fundamental right protected by the Constitution? Is it a mere welfare benefit that can be allowed to ebb and flow with political tides? Is it a common political good or a personal economic good – or both? A century after the various state governments achieved universal compulsory education within their jurisdictions, neoliberal reform has revealed that the United States has yet to offer, yet now must offer, definitive answers to these questions. I argue that this can be done in part by developing some assertions within extant Supreme Court jurisprudence that speak to public education’s meaning for individual persons and for American democracy entire, focusing on the hallmark _Plyler v. Doe_ (1982) decision. _Plyler_ clarifies two fundamental aims – call them _personalist_ aims – that underwrite compulsory education in every state: first, to meet the special need of all child persons to grow up and incorporate themselves into American society; and second, to foster the intergenerational integrity of the democratic Nation. I conclude that _Plyler’s_ personalism strengthens the theory that public education ought to have the status of a fundamental right.