Best interests and all that

Forget that Rick Santorum is a dingbat.  Look, instead, at what he considers dangerous in the recently defeated (by the US Senate) UN disabilities treaty, Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD): "Another example of this U.N. overreach is the treaty’s “best interests of the child” standard, which states in full: “In all actions concerning children with disabilities, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.” This provision is lifted from the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was also not ratified by the United States Senate. This would put the state, under the direction of the U.N., in the position of determining what is in the best interest of a disabled child, replacing the parents who have that power under current U.S. law."

I put that one section in bold to make reference to education.  Is not this exactly what we hear from politicking candidates and school leaders, intent on pushing through one version of school reform or policy over another?  The 'best interests of the child' standard frames the dialogue in favor of whoever makes that claim.  It is a challenge to the other side to demonstrate why your point of view is valid without having to provide the same kind of validity for those making the claim.  They position challengers to established policies or reform agenda as acting not in the child's best interest, simply because the challengers challenge the favored policy.  It act as a trump card, silencing not just dissent but productive, democratic dialogue.

Yet here, the Senate is specifically rejecting a treaty (based on US policy, our ADA and IDEA laws) because of this claim.  Because  the treaty establishes policy in the best interests of the child, the Senate (and its share of fellow traveler dingbats) worries that parents will lose control over their children.  Bureaucracy replaces parental discretion (in parentis loco, without the parents being loco). Therefore, the treaty dies.

OK.  So why, then, do policies in education get normed as being for the best interests of the child?  Why does that claim so effectively marginalize opposition, defame its challengers and norm the status quo or the interests of the reformers who wield this claim as a kind of negating QED?

Education is not about the best interests of the child.  It is done in the best interests of society.  Of course, no conservative would accept such a socialized, communitarian approach to education.  Focusing on the empowerment and personal gain of individual capacity fits more securely into the right-ish version of governmental intervention into our lives.  Schools must be for the benefit of the individual, because 'society,' as Margaret Thatcher liked to say, does not exist.

Now, though, the Senate has placed itself into contradiction:

• Policy must be for the best interest of the child (education) because society is a phantom; maximizing liberty and personal responsibility are on the conservative agenda.
• Policy must not be in the best interests of the child (human rights) because doing so would erect a totalizing bureaucracy that would triumph parental rights.

The issue here is less actual policy and more the process by which policy get enacted.  Ideology blinds to contingency.  Rhetoric works, only to the point where it gets challenged.  Meaning has its context; when it comes to determining what is to be done, be circumspect to the assumptions of each side.  When it comes to education, remember in whose interests the best interests of the child serve.