This paper examines the political economy of education choice discourses and seeks to theorize the roots of claims to parental rights in countries generally associated with the Anglosphere and with similar political, legal, and philosophical traditions: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Across these countries, similar discourses of parental rights are grounded in three forces shaping education politics: a strong orientation towards property rights, a socially conservative understanding of the role of the family, and neoliberalism and the privatization of publicly funded systems. Education reform is globalized and entrenched in a network of international organizations such as UNESCO and the OEDC among others (Sahlberg, 2016). As such, trends in education policy discourses move across jurisdictions, particularly those with similar models of education and shared legal, political, and cultural roots. Tracing the roots of these shared discourses represents an opportunity to interrogate the theoretical underpinnings of parental rights claims that supersede the rights of the child.

Parental duty of care for the child in the British common law tradition has roots dating back to the Roman empire’s legal restrictions on the powers of patria potestas (the legal rights of the father as pater familias). This duty of care was grounded in ideas of the child as chattel of the household (McGillivray, 2011), with duties towards children and restrictions on abuse similar to those regarding other living possessions under a heteropatriarchal understanding of the family. This principle enters into British common law tradition via canon law.

In his Two Treatises on Government, seventeenth-century British philosopher John Locke framed the idea of “natural rights.” However, he believed social rights did not exist within persons whose reason was not developed enough to pursue the self-preservation of those rights (Wall, 2008). Parents became the fiduciaries of the rights of the future person, responsible for the care of the child until they could assert their rights as adult rational actors.

This model informed legal decisions regarding children’s capacity for self-determination and the rights of parents through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with recognition of the rights of children coming largely in the area of protection rights, viewing children generally as human rights objects rather than as human rights subjects (Wall, 2008; McGillivray, 2011). As the role of the state grew, protection for children’s wellbeing shifted from patria potestas ­to parens patriae – the fiduciary power of the state over those needing protection (McGillivray, 2011). This shift underpinned changes in custody, child welfare, and other state interventions in the life of the family and brought the child into the public sphere as a semi-citizen afforded the protection of the state but not the liberties of an adult person.

A further shift can be traced in the evolution of international conventions. The 1924 Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child set out a series of duties that humanity owed to children. Under the 1959 United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child, protections expanded and included the principle that decisions regarding children should represent the best interests of the child.

The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child shifted substantially and added participatory rights such as freedom of thought, expression, conscience, and religion distinct from those of their parents. However, the boundaries of parental rights and children’s rights continued to be contested within and beyond the UNCRC. In the neoliberal era in which education is increasingly privatized, the prioritization of property rights merges with continuing beliefs in children as the property of parents, shaping education reform discourses in which parental rights override children’s rights as the primary rights in education.

This historical sociology uses existing historical data to trace the relationship between parental and children’s rights discourses in the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. These data are analyzed to identify shared trends in education reform discourses to develop a political economy of parental rights in education and theorize the political and social roots of shared parental rights discourses.

The ideological roots of parental rights are shared across the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. These discourses emerge from British political, legal, social, philosophical, and religious traditions to shape abiding beliefs about the rights and role of children that are often at odds with contemporary constructions of children’s rights. These conflicting beliefs, in a system of power in which adults hold decision making control over the lives of children, lead to children’s interests and needs being overwritten by the desires of parents and other adults in shaping education law, policy, curricula, and school systems. Within this structure, children are the objects, not the subjects, of education discourses. If a society believes strongly in the idea that parental rights are the primary rights in education, and they believe that individual choice within a market is the best way to organize a society, then they will arrive at the place of ever-increasing educational choice where government’s role is to act as a service provider to individuals, rather than government as something in which we all participate as citizens whose role is to provide for and protect the public good.

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