Originally posted by Astyanax
It seems to me that your stance in this matter is somewhat too closely defined by the parameters that obtain in the United States of America. I am making a point of much wider application.

Liberalism is founded upon the axiom that people have the right to do and say as they like provided they cause no injury to others in the process.

In the case at hand the teacher was in clear violation of that principle. The pupil was not. All he did was make a picture; an extreme liberal, one who held that children must have the same rights as adults, would call what happened in that classroom an act of censorship.

I am not such a liberal. I recognize that children are little savages, and until the process of maturity and acculturation is complete (whatever that means; it does sound a bit sinister) both their rights and their duties must necessarily be circumscribed.

That is precisely why the teacher must carry the blame for what happened in that classroom.

He shares it, however, with a society that has made Holy Writ out of a human artifact (the US Constitution),

thereby opening the way for a comprehensive usurpation of judgement and good sense by an inequitable, impenetrable labyrinth of laws and rules; and having quite lost itself as a result, raised up an over-mighty Priesthood of the Labyrinth, otherwise known as the legal profession, to 'guide' its citizens through the maze, thoroughly enslaving itself in the process.

For those of us who have learnt to look upon the United States as a grand experiment in liberal, democratic government by a free people, it is all very distressing to watch.

Astyanax: Teenage boys should be raised by men, not by bureaucrats and ambulance-chasers.

Read the sentence again: teenage boys, etc. Not infants.

By the time a boy attains puberty, his mother's contribution to the formation of his character and knowledge is essentially complete. What remains is to make him a man, and this can only properly be done by other men, even in the most modern, liberal society. It is thus that men learn manhood, not only in the schoolroom but also on the playing-field, in one another's company, in rebellion against authority and in the rather critical matter of self-defence. This viewpoint may be called old-fashioned, if you like, but it is by no means illiberal.

Originally posted by Astyanax
True liberals are the intellectual children of John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. We view the ideas and programme of socialism with the utmost repugnance.

Originally posted by The Nighthawk
For all Locke's good points, he also was big in the slave trade and helped draft the Carolinas' Constitution granting a master absolute power over his slaves, which to me seems in direct opposition to his treatise on the "self" and your "classical liberal" viewpoints.

You can argue all you want about the philosophies of conscience and self-determination, but in the real world of a busy high school those philosophies are little more than theories to be discussed in an appropriate class.

Originally posted by Astyanax
Had he lived in the nineteenth or twentieth century this would have been a valid comment, but since we are talking about a man who died in 1704, it's simply anachronistic. You cannot condemn a man for being of his time. Thomas Jefferson (a liberal for whom you might have more sympathy) was a slave-owner and fathered a child on one -- an act that cannot be interpreted, whatever the circumtances, as anything but rape. How many Europeans opposed slavery in the seventeenth century?

Who's the pragmatist now? My good friend, if principles are to be abandoned at the very moment when they are most apposite, what is the point of having principles at all?