Students,parents, educators: An approach to conflict of rights

Summary The two main approaches available for conflict resolution — in education as elsewhere — suffer from serious defects. The fundamental rights approach, popular with groups advocating certain real or fancied rights, presupposes that each individual or class of individuals has basic, over-riding entitlements. In the absence of an arbitrary or compelling consideration, however, this approach is torn and immobilized by inflexible, absolutistic claims. Our analysis in this paper shows no justification in the rhetoric of children/student rights' advocates, parent power movements, or beleaguered educators that their respective rights should be regarded as pre-eminent in educational conflicts. The second approach, intended to balance competing interests, either capriciously gives undue weight to one competing claim or leads to uncritical decisions based on unarticulated value presuppositions. Hopefully, a third approach could remedy these difficulties. The reconstructed Millian-Utilitarian approach suggested in this paper combines the use of balancing and of substantive principles based on defensible utilitarian values and pre-suppositions. In making this suggestion, the paper hopes to highlight the necessity for justices and decision-makers to deliberate more consciously, adequately, and rigorously on the values that undergird educational and social policies.