Children are forced to go to school, they have no choice. (Although there is actually no legal compulsion.) Therefore it is quite reasonable that detention should be seen as a breach of human rights.

If you were forced to attend an institution would you see being kept there against your will for even longer as a breach of your human rights. Of course you would.

Why do we find it totally acceptable to hold children against their wishes but totally immoral to do the same to an adult?

In this circumstance the problem is caused by the compulsion in education (schooling) remove this compulsion and you remove the problem.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes compulsory education a human right though. If a school day of some length is required by human rights, why do human rights forbid extension of the day by an hour?

In any case, the liberty of a child is not the same as the liberty of an adult. Children are always in someone’s custody. Should we treat that situation as a human rights outrage, because we would think it an outrage if the state appointed someone our custodian?

I think you will find the declaration says that children have the right to an education, not a compulsory one. Education does not mean schooling. Schooling is just the way the state likes us to do it.

If school was voluntary (It actually is but the state doesn’t advertise this.) then this girl could decide whether she wanted to go or gain her education by other means.

If she decided she wanted to go she could then be expected to behave in such a manner as to not warrant getting detentions. Looking at it from the school’s perspective, if education was voluntary and she misbehaved then they could easily use the sanction of refusing her access. As things stand at the moment (In the UK at least.)schools are under immense pressure not to exclude pupils and that is why forms of punishment such as detention are over used.

Children do not need to go to school to gain an education, indeed school can sometimes positively prevent an education. As I have stated already, take away the compulsion and you take away problem.

“Why do we find it totally acceptable to hold children against their wishes but totally immoral to do the same to an adult?” — Mike Peach

Because the child is not yet a fully developed agent, completely autonomous and able to rule himself. It’s the same reason we tolerate the spanking of an unruly child, but frown upon physical violence aimed at adults.

In most places, prior to our current regime of Rule By Leviathan, parents granted their local schools the authority to exact these mild punishments upon their children. This was an act of *the parents*, not of the courts, and it was so because way back when we actually used to think (can you believe it?) that people were pretty good judges of what was good for them and theirs.

The “experts” should be forced to endure teaching a junior high school class for a few weeks. You realise very quickly that the main issue is not upholding the “rights” of students, but preserving the thin line of civilization by an assertion of adult authority. Young people can change very quickly from polite and cooperative, to foul-mouthed, foul-minded, violent and bullying.

Continued from previous post:

I hasten to add that the judgments of parents *today* may well be different than the judgments of parents past, given that the schools themselves are decidedly different in character than they once were. My point is simply that there is nothing unjust in itself about after-school detention as punishment for minor breaches of the rules. Local parents can and should decide for themselves whether they want it or not.

It is, indeed, the wresting away of local control itself that has made schools into the kinds of places many parents don’t want their children to attend, much less be detained in.

Article 26(1) of the UDHR: “Elementary education shall be compulsory.”

If you have a school at all you have to have some system of discipline. I don’t see why after-school detention is particularly oppressive as a means of discipline, or why it raises any human rights issues additional to those raised by the nature of the school and the child’s obligation to attend.