Freedom = Liberty + Reason

In my last post, I mentioned the education of children. I quoted Scott Yenor saying that "Human beings do not initially posses the rationality of freedom to make themselves consistent with reason" (29). From here, Yenor talks about the education of children for the purpose of teaching them the rationality and reasoning skills that they will need to become free individuals. Part of this is so that the children may develop into successful members of the political society in which they live. The Family is where these children learn this. Yenor writes "The educative goals of the family precede the goals of the political society, for the family cultivates the rationality , civility, character, and perhaps, technical skills that allow children to become members of a civil government" (29). This character cultivated by the family is important to society because once the children have grown, government won't (or shouldn't need to be) there to hold their hand. As I mentioned in the other post, Yenor writes that "political society aims to secure men in the possessions and use of property" (29); not to provide for men, but to secure them in their possessions that they already have. It is the family that "seek[s] to teach children how to acquire and manage property" (29). In order for these children to be able to one day manage their own property they will need reason. Reason cultivate by the family, in combination with the liberty protected by the government, is what makes a man truly free. And it is reason that will moderate the otherwise unrestrained liberty. A person with unrestrained liberty is not truly free until they have reason to allow them to choose for themselves within that liberty.

Yenor uses the following quote from Locke to illustrate this point:

To turn [a child] loose to an unrestrained liberty, before he has reason to guide him, is not the allowing him the privilege of his nature to be free; but to thrust him out amongst brutes, and abandon him to a state as wretched, and as much beneath that of a man, as their's. This is that which puts the authority into the parents hands to govern the minority of their children.