Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Southern California Review of Law and Social Justice
Publication Date
2024
Abstract
Over the past two years, U.S. states have passed educational gag orders (“EGOs”) that prohibit teaching about antiracism and LGBTQ+ identities. EGOs are destructive in at least two ways. First, they violate children’s right to access information that is potentially critical for their individual well-being. Second, they interfere with cultivating mutual respect in a pluralistic society, which serves children’s present and future wellbeing interests. In this article, I aim to demonstrate the harms that EGOs inflict, and how revising the legal framework governing children’s rights in the United States can increase both children’s and adults’ well-being. That revision entails the adoption of my proposed Child’s Interests Principle (“CIP”), which I describe and apply to emerging debates regarding youth education and social oppression. The CIP illuminates these issues and how intricately they are connected to another difficult problem: how society can remediate speech harms equitably. I will elucidate this connection and clarify why plausible consequences of the CIP are a decline in harmful speech and an opportunity to ameliorate social oppression without resorting to coercive measures. Borrowing insights from critical theory, I explain why the law is often an ineffective tool for dismantling social hierarchies and why early, thorough, and accurate education may be the best hope for transforming our society into a reasonably just one.
Recommended Citation
Melina Constantine Bell, Children's Right to Access Potentially Critical Learning: Liberating Youth from Propagation of Structural Injustice, 33 S. Cal. Rev. L. & Soc. Just. 29 (2024).