Raising a child

Machines already teach, and in some settings they teach better than a tired adult with thirty pupils: adaptive tutoring, endless patience, correction that arrives at once. Raising a child is not instruction. It is the standing authority to decide on behalf of someone who cannot yet decide, exercised by whoever will answer for how it turned out. The Convention on the Rights of the Child places that authority with parents and guardians and requires states to support it rather than replace it, precisely because a child's interest needs a party who is bound to it. Nothing is at stake for a tutor. A parent is the one whose own life is rearranged by the choice, who can be wrong for years before finding out, and who is the person a grown child eventually argues with.