Children, Self‐knowledge and Cultural Reproduction

Abstract

This article evaluates two most popular normative theories about the reproduction of cultural values through children from the perspective of self‐knowledge: Brighouse and Swift's parent‐child relationship argument and Clayton's public reason argument. I suggest that while plausible on some grounds, these arguments struggle to accommodate the normative importance of the child's substantive self‐knowledge. I propose that we understand cultural reproduction as a learning process and require that children, in addition to cultural content their parents transfer to them, must also acquire knowledge of their own unique personal identity.