Levinson proposes that citizenship education can provide the "cultural coherence" that may be missing from a "detached" school—which would be a diverse community that prioritizes "critical thinking, tolerance, and reflectiveness". She argues for a constitutional mandate to establish the "autonomy-promoting aim of education" regardless of public support, and asks for a "culture change". Levinson distinguishes between parental and child rights, as laws exist for parents who do not act in their children's best interests. She adds that children are limited by the restricted scope of their parents' knowledge, and that the state should intervene to combat this small-mindedness in the interests of children. Specifically, she cites Christian criticism of curricular neutrality as a tactic to justify the imposition of their own "limited and restrictive" worldview, and that external knowledge increases the odds of their children not adopting their worldview. Her argument is that the limited worldviews resulting from "excessive paternalism" consequently stunt children's ability to develop adult autonomy or make rational decisions. Thus, state and parental paternalism should be limited where it will hurt individual "capacity for autonomy".
