Split Thread Does compulsory schooling equate to slavery? (Split from: "Liberal Fallacies" thread)

[A'isha]

So, ideas have a "sell by" date after which they go stale?

Often.

You should attend Becker because he gave the matter of human capital formation a lot of systematic consideration.

So did Marx and Engels. If you want me to care about Becker and what he had to say about schools, you're going to have to do a lot better than that.

What's your definition of "school"?

The dictionary one.

The parts of medical training that do not led themselves to independent study and credit-by-exam are precisely those that depend on the personal touch.

I can think of fewer things more terrifying than the prospect of being operated on by a correspondence-course surgeon.

Demonstrate exceptional knowledge of fluid dynamics and you might get hired.

Nope.

 

[Cleon]

I can think of fewer things more terrifying than the prospect of being operated on by a correspondence-course surgeon.

 

[Border Reiver]

False. California and Virginia allow lawyers to practice after passing the bar exam and an apprenticeship.

Given the quality Ms Taitz (who got her bar membership that way) has demonstrated, the California bar may wish to revisit that. In the vast majority of the US and all of Canada OJT for lawyers isn't allowed.

 

[RandFan]

Recap:

• Parents can control the behavior of their children.
• Private school isn't slavery.
• Parents have the option of home schooling or sending children to private school.
• If a child graduates public or private school he or she has the skills and requirements necessary for work.

Therefore slavery.

 

[elbe]

And again, David personalizes the discussion. David fails to understand that Becker (Human Capital) defines "school" as an institution whose principal product is education

What is it with you and your need to redefine commonly understood words just so they agree with your preexisting bias? It makes it very hard to even begin to trust anything you say.

 

[Dancing David]

When the free market stops demanding a high school diploma or GED Malcolm might have a basis for his belief... "might".

Yes but you will notice the double nested assertion of the conclusion that is is not the free enterprise system that wants to have people already trained.

 

[Dancing David]

And again, David personalizes the discussion. David fails to understand that Becker (Human Capital) defines "school" as an institution whose principal product is education. At one time, on-the-job training was routine for nearly all professiona and trades. See Berg, Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery. People went from high school to teaching hospitals for training as nurses until after WW II. Lawyers and surgeons learned through apprenticeship.

And you know what, I am talking about the present. My employer did not want me get my skills after I was hired, they want me to have them now.

Wolfram, ATT, Cisco,..., Google and almost all non-IT businesses do not want to train their employees. Certainly hospitals don't.

So your point was what 'we should ignore the wishes of the moderns businesses because..."

-that is the way they used to do it?

So again, this is what the businesses in the free market are asking for from their prospective employees, they are not asking to train them. So can you tell me which businesses are saying they want to hire their employees and train them? And what percentage they are.

Start over, why should we go against the businesses in the free market want skilled labor?

It is about supply and demand.

 

[Dorian Gray]

1. False. Actors, athletes, and musicians need only demonstrate performance. Lot's of trades are open to entry by exam (US diplomat, welder, actuary, even law in some jurisdictions).
2. False. I tutored a homeschooler who sat in on advanced Math classes after 8th grade, got admitted to the Universiy of Hawaii graduate program (Math) before he turned 17 (no high school diploma, no B.A.), earned his MS (Math) before he turned 19 and got five years of support at one of the top-rated Math programis in the US to work on his PhD.

Is anyone else buying RandFan's nonsense?

In the vast majority of cases, i.e., not your two anecdotal examples, people with an education do much better at life than people without. In fact, people with educations tend to be 'compelled' to support, to some extent, people who do not have educations, via things like taxes, welfare, entitlements, etc., as well as having to take time out of their productive days to explain that New Mexico is part of the United States, Czech Republic and Chechnya are two different countries, creation/intelligent design is not a science, and so forth.

Athletes, actors and musicians have limited shelf lives in most cases. Without an education, these people will have to trust others to manage their lives and business affairs - in other words, "take someone else's word for it." And you know who those others are that athletes, musicians, actors, etc. will be trusting to run their lives?

People with ****** educations.

 

[Cleon]

Another thing to note is that the chances of any athlete, musician, or actor being able to support themselves in their chosen profession is nearly zero. The guys with million-dollar multi-year contracts? Those are the small, small number of people who "made it." Everyone else winds up as waiters and busboys.

Oh, and in the case of actors, many of the successful ones do have college degrees in theater and the arts. Not all of them, but many of them.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

In the vast majority of cases, i.e., not your two anecdotal examples, people with an education do much better at life than people without.

People use the term "education" for so many applications of a person's time that your assertion is either to vague to test or nearly circular.

"Attendance at school" is only as vague as the notion of "school". Becker defines "school" as an institution whose principal product is education. This argument appears to go in circles. Government agencies recognize definable physical facilities as "schools" Many of the facilities that the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's shills call "schools" are not "schools" by Becker's definition (they degrade human capital). That makes the assertion "people with an education do much better at life than people without" false.

Marvin Minsky
Interview
Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 1994-July

(Minsky): "... many of our foremost achievers developed under conditions that are not much like those of present-day mass education. Robert Lawler just showed me a paper by Harold Macurdy on the child pattern of genius. Macurdy reviews the early education of many eminent people from the last couple of centuries and concludes (1) that most of them had an enormous amount of attention paid to them by one or both parents and (2) that generally they were relatively isolated from other children. This is very different from what most people today consider an ideal school. It seems to me that much of what we call education is really socialization. Consider what we do to our kids. Is it really a good idea to send your 6-year-old into a room full of 6-year-olds, and then, the next year, to put your 7-year-old in with 7-year-olds, and so on? A simple recursive argument suggests this exposes them to a real danger of all growing up with the minds of 6-year-olds. And, so far as I can see, that's exactly what happens.
Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do."

Roland Meighan
"Home-based Education Effectiveness Research and Some of its Implications"
Educational Review, Vol. 47, No.3, 1995

The issue of social skills. One edition of Home School Researcher, Volume 8, Number 3, contains two research reports on the issue of social skills. The first finding of the study by Larry Shyers (1992) was that home-schooled students received significantly lower problem behavior scores than schooled children. His next finding was that home-schooled children are socially well adjusted, but schooled children are not so well adjusted. Shyers concludes that we are asking the wrong question when we ask about the social adjustment of home-schooled children. The real question is why is the social; adjustment of schooled children of such poor quality?
The second study, by Thomas Smedley (1992), used different test instruments but comes to the same conclusion, that home-educated children are more mature and better socialized than those attending school.
...
So-called 'school phobia' is actually more likely to be a sign of mental health, whereas school dependancy is a largely unrecognized mental health problem.

Clive Harber
"Schooling as Violence"
Educatioinal Review p. 10, V. 54, #1

"...It is almost certainly more damaging for children to be in school than to out of it. Children whose days are spent herding animals rather than sitting in a classroom at least develop skills of problem solving and independence while the supposedly luckier ones in school are stunted in their mental, physical, and emotional development by being rendered pasive, and by having to spend hours each day in a crowded classroom under the control of an adult who punishes them for any normal level of activity such as moving or speaking."

E.O. Wilson
Naturalist, p. 11-12

Why do I tell you this little boy's story of medusas, rays, and sea monsters, nearly sixty years after the fact? Because it illustrates, I believe, how a naturalist is created. A child comes to the edge of deep water with a mind prepared for wonder.... Hands-on experience at the critical time, not systematic knowledge, is what counts in the making of a naturalist. Better to be an untutored savage for a while, not to know the names or anatomical detail. Better to spend long stretches of time just searching and dreaming.

E.O. Wilson
Naturalist p. 86-87

Adults forget the depths of languor into which the adolescent mind descends with ease. They are prone to undervalue the mental growth that occurs during daydreaming and aimless wandering. When I focused on the ponds and stream lying before me, I abandoned all sense of time.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

... My employer did not want me get my skills after I was hired, they want me to have them now.

Of course. Your employer, a government school district, is in the credential business.

... Wolfram, ATT, Cisco,..., Google and almost all non-IT businesses do not want to train their employees. Certainly hospitals don't.

You don't need school for many IT jobs. Consider Microsoft certification. That gets you in the door, then you move up as you learn on the job. Modeling doesn't require schooling. I know an adult clothes model who started as a child clothes model.

Businesses will take free or subsidized resources. David has a point in that no business can invest in training if they cannot recoup the cost. Unless employees put up a bond or make some other guarantee, the business takes a risk. Hughes paid for a USC PhD in EE for a friend of mine. He could have walked after his degree, I suppose. Maybe there was a "no competition" clause in his employment contract.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

What is it with you and your need to redefine commonly understood words just so they agree with your preexisting bias? It makes it very hard to even begin to trust anything you say.

You object to Becker's definition? What's your definition of "school", then?

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

I can think of fewer things more terrifying than the prospect of being operated on by a correspondence-course surgeon.

Wasn't the alternative under consideration OJT?

 

[Minoosh]

Modeling doesn't require schooling. I know an adult clothes model who started as a child clothes model.

If you're outstandingly gifted, in looks, athletics or other fields, then you have a chance to make a living with your dominant talent - for a while, at least. I'm sure we can all cite anecdotes of people who have succeeded despite a paucity of formal education. For many of us, though, compulsory schooling served a useful function, setting the stage for incremental progress among those of who are not geniuses, phenoms or prodigies.

I happen to agree that public education has some huge problems, but this "cartel" rhetoric does not bear any relation to the real issues, at least, not as I've been able to tell firsthand. Since you rely on theory and anecdotal evidence, don't be surprised if others do, too. And what I've observed does not support your assumption that parents automatically have superior judgment when it comes to what their kids need to know. Does that mean compulsory, universal education - or schooling, if you prefer - is automatically the best path? No, it doesn't. But as such issues are debated, be aware that your theories and your "I know a guy who ..." are legitimate targets for those who come armed with arguments that extend beyond the theoretical and anecdotal.

 

[Dancing David]

Of course. Your employer, a government school district, is in the credential business.

Same for the two hundred or so straight up tech employers in my town.

That does not negate my point, when they hire techs, network and server admins they want them to have their skills in place.

You don't need school for many IT jobs.

And how do most people who work in IT gets those skills? I work with three really bright people, one has mad skills with computers and set up our Chromebook/Google domain, one is our network admin and another out server admin.
Two went to the same junior college I am going too, one went to a different college. All three went to school to acquire their skills.

a Consider Microsoft certification. That gets you in the door, then you move up as you learn on the job.

Uh huh, and how did they get through that door?

Modeling doesn't require schooling. I know an adult clothes model who started as a child clothes model.

Great and how many employers have that as their standard, what is the percentage ?

Businesses will take free or subsidized resources. David has a point in that no business can invest in training if they cannot recoup the cost. Unless employees put up a bond or make some other guarantee, the business takes a risk. Hughes paid for a USC PhD in EE for a friend of mine. He could have walked after his degree, I suppose. Maybe there was a "no competition" clause in his employment contract.

You did not address the point, what evidence is there that employers do not want their employees to have their skills in place? Admit it and move on, employers do not want to train their work force if they can get them pretarined. Just because they used to do X does not mean that they still want to.

Which is my point.

 

[Dancing David]

Wasn't the alternative under consideration OJT?

And please tell us Malcolm, how many employers say that is what they want? What percentage?

 

[Cleon]

And how do most people who work in IT gets those skills? I work with three really bright people, one has mad skills with computers and set up our Chromebook/Google domain, one is our network admin and another out server admin.
Two went to the same junior college I am going too, one went to a different college. All three went to school to acquire their skills.

In fairness, Malcolm's point is that many (maybe even most?) folks in IT are self-taught. I'm a software engineer; I have a degree, but it's in Anthropology, not CompSci. A couple of my coworkers have no degree at all. IT, as an industry, moves much more quickly than academia can account for; by the time you graduate with a degree, the skills you were taught getting that degree are woefully out of date. (This doesn't necessarily apply to other fields, such as engineering, which require much more foundational education; subjects such as Newtonian physics and materials science don't change nearly so rapidly.)

Which is why I find Malcolm's claim about how employers are too afraid to get sued to pre-screen their employees to be laughably wrong. Every time an IT guy goes in for an interview, whether (s)he's a sysadmin, developer, or help desk technician, (s)he expects to get tested on their skillset. It might be an oral test, it might be written, it might even be online. But there will be one.

 

[jimbob]

Where I work (multinational semiconductor manufacturer) one can start work as a factory operator with mimimal qualifications and it is possible to work up through the ranks. However such people tend to get support from the company to study at college.

At the next level, technicians in my organisation tend to not have degrees but have A-levels. Several have been sponsored to study at university and move up the organisation. All the senior staff have either a lot of experience and/or qualifications - most of us have higher degrees. This is because the company needs competent senior staff - this is especially noticeable in the case of engineers, because the basic knowledge is pretty well defined - one needs the correct aptitude and attitude as well to think for oneself and solve problems.

 

[A'isha]

Wasn't the alternative under consideration OJT?

Not if you're talking about "independent study and credit-by-exam".

Doctors don't even get to start their OJT/apprenticeship (it's called a Residency) until after they've been through medical school and have earned a degree.

 

[elbe]

You object to Becker's definition? What's your definition of "school", then?

If you don't know what a word means you should try a dictionary. I just honestly don't get why you always have to resort to defnitions provided by others to support your absurd claims. If I just went by your posts I'd have to assume you've never worked in the real world, but that can't be true can it?