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

[Border Reiver]

And I note that you are still using the incorrect definition of "slavery".

 

[RandFan]

The State's principal instrument is compulsion.

Sorry for so many posts on this but I failed to mention the State's real principal instrument. Parents. Parents want the best for their children. Many if not most parents are incapable of teaching their children all that can be gained from state run education. The parents benefit from state standards and pooled resources. It is the desire of parents for a good future for their children. It's not compulsion, it's the simple realization that state run education is a public good. It's the ability to see that the best outcomes, to date, result from systems that include state run education.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

... The State's principal instrument is compulsion. Pointing out that Randfan ignores the role of incentives in the education industry and in the definition of slavery ("unpaid") is a simple statement of fact.

Argument by assertion. A fallacy.

The government of __A__ (locality) is the largest dealer in interpersonal violence in that locality (definition, after Weber). Organized violence defines that human organization that people call "government". No "fallacy" in that, although it's something advocates for a larger role for government prefer not to mention, naturally.

It is in the best interest of society to have an educated populace. That is why most if not all nations highest in economic freedom, HDI or other developmental index have state run education.

We agree (somewhat) about the value of education. The term is quite vague. That's one problem with State operation or subsidy. We differ as to whether the education industry is, in abstract, a likely candidate for State subsidy or operation. Most modern governments compel attendance at school and many directly operate schools. To me this implies something about the value politicians attach to systematic indoctrination, not about the value of "education" to society as a whole.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

And I note that you are still using the incorrect definition of "slavery".

I got it from Walter Williams. Slavery is compulsory, unpaid labor (definition). Slavery cannot require markets in people, since slaves existed in command economies (e.g., slave labor in the Soviet Union's Siberian timber camps and lead and gold mines).

 

[RandFan]

Most modern governments compel attendance at school and many directly operate schools. To me this implies something about the value politicians attach to systematic indoctrination, not about the value of "education" to society as a whole.

While I find the idea dubious it most certainly is plausible and a point where I can say reasonable people can disagree.

I can't say that about the proposition that education is equivalent to slavery since the child gets something very valuable for his efforts (K-12 education). My education allowed me to go to a University. I could not have gone if I hadn't had a primary education in math, science, English, etc. I'm very grateful for that as my parents were poor and could not have afforded to pay for 5 children to go to school. They had a very difficult time just paying bills. My father was bi-polar, ruled the home with an iron fist and often made bad decisions when it came to raising children. I could very well have grown up illiterate without state run education. I didn't like school but then most people don't like their job and many who don't have an education are forced to work in miserable conditions with lives enslaved to poverty. You've not shown how getting the govt out of education would increase literacy rates and/or improve society. We are an evolved social species and our lot in life is to a large degree impacted by the society we live in.

So long as modern governments remain democratic and so long as we remain an evolved social species I can't think of any reason why nations highest in economic freedom or any other measure of development like HDI and GDP won't have state run education. All available evidence indicates a strong correlation between state run education and the best outcomes for the most people.

 

[RandFan]

I got it from Walter Williams.

Absent special pleading the assumption that learning is labor would apply to parents. Further, absent special pleading the assumption applies to parents who require their children to perform chores.

When my children went to state run school I supported them and rewarded them with my love and encouragement. If I thought they were being treated like slaves I would not have done so.

Walter Williams definition is propaganda and not based on reality. It's demagoguery and equivocation.

I don't accept that going to school is labor simply because the education is provided by the state (special pleading). The act of studying math doesn't change based on whether you are compelled by your parents or the state. It's the same act with the same rewards. The ability to become gainfully employed. The better the student takes advantage of his or her education, regardless of who runs the school, the greater the rewards. Claiming that the act of reading a math book and doing math homework is slavery when the teacher is employed by the state but not slavery if the teacher is your mother is the very definition of special pleading.

 

[Border Reiver]

I got it from Walter Williams. Slavery is compulsory, unpaid labor (definition). Slavery cannot require markets in people, since slaves existed in command economies (e.g., slave labor in the Soviet Union's Siberian timber camps and lead and gold mines).

Slavery, as defined in dictionaries and every history or economics text I have ever read (I will confess that I had not read Williams) defines slavery as a system wherein human beings are owned as property and their labour or bodies disposed of as the owner sees fit.

As I see it, your definition is too broad to be of real application.

All this being said, the children attending school are compensated for their time with an education that they can use in whatever way they see fit. Given the value that employers place on educated workers, this would not seem to be that the children recieve nothing in exchange for their time and effort.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

While I find the idea dubious it most certainly is plausible and a point where I can say reasonable people can disagree.

I can't say that about the proposition that education is equivalent to slavery ...

Fine. Nobody around here is making that argument. Compulsory school attendance is slavery. Compulsory unpaid labor is slavery.
Attendance is compulsory (for many children). Schools do not pay students and many children would be better off following their own interests or learning on the job. NOT("school"="education"). NOT("government-operated schools"="public education").

 

[RandFan]

Fine. Nobody around here is making that argument.

It follows from your logic.

The act of reading a math book is the same regardless of who compels you to read it. You have to have a lot of special pleading to state that the act of reading a math book changes based on whether your mother compels you to read it or the state compels you to read it. They are the same activity and have the same rewards. Education.

The act of reading a math book doesn't become compulsory unpaid labor because the state does it but when your mother makes you read a math book it magically is no longer slavery.

Your argument is incoherent.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Slavery, as defined in dictionaries and every history or economics text I have ever read (I will confess that I had not read Williams) defines slavery as a system wherein human beings are owned as property and their labour or bodies disposed of as the owner sees fit.

We're edging closer in our definitions. However, "owned" and "property" imply a rather advanced legal environment. Slavery predates that.

As I see it, your definition is too broad to be of real application.

Okay. Randfan has raised this issue whith his questions about children being slaves to their parents. My generalization avoids some problems but creates others.

All this being said, the children attending school are compensated for their time with an education that they can use in whatever way they see fit. Given the value that employers place on educated workers, this would not seem to be that the children recieve nothing in exchange for their time and effort.

Some children benefit. Many lose relative to the benefit they would achieve in an uncoerced educational environment.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

It follows from your logic.

Not at all.

The act of reading a math book is the same regardless of who compels you to read it. You have to have a lot of special pleading to state that the act of reading a math book changes based on whether your mother compels you to read it or the state compels you to read it. They are the same activity and have the same rewards. Education.

The act of reading a math book doesn't become compulsory unpaid labor because the state does it but when your mother makes you read a math book it magically is no longer slavery.

The introduction of organized violence (State coercion) changes the institutional structure within which instruction occurs. If it did not, there would be no point to a State role. Institutional insiders claim that society derives a benefit from the State's presence in the education industry. Clearly, the insiders gain. Society as a whole loses. Children, in aggregate, lose.

Your argument is incoherent.

Only to Randfan, who ignores the details of the argument I have made.

 

[RandFan]

Some children benefit. Many lose relative to the benefit they would achieve in an uncoerced educational environment.

I would be willing to stipulate to this proposition with the caveat that I don't know of the ratio and, IMO, in the end state run education is a net public good. But we can disagree about that. I would be willing to entertain your ideas if you could show that your ideas would not leave children who are raised in environments such as I illiterate.

 

[RandFan]

Not at all.The introduction of organized violence (State coercion) changes the institutional structure within which instruction occurs.

Parents who compel their children to go to school or do their chores must often rely on discipline. That the discipline is institutional doesn't turn the act of reading a math book into slavery. That's special pleading.

I would dare say that most discipline for failure to attend school is meted out by parents and not the state.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

... All available evidence indicates a strong correlation between state run education and the best outcomes for the most people.

Gerard Lassibile and Lucia Navarro Gomez
"Organization and Efficiency of Educational Systems: some empirical findings"
Comparative Education

Furthermore, the regression results indicate that countries where private education is more widespread perform significantly better than countries where it is more limited. The result showing the private sector to be more efficient is similar to those found in other contexts with individual data (see, for example, Psucharopoulos, 1987; Jiminez, et. al, 1991). This finding should convince countries to reconsider policies that reduce the role of the private sector in the field of education.

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

... the evidence is that 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.

Clive Harber
"Schooling as Violence"
Educational Review

(Quoting) "...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."

Clive Harber
"Schooling as Violence"
Educational Review

Furthermore, according to a report for UNESCO, cited in Esteve (2000), the increasing level of pupil-teacher and pupil-pupil violence in classrooms is directly connected with compulsory schooling. The report argues that institutional violence against pupils who are obliged to attend daily at an educational centre until 16 or 18 years of age increases the frustration of these students to a level where they externalise it.

E.G. West
"Education Without the State"

What is needed is choice in education. School choice has not and will not lead to more productive education because the obsolete technology called ʺschool” is inherently inelastic. As long as ʺschoolʺ refers to the traditional structure of buildings and grounds with services delivered in boxes called classrooms to which customers must be transported by car or bus, ʺschool choiceʺ will be unable to meaningfully alter the quality or efficiency of education.

Joel Fried
"Pots and Kettles: Governance Practices of the Ontario Securities Commission"

2. The Government’s Principal – Agent Problem
The principal-agent problem for the private sector is well known: the owner/principal delegates to a manager/agent the responsibility to provide some services for the principal.
The problem is one of structuring contracts and institutions to insure that, in carrying out her duties, the agent acts in the principal’s interest rather than her own.
Citizens of a country also face a principal – agent problem. Citizens “own” the machinery of government and employ bureaucrats to act as their agents in running this machinery. To reduce the costs of monitoring, the principals choose a legislature/board of directors to oversee the agents. Monitoring mechanisms are similar to those in the private sector: there are financial accounting standards that are met for each budgetary unit, and an external auditor checks these internal accounts. Transparency is maintained, in part, through freedom of information regulations. Compliance with procedures and other regulations are met both through internal monitoring and checks by units external to the bureau. Finally, contracts are structured, at least in a limited manner, to align the incentives for agents with those of the principals.
There is, however, an additional problem in the public sector that does not exist for private firms. The firm has a well defined objective function – the maximization of profits – whereas the apparent objective for the government is the maximization of some index of a (weighted) level of welfare of the electorate. An unambiguous index of social welfare has been impossible to construct and, in its absence, monitoring the public sector is further complicated because data is generally lacking on whether or not the objective was actually approached and/or achieved and what the costs are that are linked to any specific objective. In effect, because of distribution issues and public goods, the cash flows measured with traditional accounting procedures will be, at best, only superficially correlated with that objective. Thus, looking at cash flows will provide the principals an extremely poor method of monitoring their public sector agents.

 

[RandFan]

Gerard Lassibile and Lucia Navarro Gomez
"Organization and Efficiency of Educational Systems: some empirical findings"
Comparative EducationMarvin Minsky
Interview
Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 1994-July
Clive Harber
"Schooling as Violence"
Educational ReviewClive Harber
"Schooling as Violence"
Educational ReviewE.G. West
"Education Without the State" Joel Fried
"Pots and Kettles: Governance Practices of the Ontario Securities Commission"

I'm speaking in the aggregate. Nations with state run schools (not necessarily excluding private options) are without doubt the most developed on average.

If you want to stop propagating the notion that state run education is slavery then we can have a different discussion. But I don't see anything in the above that demonstrates that countries without any state sponsored education perform better than countries with some level of state sponsored education.

Now, if you have that evidence I'm more than happy to consider it.

"...It is almost certainly more damaging for children to be in school than to out of it...

"School"? Children who don't go to school are far more likely to be unemployed and poor. You've already stipulated to that. Are you backtracking now? You've yet to address the very real fact that most if not all nations highest in most if not all indexes like economic freedom, literacy rates, HDI, GDP, etc., etc. have state run schools.

Until you address that fact the rest is just pointing out problems that are not insoluble and vary from nation to nation and are the result of very complex variables. That fact is very good reason to be skeptical of those claims.

I'm not opposed to providing more private options so long as it is not at the expense of taking away options for the poor like myself. You have not told me how I would not have ended up illiterate had there not been public school (state run).

 

[A'isha]

Again with the cut and paste! Spamming the exact same handful of paragraphs is not an argument, Malcolm.

Especially when you keep blithely ignoring things like what else Lassibile and Gomez say in that paper you're cherrypicking that paragraph from.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Again with the cut and paste! Spamming the exact same handful of paragraphs is not an argument, Malcolm.

If someone repeatedly says "you have seven fingers on your left hand" I will repeatedly raise my (normal, five-fingered) left hand. What else?

Especially when you keep blithely ignoring things like what else Lassibile and Gomez say in that paper you're cherrypicking that paragraph from.

We discussed this earlier.

 

[TheGoldcountry]

Again with the cut and paste! Spamming the exact same handful of paragraphs is not an argument, Malcolm.

Especially when you keep blithely ignoring things like what else Lassibile and Gomez say in that paper you're cherrypicking that paragraph from.

Especially when he just throws out names and quotes without any context. Albert Einstein, for example, was in favor of public education, but criticized the method.

Malcolm never explores the meanings of the people he quotes, he just throws out names in an exploration of bullying by infamousity.

 

[Border Reiver]

We're edging closer in our definitions. However, "owned" and "property" imply a rather advanced legal environment. Slavery predates that.

The earliest records that we have of slavery date back to Mesopotamia and the earliest legal codes.

In addition many illiterate societies practised slavery - the Celts of Europe and most First Nations practised slavery. The institution of slavery requires that people have a societal framework for recognizing property, and that is about as basic as we get in a legal system.

Okay. Randfan has raised this issue whith his questions about children being slaves to their parents. My generalization avoids some problems but creates others.

What problem(s) does it avoid?

Your generalization does not differentiate between actual slavery, forced labour, compulsory public works, or household chores.

It is the equivalent of saying that mammals and birds are the same because they share one or two points of similarity.

Some children benefit. Many lose relative to the benefit they would achieve in an uncoerced educational environment.

Most children benefit. I would argue that there is no such thing as an "uncoerced" environment, as there are always forces acting on people that compel them to choose one course of action over another.

 

[bruto]

I suppose if you are consistently and obstinately unable to comprehend the argument you will attribute your incapacity to the source of the argument.

Blaming the source for failure to communicate is usually easy but not always useful.

I'm glad to see you're taking the potential problem seriously, and applying your usual originality of thought to it.