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

[jimbob]

It was an attempt to get RandFan to moderate his pompous faux superiority.

But Malcolm, your posts have been the ones with a patronising faux superiority:

Engrish, prease?

As an aside, that above quoted post could also be considered somewhat racist.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

But Malcolm, your posts have been the ones with a patronising faux superiority

How so? Because I don't agree with the defenders of the State-monopoly school system? Here's just the first page of this thread. I tried to make the case in abstract, against a constant downpour of innuendo and outright insults.

Your statement that compulsory education is just like slavery is, in fact, nothing more than emotional hyperbole, and has no connection to either the quotes you've posted, or to reality.

you are unwilling to admit it or incapable of understanding what words mean.

You can't even get that right.

I note how you dodged my argument. Dodge.

The problem with ad hoc explanations is that they are not often thought out very well and tend to lead to absurdities.

Yes, by his logic cows pay taxes.

However, what you don't understand is that if one can ad hoc try to save a thesis then one can also special plead. Expect that next.

What Randfan apparently does not understand (unless he's a paid shill who understands just fine and is in this argument to derail it with incivility) is the impact of incivility on considerate discussion. Cows would be slaves if they were human under the law. As I wrote, the stripped-down model universe of basic economic theory contains two categories of object: "rational actors" and "property".

It's gone on like this for the entire discussion.

As an aside, that above quoted post could also be considered somewhat racist.

Sure, to someone who wants to shoehorn every observation of race-related difference into that category. "Native speaker of Japanese with limited spoken English fluency" is not a race (nor does the observation that Japanese speakers who are new to English have trouble with "l" imply anything about attitudes toward people whose chromosomes spent evolutionary time in Japan). In the USA today, "racist" just means "Caucasian who disagrees with a socialist".

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Related: ...

The Social Impact of a Fiscal Crisis: Investigating the Effects of Furloughing Public School Teachers on Juvenile Crime in Hawaii

Posted August 9, 2013 | Categories: Research Papers, Hawaii's People, Halliday, Timothy

Due to the large social costs of juvenile crime, policymakers have long been concerned about its causes. In the 2009-10 school year, the State of Hawaii responded to fiscal strains by furloughing all school teachers employed by the Department of Education and cancelling class for seventeen instructional days. We examine the effects of this unusually short school year to draw conclusions about the relationship of time in school with juvenile crime rates. We calculate marginal effects from a negative binomial model and find that time off from school is associated with significantly fewer juvenile assault and drug-related arrests, although there are no changes in other types of crimes, such as burglaries. These results differ by region of the island and by average household incomes.

 

[Belz...]

The State is me no more than McDonald's or the National Football League is me.

Then you have no clue what a government is.

The government of __A__ (locality) is the largest dealer in interpersonal violence in that locality (definition, after Weber).

We've already dealt with your nonsense before. Stop spamming it.

Why do strident advocates for redistributive government take far more than their share of offense?

You have the answer right in that sentence: because you keep labeling people instead of discussing with them. Strident advocates ? Redistribution ? You have a way of wording things to serve your own purposes, rather than honestly discussing. And you wonder how all of that is uncivil ? I don't believe for a second that you don't get that, and I'll go on assuming that you are doing this on purpose.

 

[Belz...]

Take that up with the moderator who named this thread.

No, I'll take it up with you:

Compulsory, unpaid labor is slavery. What's your definition? In most US States, children between age 6 and age 18 labor, unpaid, as windowdressing in the make-work program for dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel that people call "the public school system". Your indifference to the brutal subordination that this system inflicts would be laughable if it weren't so insulting.

 

[Nick Terry]

1. It is failing.
2. Seen polling data on party preference by age, lately?

1. I doubt that
2. In which country? The current British government is a Conservative-Liberal coalition; Germany's ruling coalition is led by the CDU, the largest party; France just alternated between the Conservatives and Socialists; the Netherlands currently has a conservative-liberal prime minister; Sweden's prime minister is liberal conservative, and so on.

All these societies have state education systems.

There are many obvious reasons why the Republicans have suffered in some US polls in the past decade; the major arguments about their potential long term decline concern ethnicity first and foremost. A dozen different variables exist.

Get back to us when you can demonstrate an unbroken run of Democrat electoral victories for a whole generation. It won't happen, any more than the Republicans were truly able to dominate all of US politics from the 1980s to 2000s, despite being in office far more often than the Democrats.

Support for the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's exclusive position in receipt of the taxpayers' age 6-18 education subsidy looks like mendacious shilling for the cartel, frankly.

I'm British, not American, so it would be difficult for me to be accused of shilling for a system in another country. You might want to try making arguments that affect more than one society.

Or are British children not equally 'enslaved' in your worldview, despite being able to leave school at 16? Which would presumably make them less enslaved, right?

 

[Border Reiver]

Most countries let students leave school before 18 in any event. While some of the information at this wiki on school leaving ages may need to be updated or be incomplete, it would seem that some of the basic assumptions - namely that students are forced to stay until 18 is false, that children are denied work experience and that the gifted cannot move quickly through the system may be in error.

 

[RandFan]

Moderators started this thread and named it. Compulsion kills motivation. That's true. Slavery is a matter of degree. All the hostile verbiage that the cartel's defenders pour over these facts do not change the facts.

Now you are just minimizing.

You started a sub thread by emphatically stating that state run school is slavery. When it was pointed out that all primary education and home chores are, by your definition, slavery you doubled down on your silly definition. It matters not who named the thread. In the end you did.

Just about everything a person does is "slavery". It's like saying life is a bitch. Yes, for most, work sucks. For most kids, school sucks, parochial, home schooling, whatever. It's the attempt to distinguish between state run compulsory schooling and all other forms of education. Most children find school hard and a boring. Most people call their jobs "slavery". And hey, no slave ever worked without remuneration. Legally, room and board are remuneration (taxable compensation). So, even slaves were compensated. Some more than minimum wage workers. The term is meaningless in this conversation because every child that attends school is, by your definition, a slave. To ad hoc state that it is a matter of degree tells us absolutely nothing. Even if we grant the premise, how much of a degree?

If you had simply stated that, in your opinion, state run schools are worse in some or many ways than private/parochial/independent schooling, well, that's a productive discussion we could actually have.

 

[RandFan]

It was an attempt to get RandFan to moderate his pompous faux superiority.

Says the pompous Malcolm who cannot stop his faux superiority.

The attempt was silly because my point was correct. Your usage of anecdotal evidence was fallacious. EVEN if I had made up attending the University of Utah and taking statistics, which I didn't.

 

[Nova Land]

I have a copy of the Einstein collection I cite.

Good. And have you actually read the essay in question?

If so you know that when Einstein wrote of "methods of fear, force, and artificial authority"

1. he was referring specifically to the methods used in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia;
2. he knew from his own experience that these methods were not used in Switzerland or the US; and
3. he did not believe it possible for these methods to be employed in any "democratically governed country"

If you have actually read the essay you should also know it includes this highly relevant passage which you failed to quote or cite:

... [T]he aim must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals, who, however, see in the service of the community their highest life problem. As far as I can judge, the English school system comes nearest to the realization of this ideal.

The English school system instituted compulsory education in the 19th century.

Einstein's analysis of the relation between compulsion and motivation generalizes.

Einstein was not speaking generally or metaphorically about force and compulsion in the passage you quoted. He was speaking about the actual teaching methods being used at the time in two of the world's most authoritarian nations -- methods which, he explicitly noted, are not a problem in the US, Switzerland, and many other countries with compulsory education.

Nothing excepts schools in the US.

Nothing except Einstein's specific statement that what he is referring to is not a problem in US schools and that he thinks it impossible for it to be a problem in the schools of any democratically governed country.

Perhaps Einstein was being diplomatic, or perhaps he bought the progressive propaganda about US schools, with which he had no direct experience, prevalent at the time.

Or perhaps he was quite correct in his evaluation of the US, English, and Swiss educational systems, all of which have compulsory educational systems. Einstein had been living and teaching in the US for several years at the time he wrote this essay.

Einstein had a lifelong interest in teaching and learning, so I think his opinions are indeed worth considering. He had been a teacher for 28 years at the time he wrote this essay.

But as Einstein himself notes, at the end of the essay:

Finally, I wish to emphasize once more what has been said here in a somewhat categorical form does not claim to mean more than the personal opinion of a man, which is founded upon nothing but his own personal experience, which he has gathered as a student and as a teacher.

Apologies for another hit-and-run post. Misty morning today so I have a few hours off. But it will likely be several days to a week before I have the next chance to go on-line, by which time I will be even farther behind on this thread.

 

[jimbob]

Apologies for another hit-and-run post. Misty morning today so I have a few hours off. But it will likely be several days to a week before I have the next chance to go on-line, by which time I will be even farther behind on this thread.

A few more "hit and run posts" of that quality would be welcome.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

... All these societies have state education systems.

Most societies have government-run school systems. Most have other forms of political favoritism as well. The "education" industry offers particularly attractive invitations to fraud, with the emotionally-freighted but vague term "education" occupying central place.

... I'm British, not American, so it would be difficult for me to be accused of shilling for a system in another country. You might want to try making arguments that affect more than one society.

Okay. Support for tax-funded, government-operated schools and compulsory attendance policies looks like shilling for public-sector unions to me.

...Or are British children not equally 'enslaved' in your worldview, despite being able to leave school at 16? Which would presumably make them less enslaved, right?

For the nth time: ... slavery is a matter of degree. Reduction of the span of compulsory attendance reduces the total enslaved population. Expansion of education options (e.g., apprenticeship training, vouchers, subsidized homeschooling, mandatory (for schools) credit-by-exam) reduces the malign impact of compulsion.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Now you are just minimizing.

Count the occurrences of "you" in this article.

You started a sub thread by emphatically stating that state run school is slavery. When it was pointed out that all primary education and home chores are, by your definition, slavery you doubled down on your silly definition. It matters not who named the thread. In the end you did.

(a) Please drop the "you" stuff. The topic is the State's contribution to the education industry. Count the occurrences of "you" in this article.
A moderator named this thread.

Just about everything a person does is "slavery". It's like saying life is a bitch. Yes, for most, work sucks. For most kids, school sucks, parochial, home schooling, whatever.

No. The State adds compulsory processes.
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 dependency is a largely unrecognized mental health problem.

Linda Darling-Hammond
American School Board Journal (September 1999)

... (M)any well-known adolescent difficulties are not intrinsic to the teenage years but are related to the mismatch between adolescents' developmental needs and the kinds of experiences most junior high and high schools provide. When students need close affiliation, they experience large depersonalized schools; when they need to develop autonomy, they experience few opportunities for choice and punitive approaches to discipline. ...

To ad hoc state that it is a matter of degree tells us absolutely nothing. Even if we grant the premise, how much of a degree?

Why call this "ad hoc"? Isn't it obvious that conditions of slavery varied? The degree would depend on the amount of compulsion. Force and freedom are opposite directions on a continuum. Behavior is more or less forced, more or less free.

If you had simply stated that, in your opinion, state run schools are worse in some or many ways than private/parochial/independent schooling, well, that's a productive discussion we could actually have.

We could have had that discussion long ago if defenders of the status quo had understood that the classification of compulsory attendance as "slavery" referred to the malign impact of compulsion on the education industry, for the same (or closely analogous) reasons that slavery (compulsion) exerts a destructive impact on incentives in other slave industries.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Says the pompous Malcolm who cannot stop his faux superiority.

Which is how Randfan characterizes the attempt to avoid personalization and remain on topic. The topic is the effect of the State's addition of compulsory processes to the education industry.

The attempt was silly because my point was correct. Your usage of anecdotal evidence was fallacious. EVEN if I had made up attending the University of Utah and taking statistics, which I didn't.

It's unlikely that college-level statistics classes bother with the "don't-run-with-scissors" lesson that Randfan claimed his statistics text included.

... It was thirty years ago but I don't recall that any of my statistics texts defined "anecdote". The practical statistics classes discuss sources of sample bias. The theoretical classes discuss the relation between sample size and the distribution of sample measures around theoretical population measures (mean, variance, mode, etc.).

Did they define Anecdotal evidence Mine sure as hell did.

 

[RandFan]

A moderator named this thread.

Based solely on YOUR claims that education is slavery.

Why call this "ad hoc"? Isn't it obvious that conditions of slavery varied

I would accept your premise if you would simply concede that by your definition home schooling and parochial schools are slavery. It's ad hoc because you did NOT make a distinction until AFTER you were challenged. As it is, your definition is meaningless as all forms of primary education fit your definition of slavery. Further, you have no objective means to give us a relative degree of "slavery". You just declare that it is worse but even if we accept that premise we have no idea how much worse.

Arguing that education is slavery is a way to stop a discussion and not further it. If you argued simply that private/parochial/independent schools were demonstrably better than *state run compulsory school we could have a productive discussion.

*A phrase I use in deference to a civil discussion. I think the distinction meaningless but I'm trying to be civil.

 

[RandFan]

Which is how Randfan...

A.) Faux air of superiority. B.) Patronizing. C.) Elementary school yard rhetoric (childish).

I've been on this forum for more than a decade. I've worked as an independent contractor for three decades. I've never had someone refer to me in the third person who wasn't patronizing. When a colleague or associate wants to be condescending one of the best passive aggressive ways to do that is to refer to another in the 3rd person.

You don't have to refer to me at all. Just attack my arguments. You don't need to say "you", just say "your argument...". That's not personalizing anything. That's attacking my argument, NOT me. Remember when you were in junior high when the coach or a teacher referred to you in the third person while talking to the rest of the class of some mistake you made? We have terms for when people do that. Patronizing and condescending.

I commit to focusing solely on your arguments and not "you". When you refer to me as "RandFan" you are in fact personalizing the argument. RandFan is my moniker. It's not really a way to attack someone without violating the forum rules.


"(insert username here) had reading comprehension problems" is A.) Personal. B.) a violation of forum rules.

 

[bruto]

So, Malcolm, if you disagree with the title of this thread, does this mean that you disagree with the contention that compulsory schooling equates to slavery? It would appear that you have continued to argue that it does. If you are now arguing that it doesn't, perhaps you need to review your expression for effectiveness.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Based solely on YOUR claims that education is slavery.

The moderator had a volume of statements from which to choose.

I would accept your premise if you would simply concede that by your definition home schooling and parochial schools are slavery. It's ad hoc because you did NOT make a distinction until AFTER you were challenged.

Why is anyone "challenged" in a neutral discussion? How 'bout "please expand"? or "How does this theory accommodate __X__?" Compulsory, unpaid labor is slavery. Compulsion is a matter of degree.

As it is, your definition is meaningless as all forms of primary education fit your definition of slavery.

Not at all. Choices that people make in an uncoerced environment do not qualify as slavery.

Further, you have no objective means to give us a relative degree of "slavery". You just declare that it is worse but even if we accept that premise we have no idea how much worse.

In general, any reduction of compulsion is an improvement. Any increase in compulsion or limitation of options will make things worse.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

A.) Faux air of superiority. B.) Patronizing. C.) Elementary school yard rhetoric (childish).

... We have terms for when people do that. Patronizing and condescending.

Again...

Count the occurrences of "you" in this article.

This is how to conduct a neutral discussion.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

So, Malcolm, if you disagree...

I don't care. Cartel defenders have made an issue of it while ignoring the point: compulsion degrades motivation.