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

[RandFan]

And if parents don't jump through these hoops, cops will haul them into court. If they resist, that's a felony. If they resist effectively, police will shoot them. If a court orders them to send their kids to school, and they do not obey, that's a new crime: contempt of court. If they refuse to pay the fine for educational neglect, that's contempt of court. Cops will haul them into court. If they resist, that's a felony. If they resist effectively, cops will shoot them.

A law is a threat by a government to kidnap (arrest), assault (subdue), and forcibly infect with HIV (imprison) someone, under some specified circumstances.

So, if Hawaiian parents don't register their child for school, private school, or provide a plan for homeschooling they are guilty of a petty misdemeanor.

Petty misdemeanors have a maximum penalty of six months in jail or a fine of $1000.

Knowing the how the judicial process works (due to a public school education and practical experience) the first step would be a complaint that a child was not being educated. The complaint would be investigated, which in this case would mean that someone would first talk to the parents to find out if the child was registered at a public or private school, and if not to see if there was a homeschool plan in place. There would likely be an opportunity to correct the problem. Only if the parents had done none of that, and refused to correct the issue would they proceed to trial.

When the "Kids for Cash" scandal broke it made headline news and judges went to jail. I think it a good bet that most judges are fair and impartial and that they are are not simply stooges for the "cartel". IMO: The scenario that there is a virtual conspiracy to make money by enslaving children does not make any sense. Do judges get a kick back like the judges in the 'kids for cash' scandal? Do law makers? Let me hasten to add that I know that teacher's unions and the NEA and other similar groups lobby congress. But they are hardly alone. They rank 7th out of the top 20. So, which groups give the most money to government in hopes of feathering their nest? The education "cartels" or the private business cartels?

I have a lot of concerns when it comes to education. I would be sympathetic to a discussion about reforms and deficiencies of public education if the discussion were a bit more nuanced. Apparently we have to accept this dichotomy of school = slavery and a threat of being raped and infected with aids.

If you polled parents how many of them would say they live in fear that their children will skip school, get arrested, thrown in jail, raped and infected with aids?

Perhaps someone could justify the thesis by posting truancy rates and the conviction rates for parents and for children.

One more thing, children who are truant\delinquent are "at risk". They suffer higher levels of drug abuse, prostitution, depression, etc.. I'm not trying to definitively establish cause and effect here but there is reason to think that attending school, including state run compulsory schools can increase a child's chance at improved psychosocial well-being.

 

[RandFan]

And if parents don't jump through these hoops, cops will haul them into court. If they resist, that's a felony. If they resist effectively, police will shoot them. If a court orders them to send their kids to school, and they do not obey, that's a new crime: contempt of court. If they refuse to pay the fine for educational neglect, that's contempt of court. Cops will haul them into court. If they resist, that's a felony. If they resist effectively, cops will shoot them.

A law is a threat by a government to kidnap (arrest), assault (subdue), and forcibly infect with HIV (imprison) someone, under some specified circumstances.

It would seem you have no serious issues with extorting, kidnapping, raping and infecting people with AIDS so long as as it is for things you think govt is better at doing, like extorting money with the threat of violence to pay for the military.

Now, either the act of dealing in interpersonal violence is a bad thing or not. I'm not trying to justify one with the other. I'm trying to find out if you are morally consistent. If dealing in interpersonal violence is bad for X why is it not also bad for Y?

*I don't accept your use of loaded language and equivocation. While I recognize that the govt can and does abuse its power (particularly when they do the bidding of private industry), I don't for a moment think there is any kind of large scale coordinated effort to exploit children to their detriment. The closest thing I can find to that is the "kids for cash" scandal and that was the result of privatizing prisons. A disastrous consequence.

Government should always offer a public option for education. I would not mind more options for parents. Home schooling, private, parochial, etc. Thing is we have seen the kinds of products and services the private sector churns out for poor people. Cheap up front, shoddy and expensive in the long run.

When I lost my job and had to go on disability, it took two years to get my first check. We lost our home and had to put everything in storage and lived in an apartment owned by some friends in another state. We could not take all that much with us and so we arrived without some items. Bear in mind that my wife and I had zero income and we had burned up our savings. So with a little bit of cash from my kids we purchased some items from the dollar store. Including kitchen shears and can opener. Both were broke in less than a couple of months. Just enough life cycle to justify purchasing them again (we had very little money). But again they broke in short order. When we finally got settled again we were able to get things out of storage. I like to cook and was happy to have my knives, shears and can opener back. All were purchased over a decade ago. Had I simply bought cheap items, given the life cycle of those items, I would have easily spent nearly $100 for each item and they barely worked. I don't remember what I paid for my shears and electric can opener but you can purchase quality kitchen shears for $30 and a quality electric can opener for less than $25.

• Knowing that poor people choose short term cost over long term quality that will cost them more in the end, what kind of education do you think private industry will provide poor people?
• How will private industry insure that every child has an education?

Some things private industry alone does better. Education our children isn't one of them.

 

[Nova Land]

As I feared when I made my two hit-and-run posts without having time to read carefully, I made a significant error which I should correct as well as oversimplifying an important point. In this point I'll address the error.

In reading too quickly I mistakenly thought Malcolm was indicating that the Einstein snippet was something he'd found in the Meighan piece. I thought that because, on most of the items Malcolm includes the source he alleges he is getting the snippet with ("Educational Review, Vol. 47, No.3, 1995"; "Education and the Treatment of Children, V. 25, #3, Aug., 2002"; "Educatioinal Review, p. 9 V. 54, #1"; etc. Not seeing such a source on the Einstein snippet, and seeing a source listed immediately below it, I wrongly thought the Meighan information provided below was intended to be the citation for it. That's why I wrote:

Malcolm is honest enough in that opening post to admit he is not quoting Einstein (whose work on this he likely has never read). He is, as he indicated, quoting from Roland Meighan, whom he has read.

But I was mistaken. On reading the post more carefully, I see that for each of the 7 items Malcolm included in that post the alleged source he got them from is to be found directly above the item. The Meighan information relates to the item below it and has nothing to do with the Einstein snippet.

I can also see that Malcolm's 'citations' are inconsistent. The Einstein 'citation' gives simply an essay title; the Hyman and Penroe 'citation' gives simply a journal title with no volume number or date; the Mencken item lacks any citation whatsoever. This kind of inconsistency is common practice among people who are passing along not their actual source of the snippets they post but rather the citations they've copied from their actual source.

So we have no way of knowing where Malcolm actually found the Einstein snippet. All we can be reasonably sure of is that he didn't find it by reading the Einstein essay itself.

We know that because Malcolm claims the snippet comes from an Einstein essay entitled "Force and Fear Have No Place in Education":

4. Albert Einstein
"Force and Fear Have No Place in Education"

This is incorrect. The Einstein essay is entitled "On Education"; there is no Einstein essay by the title Malcolm provides.

So it is pretty clear Malcolm did not read the actual Einstein quote in context before posting it, and has no idea what points Einstein was actually making in the essay he pretended to be quoting from.

It's also highly unlikely Malcolm actually read the Hyman and Penroe item which he pretends to quote from (but for which he is unable to provide any source information other than the title of the journal he alleges it appears in).

That, to my mind, makes it likely he has not read most or all of the other items he keeps posting repetitively. He keeps posting the exact same bits because those are the only bits he has read.

People interested in engaging in honest discussion should be careful to provide the actual sources from which they derive snippets they post. I mistakenly thought Malcolm had done that. My apologies for my error.

 

[Nova Land]

In summarizing the Einstein quote I oversimplified something relevant to this thread: the part in which Einstein identifies the types of schools he has a problem with.

To me the worst thing seems to be for a school principally to work with methods of fear, force and artificial authority. Such treatment destroys the sound sentiments, the sincerity and self-confidence of the pupil. It produces the submissive subject. It is no wonder that such schools are the rule in Germany and Russia. I know that the schools in this country are free from this worst evil; this also is so in Switzerland and probably in all democratically governed countries. It is comparatively simple to keep the school free from this worst of all evils. Give into the power of the teacher the fewest possible coercive measures, so that the only source of the pupil's respect for the teacher is the human and intellectual qualities of the latter.

In my second post I wrote:

... when Einstein wrote of "methods of fear, force, and artificial authority" ... he was referring specifically to the methods used in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia...

Since the essay was written in 1936, that's correct as far as it goes. Those are the countries at the time of this essay whom he saw as the prime exemplars of the methods of "fear, force and artificial authority". But Einstein's dislike of the methods used in German schools long predates the rise of Nazism.

Einstein grew up in Germany in the late 1800s, strongly disliked the teaching methods being used, and in his teens left Germany to finish his education in Italy and Switzerland. His frustrations with the German educational system in those years were a fairly important part of his life and underlie the views expressed in this essay (especially his passing mention in the essay of "fear and compulsion", which is not a reference to the requirement that children attend school.)

Unfortunately my Einstein history is a bit rusty, and I'm typing this from a computer in a very small public library which does not have any biography of Einstein on its shelves, so I'm not able to look up details now in order to provide a good summary of the problems he encountered. But for those who genuinely desire to know the kinds of things Einstein saw as problems in educational systems, and to understand better what Einstein is saying in the essay "On Education", I would recommend finding a good biography of Einstein and reading about that period of his life.

 

[Nova Land]

I see Malcolm is on suspension and can't post in this thread for a while. But here's something he might enjoy reading and thinking about during his enforced vacation.

It's by Albert Einstein, and some sources mistakenly identify it as a passage from the essay On Education (which is how I stumbled on it today). It's not; but it is a genuine Einstein quote, it does touch on education, and I am quoting enough of it -- without deletions -- for those of you who don't have time or interest in looking up and reading the whole thing to understand what Einstein is saying and not have to worry that I have engaged in creative editing to make it sound like it says something different than it actually does.

The situation prevailing in an economy based on the private ownership of capital is thus characterized by two main principles: first, means of production (capital) are privately owned and the owners dispose of them as they see fit; second, the labor contract is free. Of course, there is no such thing as a pure capitalist society in this sense. In particular, it should be noted that the workers, through long and bitter political struggles, have succeeded in securing a somewhat improved form of the “free labor contract” for certain categories of workers. But taken as a whole, the present day economy does not differ much from “pure” capitalism.

Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers’ goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before.

This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.

That's from Einstein's 1949 essay Why Socialism?, which you can read here in its entirety.

 

[A'isha]

Thank you very much for finding and posting that, Nova Land!

 

[RandFan]

This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals

That's from Einstein's 1949 essay Why Socialism?, which you can read here in its entirety.

Malcolm quotes from two different socialists, Orwell and Einstein, and then says this:

Why trust government employees more than parents? Government is not God. Sorry. To devout socialists, it is.

I wonder if he still will appeal to the authority of people who believe that government is god.

BTW: Claiming that your opponent holds a position that one can attack for rhetorical advantage is the very definition of a straw man argument. It's also ad hominem poisoning the well.

Membership Agreement

12. “Address the argument, not the arguer." Having your opinion, claim or argument challenged, doubted or dismissed is not attacking the arguer.E8

 

[RandFan]

Thank you very much for finding and posting that, Nova Land!

Seconded

 

[Nova Land]

One last post (and then I'll probably be missing longer than Malcolm...)

While I can't know what Malcolm's actual source was for the deceptively-edited Einstein snippet he posted, I have been able to trace the source of the erroneous title he attributed to the essay.

There's a site, nospank.net, which sometime about 1999 posted an edited quote from Einstein's essay On Education in support of their anti-spanking agenda. The excerpt they posted is longer than the one Malcolm posted, but as you can see if you click the link they omitted the same two sentences which are omitted from Malcolm's version. (Just as the folks trying to use that snippet to oppose universal education [the requirement every child attend school and get an adequate education] have to omit those sentences in order to make the snippet look like it's in support of their cause, so the folks trying to use that snippet to oppose spanking needed to omit it to make it support their cause. But it looks like the anti-spanking folks were there first.)

The edited snippet is titled Force and Fear Have No Place in Education. That's pretty clearly intended to be their summary of the content of the quoted passage, since directly below they identify the essay title correctly as On Education:

Force and Fear Have No Place in Education
By Albert Einstein,
From the essay "On Education" in Out of My Later Years, Philosophical Library, Inc., 1950, New York. (pp. 33-35)

But sloppy researchers -- the kind who write the propaganda pieces folks like Malcolm rely on to tell them what to think -- thought that was the actual essay title, and began referring to it as that when they included the edited quote in their opinion pieces.

Once a few of them began doing that, folks like Malcolm who cut-and-paste pass-along quotes (while pretending to be quoting the original) spread the misinformation so far and wide that now the fictitious essay title comes up first when one tries to Google the text of the Einstein passage to find its source.

Jane Bluestein used the incorrect title in a footnote to her 2001 book Creating Emotionally Safe Schools: (indicating she'd never actually read the actual essay she was claiming to cite, simply the nospank excerpt). A year later Ramona Khan used the line "Force and fear have no place in education" (erroneously attributed to Albert Einstein rather than nospank.net) as a quote at the beginning of her chapter in the collection Research Studies in Early Childhood Education edited by Cathy Nutbrown.

The earliest reference I can find is from a July 1999 item on the nospank site itself. So while I'm not computer-savvy enough to be able to determine the date the original nospank piece went up, it had to be some time prior to July 1999 -- and probably not too much prior, since there's no earlier reference.

We also know that by 2001 and 2002 the deceptive snippet and inaccurate essay title had escaped from the internet and were out in the wild, deceiving gullible folks who hadn't learned that before passing on "quotes" to other people it's a good thing to look them up and actually read for oneself the material one is claiming to be quoting.

 

[Nova Land]

Thank you very much for finding and posting that, Nova Land!

Seconded

And a big thank you from me to both of you for the excellent work you've both been doing in this thread (and other threads). (It was ANTPogo's posts in this thread which originally motivated me to start reading it; discovering generous quantities of RandFan posts in the thread was icing on the cake.)

I'm still way way way behind where the thread is now, but I've been slowly working through pages as time and internet access permit and am impressed by the skill with which both of you (and Border Reiver, and others) have managed to stay focused and sensible. It is a joy to read your posts.

 

[A'isha]

And a big thank you from me to both of you for the excellent work you've both been doing in this thread (and other threads). (It was ANTPogo's posts in this thread which originally motivated me to start reading it; discovering generous quantities of RandFan posts in the thread was icing on the cake.)

I'm still way way way behind where the thread is now, but I've been slowly working through pages as time and internet access permit and am impressed by the skill with which both of you (and Border Reiver, and others) have managed to stay focused and sensible. It is a joy to read your posts.

Thank you!

Anyway, looking back at the other quotes in that same post of Malcolm's on the first page, I noticed this:

"...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."

Malcolm cites this only to

"Clive Harber
'Schooling as Violence'
Educatioinal [sic] Review, p. 9 V. 54, #1"

But the quote itself contains quotation marks, meaning that these words are not Harber's, but are Harber quoting someone else's words (and Malcolm does not specify who).

A look at Haber's book (which is apparently an expansion of his journal article) reveals that the quote is from a UK Department for International Development study titled "Towards Responsive Schools", which (as Harber himself admits in his book) was solely a comment on "some schools in a range of countries they studied (India, Mali, Lebanon, Liberia, Mozambique, Pakistan, Mongolia, Ethiopia, and Peru)".

It's notable that the actual study makes it clear that the problems it identifies in the schools found in those nations are the result of a variety of factors such as poverty and war within those studied countries, and the quoted criticism is not a criticism of state-run compulsory education in general, but a criticism of the schools in those specific countries. Here's the full quote in context (all emphasis is in the original):

The failure of school systems to achieve their aims

In the state schools in the context reflected in these studies, the typical classroom experience has at least one and in several cases all of the following serious limitations:

•The teachers are not responsive to children's needs, and their harshness depresses the children's capacity to learn and develop

•Children are not encouraged to learn in the way they are best able to (actively) or to acquire learning skills they could use outside the classroom

•The schools do not provide effective teaching in literacy and other basic skills

•The experience of school does not prepare children for real-life challenges.

Where all these limitations apply it is almost certainly more damaging for children to be in school than 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 passive, and having to spend hours each day in a crowded room under the control of an adult who punishes them for any normal level of activity such as moving or speaking. At the end of several years the children who have been at school have not learnt enough of what school is supposed to offer to equip them to earn outside the community they were born into, but they have missed learning how to survive within it; while for children out of school the skills needed for survival have been learnt effectively (because they have been learnt actively, by modelling and by being given real responsibilities.) In such situations not going to school is almost certainly better for children and a better preparation for adult life.

When we compare how the systems in each of the countries in the studies rate on the four criteria listed above, we discover a revealing pattern of how this interacts with problems caused by poverty, and it is not the simple equation one might expect. In the countries where inadequate resourcing has been the pattern for decades, schools do badly on all four counts, but the converse is not always true. The Mongolia system, the one most recently hit by a severe decline in resources, comes out high on effectiveness - but the issue of preparation for actual life challenges is a major concern, here as elsewhere. Effectiveness here is achieved because the system is still running on fuel supplied by a better resourced era, and this includes teachers trained to deliver the prescribed curriculum in the prescribed form. The system itself lacks a mechanism for internally generated change based on sensitivity to changing external realities.

A similar relationship between problems caused by poverty and those intrinsic to the system itself is observable within countries with very inequitable income distribution, like Pakistan or India, and here the Peru study is particularly interesting because it is dealing with quality issues across the national school system. In such countries the state system applies to children across economic classes but schools for the better off are considerably better resourced; children in better off schools do on the whole become literate, learn a prescribed body of facts and pass national exams, which gives them a definite advantage over those in poor schools where effectiveness in these terms is much lower. But for better off children as well there are severe limitations because teaching style precludes a genuine educational process, and there is an equal issue about the relevance of what is taught.

Systems with no mechanism for change

The studies reflect a great diversity of systems but all are trapped by their own particular history, creaking uncomfortably under the pressure of changing times, and fundamentally resistant to change. Almost all the systems were essentially modelled on those of the colonial powers (Britain, France, Portugal, Spain) and still use styles of classroom discipline and teaching methodology that were current a hundred years ago or more in the colonial country but have long since been repudiated there. They remain entrenched in the ex-colonies, and education ministry officials continue to be resistant to the suggestion of changes that appear to offer anything less rigidly defined than their conception of the education systems of the wealthier west. Within the systems themselves there are no inherent mechanisms for change[.]

In other words, just as with the Einstein quote, this quote is not a general criticism of compulsory state education in general, but is a specific criticism of schools and education systems that are explicitly not the schools and education systems currently found in countries like the US and the UK. The study itself contains suggestions for improving the existing state systems to ensure that all children in these countries are given the opportunity for an education and to improve teacher training to meet international standards, and specifically notes that among Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, "primary school was made compulsory in 1991, [but] coverage of schools is still inadequate".

 

[Border Reiver]

Thank you, Nova Land for the compliment and for the quotes.

 

[Nova Land]

... looking back at the other quotes in that same post of Malcolm's on the first page, I noticed this:

"...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."

Malcolm cites this only to

"Clive Harber
'Schooling as Violence'
Educatioinal [sic] Review, p. 9 V. 54, #1"

But the quote itself contains quotation marks, meaning that these words are not Harber's, but are Harber quoting someone else's words (and Malcolm does not specify who).

A look at Haber's book (which is apparently an expansion of his journal article) reveals that the quote is from a UK Department for International Development study titled "Towards Responsive Schools", which (as Harber himself admits in his book) was solely a comment on "some schools in a range of countries they studied (India, Mali, Lebanon, Liberia, Mozambique, Pakistan, Mongolia, Ethiopia, and Peru)".

It's notable that the actual study makes it clear that the problems it identifies in the schools found in those nations are the result of a variety of factors such as poverty and war within those studied countries, and the quoted criticism is not a criticism of state-run compulsory education in general, but a criticism of the schools in those specific countries...

In other words, just as with the Einstein quote, this quote is not a general criticism of compulsory state education in general, but is a specific criticism of schools and education systems that are explicitly not the schools and education systems currently found in countries like the US and the UK...

Nice job spotting those quotation marks!

Hmmm. Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence... I wonder if the other items in Malcolm's posts will turn out when examined to be as spurious as these have turned out to be.

I'm tempted to think this is a puzzle Malcolm set for us, and he's waiting for us to discover all the deceptions before jumping out, congratulating us, and bring out refreshments for a surprise party. (I think I'd prefer that -- obnoxious as it would be -- to the idea he sincerely believes in the validity of the evidence he's been posting and the arguments he's been making.)

Another day off, curse it. But it gives me a chance to make a quick post or two.

 

[Nova Land]

Here are some questions for Malcolm when he gets back. These refer to the items Malcolm included in post # 3 on page 1 of this thread:


1.

Albert Einstein
"Force and Fear Have No Place in Education"

There is no Einstein essay by that title, nor is that sentence a direct quote from anything Einstein wrote or said. (If you disagree, please provide a source for the essay or the quote). The title you provide appears to have originated as the heading on an item at nospank.net.

Since you apparently did not get the snippet you posted from Einstein's essay, what was your actual source for the Einstein snippet?

2.

Hyman and Penroe
Journal of School Psychology

You omitted the volume, date, and article title from which you got this snippet; and the information you did provide is incorrect. Interestingly, the error in what you posted appears in a whole bunch of other places where this snippet is posted by folks like you.

Since it looks like you didn't get this snippet from reading the original article either, what was your actual source?

3. ... Oops, library closing. Sorry, no more time.

 

[RandFan]

Here are some questions for Malcolm when he gets back. These refer to the items Malcolm included in post # 3 on page 1 of this thread:

1.

There is no Einstein essay by that title, nor is that sentence a direct quote from anything Einstein wrote or said. (If you disagree, please provide a source for the essay or the quote). The title you provide appears to have originated as the heading on an item at nospank.net.

Since you apparently did not get the snippet you posted from Einstein's essay, what was your actual source for the Einstein snippet?

2.

You omitted the volume, date, and article title from which you got this snippet; and the information you did provide is incorrect. Interestingly, the error in what you posted appears in a whole bunch of other places where this snippet is posted by folks like you.

Since it looks like you didn't get this snippet from reading the original article either, what was your actual source?

3. ... Oops, library closing. Sorry, no more time.

Nova, if I had the money I'd buy you an internet connection and computer.

 

[Minoosh]

No, you've made repeated assertions, but you've neither provided evidence, nor described how the "variations in system performance as a function of the degree of parent control" has anything to do with compulsion of students to attend school, since it's parents that make children go to school and do homework.

Could it be perhaps argued that parents have a right to enslave their children, and that the problem with compulsory education is that the state usurps parents' rights to enslave children in the manner of the parents' choosing?

That seems intellectually defensible. Disagreeable to me, but defensible.

 

[A'isha]

Could it be perhaps argued that parents have a right to enslave their children, and that the problem with compulsory education is that the state usurps parents' rights to enslave children in the manner of the parents' choosing?

That seems intellectually defensible. Disagreeable to me, but defensible.

I don't think it is, because parents (at least in places like the US) don't own their children and can't just decide to do whatever they want with them.

On the other hand, way back on the first page of this thread when RandFan asked "Is it slavery for parents to give their children compulsory rules Yes or no?", Malcolm answered:

Sometimes. As I wrote, children occupy an anomalous position in economic theory; halfway between property and rational economic actor. Parents compensate children with benign attention. Children, especially very young children, will work for love, which parents will more reliably supply than will strangers. As children mature, thet will, if given freedom to follow their own benign interests, self-reward.

 

[RandFan]

Could it be perhaps argued that parents have a right to enslave their children, and that the problem with compulsory education is that the state usurps parents' rights to enslave children in the manner of the parents' choosing?

That seems intellectually defensible. Disagreeable to me, but defensible.

I honestly don't think it is defensible. Is it okay for a parent to neglect a child? Is it okay for a parent to withhold medical treatment for religious reasons? There are lots of exceptions where the state allows the parents autonomy. For good reasons. My father required that I feed our animals each and every day and for me to work the farm and to work on other people's farms. For awhile I rototilled people's gardens to earn my father money. This is somewhat understandable when the family is simply trying to survive. But the state does not allow parents to do anything with their children. A parent who puts his or child up for acting must return a portion or the remunerations to the child.

So, while I think you have a small point to make, at least to an extent, as a whole I do not accept the premise. And thank goodness it is not true. I worked my ass off as a child but my father could not prevent me from getting an education. Nor, if were so inclined to do so, withhold medical treatment from me on religious grounds. I'm sure that if some of the things he did to my mother myself and siblings had come to light the state would have incarcerated him. Or at least try to.

We cannot absolutely protect children from their parents but state run compulsory schools are a great step in that direction. Malcolm would like to take that away. Let parents profit from their little investments.

 

[Nova Land]

Nova, if I had the money I'd buy you an internet connection and computer.

Oh, I have a computer and internet connection -- at home in Tennessee.

But my main source of income is harvesting blueberries, so each year at this time I'm up in Maine tented out on the edge of a blueberry field with no electricity for PC and no phone line for internet connection.

It's funny: you and I are sort of mirror images. You grew up in a farming family, did farm work when growing up to please your father, and wound up doing computer programming. I grew up in an academic family, learned Fortran and other programming languages when growing up to please my father, and wound up doing farm work.

I love raking blueberries. (Here's a picture of a blueberry rake, since it's probably nothing like what you're picturing.)

But I also love learning. One of my favorite recreations is spending time in a good library, looking up things on microfilm, bound volume journals, and old books. I love reading primary sources, rather than relying on other people's filtered interpretations of that information.

My philosophy of education is very similar to Einstein's (whose philosophy of education bears little resemblance to how Malcolm portrays it in the misleading snippets he has posted). Einstein had nothing against requiring young people to attend school and get an education; but he wanted the education to provide students with freedom to explore the areas of subjects which intrigued them most, rather than being forced to memorize and regurgitate a standardized set of facts and figures. Unfortunately the schools in Germany didn't operate that way. He was very frustrated that there were all these interesting things he wanted to explore and he didn't have time because of all the required class work which consisted largely of memorizing things that would be on the tests. (I believe, although my memory may be wrong on this, that German schools of his time required students to take part in military exercises, and that this was another thing Einstein strongly objected to.)

I also preferred to explore the questions which caught my attention rather than simply memorize the things in the textbooks; but my school experience was much more enjoyable than Einstein's because rather than butting heads with the teachers I was able to give the teachers what they wanted with minimal effort on my part and thus free to spend much of my time on the things I was interested in. Of course, I was lucky enough to grow up in the US where that was possible, and even luckier to attend university in England, where a degree program took only 3 years and I was free to spend most of the day browsing at second-hand bookstores, reading fiction I checked out of the public library, and going from greengrocer to greengrocer picking up food treats to cook up for myself; if I'd grown up in Germany in the late 19th century I'd likely have been as frustrated as he was.

 

[Nova Land]

Here are some questions for Malcolm when he gets back. These refer to the items Malcolm included in post # 3 on page 1 of this thread:


1.

Albert Einstein
"Force and Fear Have No Place in Education"​

There is no Einstein essay by that title, nor is that sentence a direct quote from anything Einstein wrote or said. (If you disagree, please provide a source for the essay or the quote). The title you provide appears to have originated as the heading on an item at nospank.net.

Since you apparently did not get the snippet you posted from Einstein's essay, what was your actual source for the Einstein snippet?

2.

Hyman and Penroe
Journal of School Psychology
​

You omitted the volume, date, and article title from which you got this snippet; and the information you did provide is incorrect. Interestingly, the error in what you posted appears in a whole bunch of other places where this snippet is posted by folks like you.

Since it looks like you didn't get this snippet from reading the original article either, what was your actual source?

...

I ran out of time before I was able to finish that post. Perhaps it's just as well. Rather than my going through the list of problematic snippets Malcolm posted one by one, let me save us all some time by making a more general request.

Malcolm, when you return from suspension perhaps you could go through all the snippets you've posted and state clearly (a) which of the items you posted come originally from sources you've actually read for yourself and are excerpts you yourself made from these sources which you believe accurately represent the ideas contained in the piece, and (b) which of the items are cribbed from sources other than the one you listed as the citation.

For all the items which you cribbed from sources other than the one you cited, please list the actual source you got the snippet from, rather than copy-pasting the source they claim to have gotten it from and trying to pass it off as where you got it from.

In the future it would be good if, when posting items from sources you haven't actually read, you clearly identified them as such from the beginning. For instance: Here's a reference to what looks like an interesting study which RandomBozo posted on his website recently. I haven't been able to locate the study and read it for myself, so I can't vouch for whether it actually says what RB claims, but if it does it would seem to support the point I'm making.

Doing this is a courteous as well as an honest thing to do.

One reason I enjoy RandFan's posts is that he is generally very good when presenting evidence to make it clear which are things he knows from his own experience, which are things he has read for himself, and which are things he has heard but not yet been able to verify. It's clear to me from his posts that he is more interested in determining what's true than in winning arguments or scoring debating points. That's one reason I have a high level of respect for posts from posters such as RandFan and ANTPogo. Because of your posting practices, I am not yet able to assign that level of respect to your posts.