Did you see the whole show? It's an eye-opener. I have it on DVR if you want me to save it. And did you see Ron Paul on CNBC this morning. He gives me a lot to think about, and he is just unbeatable in an argument.
I did watch the whole thing on YouTube. I have to say that Stossel himself was a bit of a disappointment on the topic. I'm a radical public-education abolitionist, and I think he hurts the cause by advocating charter schools and vouchers. I actually might support vouchers IF they were, by law, only temporary measures (5 years or so) to help get the private ed. industry going as the public system is being phased out. But Stossel was advocating them as well as charter schools as a permanent solution. Something like this would scare me a lot. Stossel says there is a difference between "Government-run and government-funded," I don't think that's true. Government-funded will always lead to government-run. That's actually how fascism always gets started. The government gives companies money, and then a little while later after companies get dependent says "Okay if you want to keep getting our money you have to do what we say."
I wouldn't have a problem with using the charter school and voucher programs as examples in arguments to demonstrate the idea that the more private the system is, the better. But the logical conclusion of that idea is that the system should be 100% private. I want constitutional separation of education and state.
Still, there was a lot to learn from the show. The 2 union guys who were on there were absolutely childish.
Haha, the first guy tries to say "I bet your school wouldn't score so well if you let in special needs kids!"
"We have 20% special needs kids."
"If you started to have English-language learners beyond 4-5%"
"We have 15%"
"Homeless students!"
"We have homeless students"
HAHAHAHA. How the hell do these union baby-people thugs get support?! I swear, they were both effing morons, and it was obvious. It wasn't even like they were charismatic or anything. The fact that such people end up as respected leaders of union movements makes me think that people have simply gone batshit insane.
The best segment of the show was the one that I posted here. That's an amazing thing to see. Some commenter said "Poor people in Ghana know more about school choice than Pelosi, Obama, Reid, etc.." That amazing fact even surprised me. It's a REAL slap in the face to those people who say "Yeah but without public education droves of poor children would never be able to go to school!" BULLSHIT. Those kids are a hell of a lot poorer than any ones here.
On a sidenote, I don't think anybody out there is getting better results in child education than the VanDamme Academy in California.
Luke, without vouchers, in your plan, how would poor people purchase education for their children? If anyone is short-changed by the current system, it is the poor.
Well they would probably pay a heck of a lot less for a much higher quality education. Or, they would depend on private charity, and STILL get a much higher quality education.
One thing I would need to think about is whether or not a parent who is unwilling or unable to get his kid a basic education could be found guilty of child neglect.
Still, the idea that any significant number of parents will simply not try at all to send their kids to a school is a common fallacy. Even the worst, abusive parents, when required to be self-reliant, would still try to get their kids at least a rudimentary education. Look at those people in Ghana! Probably if you talked to most of them you'd find them to be just about the backwardest of the backward. But they still get their kids to school (and pay for it even). The kids we're talking about whose parents really just wouldn't do anything at all, I think would be something like 1 out of 10,000 or so. Private charities could easily solve that problem (especially with all the extra wealth that one finds in a capitalist society), and again, maybe a lot of these parents would actually even get their kids taken away.
Luke, there is such a thing as educational neglect -- that is, it's possible to find that parents are guilty of child neglect because they are neglecting the child's educational needs. I saw a case once where parents were charged with educational neglect for having taken their children out of the public schools to home school them, and then not actually providing them with any home schooling. But in that case, besides the fact that the family wasn't educating the kids, there was also strong evidence that the father was physically abusing the kids and that the real reason he had taken them out of school was to stop the teachers from noticing their bruises and calling the child abuse hotlines. If there hadn't been a reason to believe that the kids were not physically safe at home, I'm not sure the County would have used a neglect proceeding to try to make the parents educate the kids. (There are truancy laws for that.)
In a world with no public schools, I'd be awfully surprised if any court would find that parents who could not afford to send their kids to school were guilty of neglect. That's tantamount to saying that being poor enough, and not lucky enough to live near any good charitable schools, makes a parent neglectful by definition --and I don't think anybody really wants the government to have that kind of power. The same thing goes for taking children away from their parents for educational reasons. Taking children away from their parents is one of the most serious interferences with personal freedom that a government can possibly make. I'm not saying it's never justified, of course, but if you spend much time in Family Court, it's clear that giving the government a little bit of power to interfere with families quickly leads to more and more. We need to keep a careful check on that power or before you know it, we'll be England, where they take kids away from their parents because they're too fat, and mount TV cameras inside people's homes so the government can monitor how they are raising their children. If what you're worried about is expansion of government power, then the last thing you want to do is come up with even more justifications for the government to interfere with parental judgment and take kids out of their homes.
"In a world with no public schools, I'd be awfully surprised if any court would find that parents who could not afford to send their kids to school were guilty of neglect. That's tantamount to saying that being poor enough, and not lucky enough to live near any good charitable schools, makes a parent neglectful by definition"
My question is, why shouldn't such a parent be neglectful by definition? What are they doing having kids that they can't afford to take care of in the most basic ways? What if a parent was too poor to buy their kid food and didn't live near any good charitable food distributors?
Those are serious questions by the way, I'm not trying to be Socratic or anything.
Remember though, I'm talking about the really, really extreme cases. I mean by the time a kid qualifies under the circumstances I'm talking about, his parent probably already is abusive or is not even there anymore.
On the other hand, such extreme circumstances make me think that there wouldn't be any purpose for having the extra law, anyway. It might just end up getting in the way of more caring parents who are just raising their kids differently.
"If what you're worried about is expansion of government power"
Ahh, see, that's actually NOT what I'm worried about, primarily. What I'm worried about is having government be restricted only to it's proper powers. The proper powers need to be defined.
This is where I differ from anti-conceptual libertarians who just claim to want "smaller" government. Fundamentally, what I want is proper government, which in today's context certainly translates to smaller government, but "smaller" government is not any kind of effective conceptual guide to cognition.
If I lived in Somalia, I'd sure as hell want expansion of government power!
My question is, why shouldn't such a parent be neglectful by definition? What are they doing having kids that they can't afford to take care of in the most basic ways?
Well, that's an awful darned good question, and it's another one that will come up regularly if you spend much time in Family Court. But remember, with your food example, there are government programs like WIC and food stamps to help people who can't afford to feed their kids, as well as food pantries run by private charities. Now if you have a parent who willfully fails to take advantage of such things and lets their kids go hungry, you certainly have a neglectful parent. It's harder to say whether that's true if there's no assistance available to a parent who can't afford education for a child. Also, this is a detail, but there are laws that require the government to use diligent efforts to help parents do a better job (for instance, by teaching them about food stamps and helping them apply, showing them how to grocery shop, and such) before deciding that no such efforts are going to work and that there's no alternative to removing the kids. Presumably the same thing would be true with education.
Interesting thoughts about "proper" as opposed to "small" government, and I see your point about Somalia!
"Interesting thoughts about "proper" as opposed to "small" government"
Thanks!
As a thought experiment, pretend that you have absolutely no concept of proper government, but that you know that you at least want SMALL government. Then try and describe what your ideal government would actually look like....you'll run into a dead end. The only guide to thought that you have will lead you to the conclusion that we should just have no government at all! This is, unfortunately, what happens to a lot of libertarian-types out there: they become anarchists. Then I stop associating with them. :-)
This is why I don't call myself a "minarchist," but instead just a "capitalist."
11 comments:
Did you see the whole show? It's an eye-opener. I have it on DVR if you want me to save it. And did you see Ron Paul on CNBC this morning. He gives me a lot to think about, and he is just unbeatable in an argument.
I did watch the whole thing on YouTube. I have to say that Stossel himself was a bit of a disappointment on the topic. I'm a radical public-education abolitionist, and I think he hurts the cause by advocating charter schools and vouchers. I actually might support vouchers IF they were, by law, only temporary measures (5 years or so) to help get the private ed. industry going as the public system is being phased out. But Stossel was advocating them as well as charter schools as a permanent solution. Something like this would scare me a lot. Stossel says there is a difference between "Government-run and government-funded," I don't think that's true. Government-funded will always lead to government-run. That's actually how fascism always gets started. The government gives companies money, and then a little while later after companies get dependent says "Okay if you want to keep getting our money you have to do what we say."
I wouldn't have a problem with using the charter school and voucher programs as examples in arguments to demonstrate the idea that the more private the system is, the better. But the logical conclusion of that idea is that the system should be 100% private. I want constitutional separation of education and state.
Still, there was a lot to learn from the show. The 2 union guys who were on there were absolutely childish.
Haha, the first guy tries to say "I bet your school wouldn't score so well if you let in special needs kids!"
"We have 20% special needs kids."
"If you started to have English-language learners beyond 4-5%"
"We have 15%"
"Homeless students!"
"We have homeless students"
HAHAHAHA. How the hell do these union baby-people thugs get support?! I swear, they were both effing morons, and it was obvious. It wasn't even like they were charismatic or anything. The fact that such people end up as respected leaders of union movements makes me think that people have simply gone batshit insane.
The best segment of the show was the one that I posted here. That's an amazing thing to see. Some commenter said "Poor people in Ghana know more about school choice than Pelosi, Obama, Reid, etc.." That amazing fact even surprised me. It's a REAL slap in the face to those people who say "Yeah but without public education droves of poor children would never be able to go to school!" BULLSHIT. Those kids are a hell of a lot poorer than any ones here.
On a sidenote, I don't think anybody out there is getting better results in child education than the VanDamme Academy in California.
Thanks for your thoughts, Luke. Here is an excellent interview with Lisa VanDamme:
http://www.vandammeacademy.com/philosophy/interview.htm
Luke, without vouchers, in your plan, how would poor people purchase education for their children? If anyone is short-changed by the current system, it is the poor.
Well they would probably pay a heck of a lot less for a much higher quality education. Or, they would depend on private charity, and STILL get a much higher quality education.
One thing I would need to think about is whether or not a parent who is unwilling or unable to get his kid a basic education could be found guilty of child neglect.
Still, the idea that any significant number of parents will simply not try at all to send their kids to a school is a common fallacy. Even the worst, abusive parents, when required to be self-reliant, would still try to get their kids at least a rudimentary education. Look at those people in Ghana! Probably if you talked to most of them you'd find them to be just about the backwardest of the backward. But they still get their kids to school (and pay for it even). The kids we're talking about whose parents really just wouldn't do anything at all, I think would be something like 1 out of 10,000 or so. Private charities could easily solve that problem (especially with all the extra wealth that one finds in a capitalist society), and again, maybe a lot of these parents would actually even get their kids taken away.
Luke, there is such a thing as educational neglect -- that is, it's possible to find that parents are guilty of child neglect because they are neglecting the child's educational needs. I saw a case once where parents were charged with educational neglect for having taken their children out of the public schools to home school them, and then not actually providing them with any home schooling. But in that case, besides the fact that the family wasn't educating the kids, there was also strong evidence that the father was physically abusing the kids and that the real reason he had taken them out of school was to stop the teachers from noticing their bruises and calling the child abuse hotlines. If there hadn't been a reason to believe that the kids were not physically safe at home, I'm not sure the County would have used a neglect proceeding to try to make the parents educate the kids. (There are truancy laws for that.)
In a world with no public schools, I'd be awfully surprised if any court would find that parents who could not afford to send their kids to school were guilty of neglect. That's tantamount to saying that being poor enough, and not lucky enough to live near any good charitable schools, makes a parent neglectful by definition --and I don't think anybody really wants the government to have that kind of power. The same thing goes for taking children away from their parents for educational reasons. Taking children away from their parents is one of the most serious interferences with personal freedom that a government can possibly make. I'm not saying it's never justified, of course, but if you spend much time in Family Court, it's clear that giving the government a little bit of power to interfere with families quickly leads to more and more. We need to keep a careful check on that power or before you know it, we'll be England, where they take kids away from their parents because they're too fat, and mount TV cameras inside people's homes so the government can monitor how they are raising their children. If what you're worried about is expansion of government power, then the last thing you want to do is come up with even more justifications for the government to interfere with parental judgment and take kids out of their homes.
"In a world with no public schools, I'd be awfully surprised if any court would find that parents who could not afford to send their kids to school were guilty of neglect. That's tantamount to saying that being poor enough, and not lucky enough to live near any good charitable schools, makes a parent neglectful by definition"
My question is, why shouldn't such a parent be neglectful by definition? What are they doing having kids that they can't afford to take care of in the most basic ways? What if a parent was too poor to buy their kid food and didn't live near any good charitable food distributors?
Those are serious questions by the way, I'm not trying to be Socratic or anything.
Remember though, I'm talking about the really, really extreme cases. I mean by the time a kid qualifies under the circumstances I'm talking about, his parent probably already is abusive or is not even there anymore.
On the other hand, such extreme circumstances make me think that there wouldn't be any purpose for having the extra law, anyway. It might just end up getting in the way of more caring parents who are just raising their kids differently.
"If what you're worried about is expansion of government power"
Ahh, see, that's actually NOT what I'm worried about, primarily. What I'm worried about is having government be restricted only to it's proper powers. The proper powers need to be defined.
This is where I differ from anti-conceptual libertarians who just claim to want "smaller" government. Fundamentally, what I want is proper government, which in today's context certainly translates to smaller government, but "smaller" government is not any kind of effective conceptual guide to cognition.
If I lived in Somalia, I'd sure as hell want expansion of government power!
My question is, why shouldn't such a parent be neglectful by definition? What are they doing having kids that they can't afford to take care of in the most basic ways?
Well, that's an awful darned good question, and it's another one that will come up regularly if you spend much time in Family Court. But remember, with your food example, there are government programs like WIC and food stamps to help people who can't afford to feed their kids, as well as food pantries run by private charities. Now if you have a parent who willfully fails to take advantage of such things and lets their kids go hungry, you certainly have a neglectful parent. It's harder to say whether that's true if there's no assistance available to a parent who can't afford education for a child. Also, this is a detail, but there are laws that require the government to use diligent efforts to help parents do a better job (for instance, by teaching them about food stamps and helping them apply, showing them how to grocery shop, and such) before deciding that no such efforts are going to work and that there's no alternative to removing the kids. Presumably the same thing would be true with education.
Interesting thoughts about "proper" as opposed to "small" government, and I see your point about Somalia!
"Interesting thoughts about "proper" as opposed to "small" government"
Thanks!
As a thought experiment, pretend that you have absolutely no concept of proper government, but that you know that you at least want SMALL government. Then try and describe what your ideal government would actually look like....you'll run into a dead end. The only guide to thought that you have will lead you to the conclusion that we should just have no government at all! This is, unfortunately, what happens to a lot of libertarian-types out there: they become anarchists. Then I stop associating with them. :-)
This is why I don't call myself a "minarchist," but instead just a "capitalist."
Here's a bit more on the topic of public vs. private education from Yaron Brook:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thCgKtx-Ks8
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