Education Thread: Why are the youth disrespectful?

[The Rich Port]

My mother considers me disrespectful because I have a problem with her taking out her anger on me and my sister, and becomes upset and confused when we bring them up when she's having an anger fit. What makes it even more ridiculous is that she seems to complain to my father about it, probably not realizing how extremely aggressive and irrational she comes across whenever things don't go the way she wants them to go. To make things even MORE ridiculous, most of my family (so far excluding my father) agree with her when she says that children shouldn't question their parents because their parents are bound to know better. Then again... Very few people have seen my mother truly angry, rather than just mildly annoyed.

To me, the "youth are becoming more disrespectful" thing is an illusion brought about by historical short-sightedness (were youths really all that behaved "back in the day"?) and a misunderstanding of adolescent psychology as society becomes more dogmatic in order to counter-act the change shock of continuing liberalism, so any argument against it would be like arguing the theology of the Necronomicon.

[Southern Babylonia]

My mother considers me disrespectful because I have a problem with her taking out her anger on me and my sister, and becomes upset and confused when we bring them up when she's having an anger fit. What makes it even more ridiculous is that she seems to complain to my father about it, probably not realizing how extremely aggressive and irrational she comes across whenever things don't go the way she wants them to go. To make things even MORE ridiculous, most of my family (so far excluding my father) agree with her when she says that children shouldn't question their parents because their parents are bound to know better. Then again... Very few people have seen my mother truly angry, rather than just mildly annoyed.

To me, the "youth are becoming more disrespectful" thing is an illusion brought about by historical short-sightedness (were youths really all that behaved "back in the day"?) and a misunderstanding of adolescent psychology as society becomes more dogmatic in order to counter-act the change shock of continuing liberalism, so any argument against it would be like arguing the theology of the Necronomicon.

I preach on the alters of your words

[Salvarity]

To make things even MORE ridiculous, most of my family (so far excluding my father) agree with her when she says that children shouldn't question their parents because their parents are bound to know better. Then again... Very few people have seen my mother truly angry, rather than just mildly annoyed.

So true.

They don't always know better. They don;t


I can remember this one time me and my family were in New Jersey. i kept telling them to go one way because i actually read the map. But they went another way and told me to shut up. Guess what. They went the wrong way and had to go back around and go the same way i told them.

Remember the quote is parents ALWAYS know better. Not Sometimes.

Sometimes they're right.
Sometimes they're not
They're still human.

[Infinite Harmony]

NERVUN: Regarding your level of rudeness or near-rudeness in your post here, please note that it is my preference and intention to be polite and professional in my discussions here. That noted, this shouldn't be taken to mean I am willing to accept being talked down to, especially by someone who doesn't seem to meet the criteria they are judging me on.

And not all other teachers resort to police-state tactics either. I hate to tell you this, but John Gatto is not the only teacher on the planet, nor is he the only teacher to get results (Whatever the hell that means), and honestly, while I can understand you like him, you show just how shallow your understanding of education is by quoting only him.

I'm glad they don't all resort to police-state tactics, and I admit I'm no expert on inner-city schools, though I have some pretty bad accounts of them, including high illiteracy and dropout rates. What the hell does "results" mean you ask? I don't know the exact criteria, but they were impressive enough for New York to name him New York City Teacher of the Year in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991 (according to wikipedia). As most bureaucracies tend to squash mavericks and innovation, this is probably even more impressive than it may first seem.

With that said, if the public schools of (poor areas of) New York are presently producing results you are proud of, I welcome you to present the data that shows their "understanding of education". I'll bet that it's nowhere as good as Gatto's results, by any legitimate measure you care to utilize.


Regarding like-minded experts, I have referenced at least five different people in the past. You have ignored them all, except for Gatto who you seem to dismiss, and Einstein, who you implied was somehow unqualified to speak about teaching because he was a genius. Frankly I had given up referencing them due to your non-discussion or non-awareness of these references, all of which have material online or in a local library if you care to look for it...

Isn't this statement paradoxical coming from a teacher? On one hand you support children being kept in school for 12 years or more, on the other hand you say that their performance in these schools doesn't translate well into workplace experiences. That asked, the fact that the homeschooled students learned more suggests to me that they may be better self-learners than others (assuming a less structured homeschool environment), while not being anti-social (surveys suggest more extracurricular/community/charity involvement amongst homeshcoolers than non-homeschoolers). At best this could be a significant advantage, at worst it might be neutral IMO.

Ah... no, I said that standardized tests do not translate. I explained why this is to you last time as well. To recap, STs take a snapshot of a student, and just as a snapshot does not show the whole of a person’s life or ability, nor do STs do the same for a student’s education. STs are limited; they test about, at best, 5% of the curricula. STs are poor evaluators in discovering student thought processes (Normally because in order to get through a number of students quickly, the test format is usually multiple choice), this makes it possible for students to get the right answer for the wrong reasons, or show brilliance with the reasoning, but still arrive at the wrong answer. Thus STs do not equal a student's education.

Furthermore, you are assuming that home school automatically leads to a less structured environment, this is not the case. And it IS your own opinion, and one I discount as you have shown a lack of depth in this.

Data, not opinion please.

Firstly, the phrase "assuming ___" above meant "X is likely true assuming (if) Y is valid", not that I am "assuming home school automatically leads to a less structured environment", as you accuse me of. You might want to be careful when making assumptions about other peoples assumptions, you might end up looking foolish and/or rude in the process.

It is not illogical to assume that those advancing their learning beyond the (structured) norm might be self-learners, and for your part you have not provided evidence to the contrary, despite you request for "data, not opinion". In this vein, please also note that I have provided more links - including data-heavy links - than you have on these threads, which speaks again to the assumption question...



I mentioned these two links (below) in my last post in the other thread (It is now edited correctly if you want to address it @ viewtopic.php?ns=1&f=20&t=136637&p=6960575#p6960575), to which your only comment was
"Ah yes, that study which has already been attacked for some problems within their metholodgy IIRC. Not to mention your other stats don't seem to, you know, show a trend of it declining".


Since you brought up data and such, I will note that you offered no reasoning or data to suggest any real problems with the "Academically Adrift' study, nor did you address why the massive increase in funding in the US over the decades did not raise outcomes (as opposed to simply having them not decline). Whether or not things have gotten worse - and they may have - having an education system that produces only 13% of students who are "proficient" (by US government measures, see http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/datafiles.asp) in the three measures of literacy is hardly inspiring.


Quoting from that page:

Many Americans who go through modern-day schooling these days are functionally illiterate. From wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy) again:

In the United States, according to Business magazine, an estimated 15 million functionally illiterate adults held jobs at the beginning of the 21st century. The American Council of Life Insurers reported that 75% of the Fortune 500 companies provide some level of remedial training for their workers. All over the U.S.A. 30 million (14% of adults) are unable to perform simple and everyday literacy activities.[5]

The National Center for Education Statistics provides more detail. Literacy is broken down into three parameters: prose, document, and quantitative literacy. Each parameter has four levels: below basic, basic, intermediate, and proficient. For prose literacy, for example, a below basic level of literacy means that a person can look at a short piece of text to get a small piece of uncomplicated information, while a person who is below basic in quantitative literacy would be able to do simple addition. In the US, 14% of the adult population is at the "below basic" level for prose literacy; 12% are at the "below basic" level for document literacy; and 22% are at that level for quantitative literacy. Only 13% of the population is proficient in these three areas—able to compare viewpoints in two editorials; interpret a table about blood pressure, age, and physical activity; or compute and compare the cost per ounce of food items.



Despite a massive increase in school funding in the past few decades, test scores are stagnant and university students are not faring too well either. From a book review of a large study on the topic (http://www.amazon.com/Academically-Adri ... 0226028569)

... Authors Richard Arum (sociology and education professor at New York University) and Josipa Roksa (professor of sociology at the University of Virginia) studied over 2,000 undergraduates from Fall 2005 to Spring 2009 at two dozen universities (large public flagship institutions, highly selective liberal-arts colleges, and institutions that historically serve blacks and Hispanics). They determined that 45% "demonstrated no significant gains in critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and written communications during the first two years of college," and 36% showed no improvement over the entire four years. Including dropouts would have made the findings even worse. Further, those that did improve did so only modestly on average - eg. moving from the 50th percentile to the 68th in those four years. These findings severely undermine President Obama's proposal to boost the proportion of U.S. college graduates from 40% to 60% in ten years, parents' sacrifices to send their children to college, students incurring crushing amounts of college debt, and the rationale for average tuitions now having risen to 257% of their 1986 levels.

The author's assessment was made using the respected 'Collegiate Learning Assessment' (CLA) from the Council for Aid to Education. That group adds that "Academically Adrift" confirms their own findings, and that when combined with our 47 million high school dropouts and the fact that 40% of entering college students cannot read, write, or compute at a college-ready level makes our overall education outputs even dimmer - despite world-leading per-pupil expenditure levels.

As for the article you linked, its reference material on John Taylor Gatto is here: http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm is the only source listed), and seems to be more of a call to action to parents instead of a wholesale "destruction" of the public school system. I suspect he would be OK with public schools if they adopted more workable methods (as he managed to do), as unlikely as this may be in reality. Again, his prime agenda here seems to get people thinking and acting in a manner that would promote genuine independence and learning as opposed to a more sheeplike/cog-in-a-machine type manner that he believes the current system promotes.

And again that doesn't address anything I have actually said.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. His prime agenda is to get people to learn what works in education, and that is the most important thing IMO, both from a theoretical and a practical standpoint. What are the odds that public schools will be completely dismantled with chaos ensuing? Probably right around zero. What are the odds that showing people what works in education will have a positive impact of some sort? I don't know, but it's worth a shot regardless IMO, even if only a few hundred or few thousand learn from him.

I will agree with you here that JTG may be going too far with his statements about getting government out of education, this does not make the rest of his work worth dismissing. To the contrary, if it were adopted by public schools they would be much more able to withstand pressure to privatize IMO, a win-win of sorts.

As stated numerous times in the past, I do not think teachers are aware of the history here, indeed it took John Taylor Gatto many thousands of hours of research after he retired teaching to figure it out himself. Have you read his book or done the research on this yourself? Have your colleagues? If you (or they) haven't, is it really that surprising that you might not understand it, especially if you have been conditioned for years to see matters in a different light?

Excuse me, but I will call bullshit on that statement. John Gatto claims to have researched (of course he also doesn't bother to cite so we have no way to check)...

But, in any case, let me make it easy. Do you want to know what education is all about? ... education is the attempt of one group, to depart the skills and values it deems important to another group, usually the older generation to the younger.

That’s what schools are all about. We quibble about methodology, and of course have loud arguments about WHAT skills and values, but I haven’t seen any other teacher or researcher state the purpose of education any differently than that.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm claims nine years of research, the appendix would would undoubtedly dwarf the book if they were fully listed. The book itself is chalked full of quotes and historical references - which you would know if you actually read it (again, it is free online) - and could easily enough check out for yourself if you were so inclined.

Am I glad that teachers are working to "impart the skills and values it deems important"? If done wisely, sure. The main question however IMO is how well children are being prepared to be healthy, responsible, and productive adults, as the people I reference all seem to understand, in theory and in practice (via teaching). The answer under the modern schooling regiment it seems is "not so well", good intentions and hard work aside.

People in general tend to herd together and not deeply question what they have been taught. Intelligent people adopt and defend flawed paradigms all the time, even when the evidence showing a better way forward is laid out for them. http://amasci.com/weird/vindac.html is an excellent article dealing with this subject, I highly recommend everyone here read and reflect on it, society would be greatly improved IMO if this were better understood.

And certain people always want to be the ones to be in on the secret know.

Of course, this isn't the first time you've attempted this. It’s also important to note that the website you posted means very little, of course we don’t know the failures, because the failures tend to not get recorded. The problem with saying that the mavericks are right is that it glosses over the problem of HOW they were right, they were right because they could show better data, not just their opinions.

I assume the "certain people" and ..."isn't the first time you've attempted this" lines are more cheap shots?

Aside from that, you completely missed the point of the site as I referenced it, namely that open mindedness and investigation are highly important in our modern age, and that those who fail in these areas are dooming themselves to substandard results, if not outright failure and/or harm. And again, the 5+ "mavericks" I referenced did show results in educating people, just as those maverick scientists had the data to back them up and were shunned or ignored. Your decision to ignore these results is on you, not on me.

With all due respect, some of the "problems" noted in that article seem very illogical. The idea that someone could monopolize private schooling was the one I recall the most, something that would be very unlikely due to the extreme costs involved in cornering a market, and using the (absurd IMO) assumption that children and parents would reward bad private schools with their $10 500 dollars if they weren't doing a decent job of educating the children. As noted earlier, free markets tend strongly to increase quality of goods and services while reducing costs, unless someone can prove to me why education would not be in line with almost every other free-market service in recorded history I suspect the same trend would hold true...

Have you ever bothered to look at schooling outside the US? Try some of the public schools (Private) in the UK, their histories and horror stories.

Then read Jennifer Government.

Are you really suggesting that private schools would be like old-school boarding schools in the UK? The cultural differences (focus on individuality in the US for example) make this seem highly unlikely to me.

As for "Jennifer Government", I don't read fiction, as I seldom find it relevant to real-world issues. That said, the author's construction of this site might suggest a better-than-average understanding of politics and such, so this is hardly a dismissal of his understanding or his work on my part.

I have heard some serious complaints by heads of US industry about "functional illiteracy". Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" segments show many of the (very ignorant) students of the US public school system, according to him the people he interviews are more the norm than the exception, he says it takes very little time to film those segments.

Really? You're using the idea of a talk show host's segment that is designed to make people look stupid as evidence? REALLY?!

Normally I would shy away from such data, but when highly ignorant people are so prevalent in the US that one can find tons of them in a very short period of time, yes, I take this as a bad sign. And the questions he asks tend to be basic ones that everyone should readily know (or be able to reason out), if anyone looks "stupid" when trying to answer them it is probably because they have gotten a terrible education, which speaks to the topic at hand...

Also, it would appear that the results of Mr. Gatto's teaching were better than most or all of those (OECD) countries, which would be the better metric here IMO in terms of judging his thinking on this subject.

Uh, no they weren't. Unless you can show me that his students went head to head on those tests...

Well, if a 3 time New York Teacher of the Year isn't getting better results than the average OECD country, what results are the students of other teachers getting I wonder? Logical deduction and reasoning do have a place IMO, regardless of whether or not attempts to utilize them lead to someone forming an "opinion" without hard data.

The OP was about public schools, so I'll keep to that.

In 60 years of education, how much true innovation or alternatives have been deeply studies and implemented? The only significant change that I am aware of is the massive increase in funding, without a subsequent rise in performance. If the school system was working well, would the right have any real leverage to push privatization? I think not.

I'll stop right here, because everything you have shown to me so far is that your own background is reading nothing but John Gatto. You have not actually studied the history of education and what trends have been used in schools. The methods and methodology has changed, greatly, from when I was a student to when I started studying to be a teacher. To use my own discipline, the last few decades has seen a huge switch from Audio-lingual to PPP, and even that is now dying as newer methods of language instruction (Such as task based) are providing better results. Since you do not know and I honestly do not feel the need to re-type my college textbooks, all I can really say is that if you honestly, truly, want to know I will be glad to recommend you a number of scholarly books about the development of education.

But I would suspect that you don't because of your last quote. Because you do not seem to get a point that even ZR admits to, it ain't about getting educated students, it's about being annoyed that they have to pay taxes to public schools.

And yet more unsubstantiated slander (last line), wow, you were really on a roll with this post, weren't you?
FWIW, I will accept an apology for this rudeness in these threads should it be offered.

Am I concerned with the "trends" that have been used in schools if the best research and educators have been ignored? Not so much.
Am I concerned with small changes to the current system that also fail to address the main ideas of these top-level educators and thinkers, and fail to show similar results? Not so much.

As for the "development of education", I will respectfully say this: Unless those sources deal with the foundations of education as revealed in JTG's book, or unless you can disprove JTG's work in this area, then the fundamental problems/inefficiencies remain IMO, and this should probably be an area of investigation and discussion for everyone connected to the US educational system.

I have read and reflected on the five authors I mentioned, and others in addition to those. You have shown no indication of doing so, despite the numerous references and links I have provided, and despite the concern apparently shown for many years by NSG forumers with the current educational system. Do you really think you have moral or factual standing to accuse me of unsubstantiated opinion when you apparently refuse to check into these things for yourself?

Again, nothing personal here, but I do think that significant improvements can be made to the current educational system, and feel that it is quite legitimate to discuss them, even with members of that system.
No offense is intended nor implied by the expression of my differences of opinion here.

[Mr Bananagrabber]

As for "Jennifer Government", I don't read fiction...

But don't you read Austrian economics? Ohhhh burn!

[NERVUN]

*Snip*

Then we are done here, you refuse to actually read anything other than Gatto and I tire of explaining why Gatto is not the most brilliant man on the planet.

[Southern Babylonia]

It's pretty obvious that school is not prison. Consider the work of Epstein & Dumas: in a questionnaire on restrictions of rights, prisoners had an average score of 14,6. This isn't anything close to the 26,6 students averaged. (For reference, the average non-institutionalised civilian scores 2,3.)

...I don't understand what you mean by this.

[-St George]

None of those 5 things has anything to do with what constitutes a prison.

Life is a prison then. What are you gonna do, rebel against physics?

DOWN WITH EINSTEIN

[Southern Babylonia]

I happen to be lucky enough to have fairly liberal parents, although not always. Just last night I had to argue with my parents for 10 minutes because they were trying to make me go to bed when it was only 11 pm, where it really was none of their business, also it was a weekend and I didn't have to catch the bus or ANYTHING AT ALL. The reason it was none of their business is because I was going to put myself to bed, reason being I'm not a baby. But they didn't care about that, it was just an impossible-to-understand redirect of bossing people around based on... based on what again? I don't understand a thing. It was also kinda hilarious how they initially thought I'd obey like an electrical robot dog. In the end they caved in, and then when I finally went to bed, they were still awake for some reason even though they'd previously told me they were gonna go to bed.

Does this make sense to you?

[Ryadn]

Your personal belief still isn't reality. I know that insisting it IS reality seems like evidence enough, but it isn't.

Definition of PRISON
1
: a state of confinement or captivity

This matches mandatory school. The amount of time spent there is irrelevant, as are argumentum ad populum (espoused by many others in the debate).

I am confined to Earth. I am a captive of gravity. Ergo, every living being except for astronauts currently in space is a prisoner.

STOP OPPRESSING ME, PLANET!

[Ryadn]

This debate about the definition of prison and whether compulsory schooling constitutes imprisonment is silly and serves as an overly dramatic distraction from the real argument. Earth, as I have sarcastically suggested, is in reality far more similar to prison than school. The barriers of escape from prison are as physical as gravity; it is nearly physically impossible to escape from prison or Earth. There are very few physical impediments to escaping school: the doors are not locked; students are not shackled; guards are not posted with guns. Leaving school carries consequences, sometimes legal consequences. Consequences accompany most decisions in life. Whether or not you agree that such consequences should accompany that decision is irrelevant to the fact that consequences are not physical barriers.

The real argument here seems to me to center around the legal status of minors and what rights, responsibilities and restrictions ought to accompany that legal status. I will try to address that argument in as few points as possible and as briefly as possible.

1. Minors have a distinct legal status in all modern societies which accords them both more and fewer rights than adult citizens. This legal status is modern society's best attempt to account for the fact that children, while human beings with functioning thoughts and feelings, do not complete the physical, mental and emotional development necessary to exist within society until they are nearly 25. A five-year-old child is fundamentally incapable of operating as a self-reliant individual in society. This is a fact of nature, and it is both a moral obligation and in the best interest of society to protect children until they are self-reliant individuals.

2. Because children are unable to care for themselves, and because parents choose to bring them into the world, parents are legally charged with care of children until the age of majority (or, in rare cases, emancipation). This is in the best interest of both children and society.

3. This legal status affords children special rights that adults do not have. No one is legally charged with my care; no one is legally obligated to feed, clothe or house me. My survival is entirely legally dependent upon me.

4. This legal status also removes certain rights from children that all adults have. There are no restrictions upon my movement or activities that are not put on the movement and activities of all civilians (in general); no one gets to make decisions for me about where I go or what I do, so long as it is legal.

5. These rights and restrictions must coexist. In order for parents to provide for children, a measure of power over children must be given to parents, for a child's own protection. The same inability of a five-year-old to hold a job and earn her/his own wages makes her incapable of making rational decisions in other areas of life. A child of a certain age does not have the mental or emotional maturity to understand why it is important to go to school, or eat vegetables, or go to bed at a certain time. If someone argues that children of all ages do possess such maturity, no further debate can be held, because such a person denies and ignores the very facts of nature.

6. What debate CAN be held is at what age individuals should be afforded the rights and responsibilities of adulthood; to what degree parents should decide a child's circumstances; and when outside agencies should intervene on behalf of a child's rights. The OP has argued that a child being abused should be allowed to free him/herself. While a compassionate argument, it ignores the questions of what constitutes abuse (anything the child does not want to do? having a curfew? being made to eat broccoli?) and how the child's well-being will be insured after removal from the home (left on his/her own? taken as a ward of the state? given to relatives?). In the wild, a young animal who chose to leave the protection of home would be forced to survive on its own, and would likely suffer negative consequences, including injury and death. It would be sad if, as mostly rational and caring creatures, we could not provide better for our young.

7. While schooling has been portrayed as a government entity, it is, in fact, only possible through parent agreement and complicity. Children are registered in school by parents; parents suffer the consequences most often for truancy. This is not a matter of government imprisoning children, it is a matter of parents making decisions for children about what is good for them. While parents do not always make the best decisions, this right is, as mentioned above, a necessary part of parents' protection of children until they reach adulthood. To argue against this right--to say parents should have no power over children in any way--makes society's ability to provide for and rear children to adulthood impossible.


Now that's done, I have to go write some lesson plans. It's a surprising amount of work to imprison children.

[Jinos]

^ Standing ovation.

[Dyakovo]

This debate about the definition of prison and whether compulsory schooling constitutes imprisonment is silly and serves as an overly dramatic distraction from the real argument. Earth, as I have sarcastically suggested, is in reality far more similar to prison than school. The barriers of escape from prison are as physical as gravity; it is nearly physically impossible to escape from prison or Earth. There are very few physical impediments to escaping school: the doors are not locked; students are not shackled; guards are not posted with guns. Leaving school carries consequences, sometimes legal consequences. Consequences accompany most decisions in life. Whether or not you agree that such consequences should accompany that decision is irrelevant to the fact that consequences are not physical barriers.

The real argument here seems to me to center around the legal status of minors and what rights, responsibilities and restrictions ought to accompany that legal status. I will try to address that argument in as few points as possible and as briefly as possible.

1. Minors have a distinct legal status in all modern societies which accords them both more and fewer rights than adult citizens. This legal status is modern society's best attempt to account for the fact that children, while human beings with functioning thoughts and feelings, do not complete the physical, mental and emotional development necessary to exist within society until they are nearly 25. A five-year-old child is fundamentally incapable of operating as a self-reliant individual in society. This is a fact of nature, and it is both a moral obligation and in the best interest of society to protect children until they are self-reliant individuals.

2. Because children are unable to care for themselves, and because parents choose to bring them into the world, parents are legally charged with care of children until the age of majority (or, in rare cases, emancipation). This is in the best interest of both children and society.

3. This legal status affords children special rights that adults do not have. No one is legally charged with my care; no one is legally obligated to feed, clothe or house me. My survival is entirely legally dependent upon me.

4. This legal status also removes certain rights from children that all adults have. There are no restrictions upon my movement or activities that are not put on the movement and activities of all civilians (in general); no one gets to make decisions for me about where I go or what I do, so long as it is legal.

5. These rights and restrictions must coexist. In order for parents to provide for children, a measure of power over children must be given to parents, for a child's own protection. The same inability of a five-year-old to hold a job and earn her/his own wages makes her incapable of making rational decisions in other areas of life. A child of a certain age does not have the mental or emotional maturity to understand why it is important to go to school, or eat vegetables, or go to bed at a certain time. If someone argues that children of all ages do possess such maturity, no further debate can be held, because such a person denies and ignores the very facts of nature.

6. What debate CAN be held is at what age individuals should be afforded the rights and responsibilities of adulthood; to what degree parents should decide a child's circumstances; and when outside agencies should intervene on behalf of a child's rights. The OP has argued that a child being abused should be allowed to free him/herself. While a compassionate argument, it ignores the questions of what constitutes abuse (anything the child does not want to do? having a curfew? being made to eat broccoli?) and how the child's well-being will be insured after removal from the home (left on his/her own? taken as a ward of the state? given to relatives?). In the wild, a young animal who chose to leave the protection of home would be forced to survive on its own, and would likely suffer negative consequences, including injury and death. It would be sad if, as mostly rational and caring creatures, we could not provide better for our young.

7. While schooling has been portrayed as a government entity, it is, in fact, only possible through parent agreement and complicity. Children are registered in school by parents; parents suffer the consequences most often for truancy. This is not a matter of government imprisoning children, it is a matter of parents making decisions for children about what is good for them. While parents do not always make the best decisions, this right is, as mentioned above, a necessary part of parents' protection of children until they reach adulthood. To argue against this right--to say parents should have no power over children in any way--makes society's ability to provide for and rear children to adulthood impossible.

Now that's done, I have to go write some lesson plans. It's a surprising amount of work to imprison children.

[Kulnae]

This debate about the definition of prison and whether compulsory schooling constitutes imprisonment is silly and serves as an overly dramatic distraction from the real argument. Earth, as I have sarcastically suggested, is in reality far more similar to prison than school. The barriers of escape from prison are as physical as gravity; it is nearly physically impossible to escape from prison or Earth. There are very few physical impediments to escaping school: the doors are not locked; students are not shackled; guards are not posted with guns. Leaving school carries consequences, sometimes legal consequences. Consequences accompany most decisions in life. Whether or not you agree that such consequences should accompany that decision is irrelevant to the fact that consequences are not physical barriers.

The real argument here seems to me to center around the legal status of minors and what rights, responsibilities and restrictions ought to accompany that legal status. I will try to address that argument in as few points as possible and as briefly as possible.

1. Minors have a distinct legal status in all modern societies which accords them both more and fewer rights than adult citizens. This legal status is modern society's best attempt to account for the fact that children, while human beings with functioning thoughts and feelings, do not complete the physical, mental and emotional development necessary to exist within society until they are nearly 25. A five-year-old child is fundamentally incapable of operating as a self-reliant individual in society. This is a fact of nature, and it is both a moral obligation and in the best interest of society to protect children until they are self-reliant individuals.

2. Because children are unable to care for themselves, and because parents choose to bring them into the world, parents are legally charged with care of children until the age of majority (or, in rare cases, emancipation). This is in the best interest of both children and society.

3. This legal status affords children special rights that adults do not have. No one is legally charged with my care; no one is legally obligated to feed, clothe or house me. My survival is entirely legally dependent upon me.

4. This legal status also removes certain rights from children that all adults have. There are no restrictions upon my movement or activities that are not put on the movement and activities of all civilians (in general); no one gets to make decisions for me about where I go or what I do, so long as it is legal.

5. These rights and restrictions must coexist. In order for parents to provide for children, a measure of power over children must be given to parents, for a child's own protection. The same inability of a five-year-old to hold a job and earn her/his own wages makes her incapable of making rational decisions in other areas of life. A child of a certain age does not have the mental or emotional maturity to understand why it is important to go to school, or eat vegetables, or go to bed at a certain time. If someone argues that children of all ages do possess such maturity, no further debate can be held, because such a person denies and ignores the very facts of nature.

6. What debate CAN be held is at what age individuals should be afforded the rights and responsibilities of adulthood; to what degree parents should decide a child's circumstances; and when outside agencies should intervene on behalf of a child's rights. The OP has argued that a child being abused should be allowed to free him/herself. While a compassionate argument, it ignores the questions of what constitutes abuse (anything the child does not want to do? having a curfew? being made to eat broccoli?) and how the child's well-being will be insured after removal from the home (left on his/her own? taken as a ward of the state? given to relatives?). In the wild, a young animal who chose to leave the protection of home would be forced to survive on its own, and would likely suffer negative consequences, including injury and death. It would be sad if, as mostly rational and caring creatures, we could not provide better for our young.

7. While schooling has been portrayed as a government entity, it is, in fact, only possible through parent agreement and complicity. Children are registered in school by parents; parents suffer the consequences most often for truancy. This is not a matter of government imprisoning children, it is a matter of parents making decisions for children about what is good for them. While parents do not always make the best decisions, this right is, as mentioned above, a necessary part of parents' protection of children until they reach adulthood. To argue against this right--to say parents should have no power over children in any way--makes society's ability to provide for and rear children to adulthood impossible.


Now that's done, I have to go write some lesson plans. It's a surprising amount of work to imprison children.

Wish I had the patience to write that much.

[Farnhamia]

This debate about the definition of prison and whether compulsory schooling constitutes imprisonment is silly and serves as an overly dramatic distraction from the real argument. Earth, as I have sarcastically suggested, is in reality far more similar to prison than school. The barriers of escape from prison are as physical as gravity; it is nearly physically impossible to escape from prison or Earth. There are very few physical impediments to escaping school: the doors are not locked; students are not shackled; guards are not posted with guns. Leaving school carries consequences, sometimes legal consequences. Consequences accompany most decisions in life. Whether or not you agree that such consequences should accompany that decision is irrelevant to the fact that consequences are not physical barriers.

The real argument here seems to me to center around the legal status of minors and what rights, responsibilities and restrictions ought to accompany that legal status. I will try to address that argument in as few points as possible and as briefly as possible.

1. Minors have a distinct legal status in all modern societies which accords them both more and fewer rights than adult citizens. This legal status is modern society's best attempt to account for the fact that children, while human beings with functioning thoughts and feelings, do not complete the physical, mental and emotional development necessary to exist within society until they are nearly 25. A five-year-old child is fundamentally incapable of operating as a self-reliant individual in society. This is a fact of nature, and it is both a moral obligation and in the best interest of society to protect children until they are self-reliant individuals.

2. Because children are unable to care for themselves, and because parents choose to bring them into the world, parents are legally charged with care of children until the age of majority (or, in rare cases, emancipation). This is in the best interest of both children and society.

3. This legal status affords children special rights that adults do not have. No one is legally charged with my care; no one is legally obligated to feed, clothe or house me. My survival is entirely legally dependent upon me.

4. This legal status also removes certain rights from children that all adults have. There are no restrictions upon my movement or activities that are not put on the movement and activities of all civilians (in general); no one gets to make decisions for me about where I go or what I do, so long as it is legal.

5. These rights and restrictions must coexist. In order for parents to provide for children, a measure of power over children must be given to parents, for a child's own protection. The same inability of a five-year-old to hold a job and earn her/his own wages makes her incapable of making rational decisions in other areas of life. A child of a certain age does not have the mental or emotional maturity to understand why it is important to go to school, or eat vegetables, or go to bed at a certain time. If someone argues that children of all ages do possess such maturity, no further debate can be held, because such a person denies and ignores the very facts of nature.

6. What debate CAN be held is at what age individuals should be afforded the rights and responsibilities of adulthood; to what degree parents should decide a child's circumstances; and when outside agencies should intervene on behalf of a child's rights. The OP has argued that a child being abused should be allowed to free him/herself. While a compassionate argument, it ignores the questions of what constitutes abuse (anything the child does not want to do? having a curfew? being made to eat broccoli?) and how the child's well-being will be insured after removal from the home (left on his/her own? taken as a ward of the state? given to relatives?). In the wild, a young animal who chose to leave the protection of home would be forced to survive on its own, and would likely suffer negative consequences, including injury and death. It would be sad if, as mostly rational and caring creatures, we could not provide better for our young.

7. While schooling has been portrayed as a government entity, it is, in fact, only possible through parent agreement and complicity. Children are registered in school by parents; parents suffer the consequences most often for truancy. This is not a matter of government imprisoning children, it is a matter of parents making decisions for children about what is good for them. While parents do not always make the best decisions, this right is, as mentioned above, a necessary part of parents' protection of children until they reach adulthood. To argue against this right--to say parents should have no power over children in any way--makes society's ability to provide for and rear children to adulthood impossible.


Now that's done, I have to go write some lesson plans. It's a surprising amount of work to imprison children.

Brava, Ryadn, bravissima.

And I ran across this today, which also makes a certain amount of sense.

[The Black Forrest]

NERVUN: Regarding your level of rudeness or near-rudeness in your post here, please note that it is my preference and intention to be polite and professional in my discussions here. That noted, this shouldn't be taken to mean I am willing to accept being talked down to, especially by someone who doesn't seem to meet the criteria they are judging me on.

Nervun....rude?......... I am sorry he is one of the more polite mods around here. When dispensing justice; he always apologies when he beats me with a trout.

Nervun? Is the enough sucking up? Can I be a mod now?

[The Atlantean Menace]

1. Children are treated like criminals, and they will in turn act like criminals. There is nothing that says "you are a criminal" more than locking a child up for the better half of the day. Once in school, kids form their own cliques (equivalent to prison gangs) and segregate themselves based on class, race etc.

"Locking kids up" is a bit extreme. On the other hand, I do think that raising the dropout age to 18 is stupid. By the time someone is 16, they're mature enough to truly decide whether or not they want to continue going to school. And they can always get their GED later.

So forcing kids in their late teens to attend school is dumb. Forcing 8 year olds to go to school is not. Also, cliques are not like prison gangs, Jesus Christ. Calling a clique similar to a prison gang is like saying a couple people who go out for drinks together a lot are similar to the Crips.

2. Parents don't give a shit about their kids, mainly because there is a free daycare available. This free daycare is the public education system, which provides an opportunity to dump your kids off in jail all day, and incentivizes it. Have you ever wondered why the school day often starts at 7 in the morning, when studies show that children learn better when they actually get sleep? The reason why is because the parents need to be off to work by that time, so they need to be able to throw their kids in the daycare early in the morning. Nothing says "I don't give a shit about you" more than abandoning your child in a prison for the day.

Yeah...Or maybe it says "I have to work so I can support and provide a good life for you."

3. Some kids aren't meant to be in school. Children are energetic, and they don't always sit in a desk for hours and hours when you want them to. Kids learn better at early ages, so you need to make sure you can mould their minds into the husks you want them to be early on, so instead of waiting for them to be mentally and emotionally mature enough for schooling, you chemically lobotomize them so they will comply with your demands easier.

...Chemically lobotimize? You have to be fucking kidding me, it's not like every elementary school kid is strapped down and shot full of ritalin every day by the school nurse. Such drugs are only prescribed by a psychiatrist with parental permission. And while some drugs certainly are overprescribed, the psychiatric community is realizing this and becoming less likely to hand ritalin to any kid who seems hyperactive.

4. School offers an opportunity to teach kids that nothing can ever be accomplished, and that life is a waste of time. Before anything of substance can be completed in the classroom, the bell rings and you are off to your next menial task. Basically, this is how the system turns kids into procrastinators. John Gatto, a former teacher of the year writes about the REAL lessons kids learn in the classroom. Instead of listing them all here, I will just direct you to this link.

Actually, based on my experience, about an hour is a decent class length, and that's the class length in most high schools. Take math, for example - I don't know about other people's experiences, but if I spend more than an hour doing repetitive problems designed to drill two or three formulas into my head, I need to take a break from it and come back to it later.

5. Instead of gaining working experience and bonding time with their parents, children are forced to go to compulsory prison. At a young age, children should be working part time and learning important habits like the value of hard work and the value of money. After work, children should come home to a loving parent who homeschools them one on one and teaches them all the necessary fields of study. Instead of relegating the parenting of your child to a bunch of bureaucrats, a parent should stay home and affectionately guide their children, cultivating their interests and stirring their imaginations.

Not all parents can afford to stay home. Not all parents are even remotely qualified to teach every (or any) subject.

So what do you think of my reasons for the disrespectful youth, and my solutions I intermittently offered throughout? There are more, these are just the first five things I thought to write down.

They're awful. Allow me to present mine:


1: End rote memorization. It is a useless technique that leads to students forgetting most of what they learned after the test. Mnemoics, memory palace techniques, and other memory methods are far, far superior in terms of actually creating memories that will last.

2: End tests with no reflection on the real world. Math is a good example of this. In the real world, you can use a calculator if you need to. In the real world, you can look up a formula or a theorem if you can't remember it off the top of your head. While there are some things people should be able to do from memory/without a calculator (Find a variable, addition, division, simple stuff,) there are other things where the way to solve it on the test has almost nothing to do with how you'd do it in reality.

3: Teach critical thinking. Schools do not do shit to teach this.

4: Stop teaching idealized fantasies in government and economics classes. What's the point of teaching kids about how the government works if you're not going to teach them how the government ACTUALLY works?

5: Reduce graduation requirements in certain fields. While expecting kids to learn geometry and basic biology is a good idea, there's no reason to make every student take 3 or 4 years of math, science, english, and history. A kid who wants to be a journalist has no use for calculus. A kid who wants to be a biologist doesn't need to read the Iliad. A kid who wants to be an Electrical Engineer doesn't need to know about obscure things that happened in the 800s.

Now, obviously, learning some history, science, english, and math is essential to being a well-rounded individual - however, being forced to sit through classes you have no interest in at all and that will have no use in your career can be very, very frustrating and draining. You know how in high school math, at some point every year, some kid would ask the teacher what the use of this was? I got to a high enough math where the only answer the teacher could think of to that question was "If you're a math teacher teaching this class you'd need to know it."

Needless to say, this did not improve the class' morale, since most of us did not want to be math teachers.

6: Stop teaching history based on dates. This reduces history, one of the single most fascinating subjects, into a soul-crushing exercise removed of all it's vigor and wonder.

7: Stop teaching to the stupid kids. The problem with the "everyone should graduate from high school" crowd is that they've made it so being a high school graduate doesn't mean anything, because the curriculum has changed so that everyone CAN graduate from high school. "Honors" and "AP" should not mean "non-stupid."

8: Stop blaming students for the problems in the education system. The goal of the education system is to educate students - therefore, if the students are not being educated, it is the education system that's the problem.

9: Be more willing to kick people the fuck out. Schools are a little too hesitant to expel students, particularly for things like harassment. I don't think a kid should be thrown out for insulting another kid once in awhile, but if the school has several dozen complaints about bullying from different people, the kid should be kicked out, since he's obviously making the schools atmosphere hostile.

10: Be more willing to kick teachers the fuck out. Some teachers can't teach. These teachers should be fired. Period. For example, in high school we got a new German teacher. She could not speak German accurately at all. The third and fourth year German kids spent the entire class correcting her, and didn't learn anything. Most of the German I and II kids dropped because they realized that learning German wrong would just make it so that they had to not just learn it right, but unlearn the things that were wrong in the future. German exchange students called her "the worst adult German speaker" they'd ever met.

It took her 2 years to get fired. It should've taken her two months.

[Minsies]

1. Children are treated like criminals, and they will in turn act like criminals. There is nothing that says "you are a criminal" more than locking a child up for the better half of the day. Once in school, kids form their own cliques (equivalent to prison gangs) and segregate themselves based on class, race etc.

"Locking kids up" is a bit extreme. On the other hand, I do think that raising the dropout age to 18 is stupid. By the time someone is 16, they're mature enough to truly decide whether or not they want to continue going to school. And they can always get their GED later.

So forcing kids in their late teens to attend school is dumb. Forcing 8 year olds to go to school is not. Also, cliques are not like prison gangs, Jesus Christ. Calling a clique similar to a prison gang is like saying a couple people who go out for drinks together a lot are similar to the Crips.

2. Parents don't give a shit about their kids, mainly because there is a free daycare available. This free daycare is the public education system, which provides an opportunity to dump your kids off in jail all day, and incentivizes it. Have you ever wondered why the school day often starts at 7 in the morning, when studies show that children learn better when they actually get sleep? The reason why is because the parents need to be off to work by that time, so they need to be able to throw their kids in the daycare early in the morning. Nothing says "I don't give a shit about you" more than abandoning your child in a prison for the day.

Yeah...Or maybe it says "I have to work so I can support and provide a good life for you."

3. Some kids aren't meant to be in school. Children are energetic, and they don't always sit in a desk for hours and hours when you want them to. Kids learn better at early ages, so you need to make sure you can mould their minds into the husks you want them to be early on, so instead of waiting for them to be mentally and emotionally mature enough for schooling, you chemically lobotomize them so they will comply with your demands easier.

...Chemically lobotimize? You have to be fucking kidding me, it's not like every elementary school kid is strapped down and shot full of ritalin every day by the school nurse. Such drugs are only prescribed by a psychiatrist with parental permission. And while some drugs certainly are overprescribed, the psychiatric community is realizing this and becoming less likely to hand ritalin to any kid who seems hyperactive.

4. School offers an opportunity to teach kids that nothing can ever be accomplished, and that life is a waste of time. Before anything of substance can be completed in the classroom, the bell rings and you are off to your next menial task. Basically, this is how the system turns kids into procrastinators. John Gatto, a former teacher of the year writes about the REAL lessons kids learn in the classroom. Instead of listing them all here, I will just direct you to this link.

Actually, based on my experience, about an hour is a decent class length, and that's the class length in most high schools. Take math, for example - I don't know about other people's experiences, but if I spend more than an hour doing repetitive problems designed to drill two or three formulas into my head, I need to take a break from it and come back to it later.

5. Instead of gaining working experience and bonding time with their parents, children are forced to go to compulsory prison. At a young age, children should be working part time and learning important habits like the value of hard work and the value of money. After work, children should come home to a loving parent who homeschools them one on one and teaches them all the necessary fields of study. Instead of relegating the parenting of your child to a bunch of bureaucrats, a parent should stay home and affectionately guide their children, cultivating their interests and stirring their imaginations.

Not all parents can afford to stay home. Not all parents are even remotely qualified to teach every (or any) subject.

So what do you think of my reasons for the disrespectful youth, and my solutions I intermittently offered throughout? There are more, these are just the first five things I thought to write down.

They're awful. Allow me to present mine:


1: End rote memorization. It is a useless technique that leads to students forgetting most of what they learned after the test. Mnemoics, memory palace techniques, and other memory methods are far, far superior in terms of actually creating memories that will last.

2: End tests with no reflection on the real world. Math is a good example of this. In the real world, you can use a calculator if you need to. In the real world, you can look up a formula or a theorem if you can't remember it off the top of your head. While there are some things people should be able to do from memory/without a calculator (Find a variable, addition, division, simple stuff,) there are other things where the way to solve it on the test has almost nothing to do with how you'd do it in reality.

3: Teach critical thinking. Schools do not do shit to teach this.

4: Stop teaching idealized fantasies in government and economics classes. What's the point of teaching kids about how the government works if you're not going to teach them how the government ACTUALLY works?

5: Reduce graduation requirements in certain fields. While expecting kids to learn geometry and basic biology is a good idea, there's no reason to make every student take 3 or 4 years of math, science, english, and history. A kid who wants to be a journalist has no use for calculus. A kid who wants to be a biologist doesn't need to read the Iliad. A kid who wants to be an Electrical Engineer doesn't need to know about obscure things that happened in the 800s.

Now, obviously, learning some history, science, english, and math is essential to being a well-rounded individual - however, being forced to sit through classes you have no interest in at all and that will have no use in your career can be very, very frustrating and draining. You know how in high school math, at some point every year, some kid would ask the teacher what the use of this was? I got to a high enough math where the only answer the teacher could think of to that question was "If you're a math teacher teaching this class you'd need to know it."

Needless to say, this did not improve the class' morale, since most of us did not want to be math teachers.

6: Stop teaching history based on dates. This reduces history, one of the single most fascinating subjects, into a soul-crushing exercise removed of all it's vigor and wonder.

7: Stop teaching to the stupid kids. The problem with the "everyone should graduate from high school" crowd is that they've made it so being a high school graduate doesn't mean anything, because the curriculum has changed so that everyone CAN graduate from high school. "Honors" and "AP" should not mean "non-stupid."

8: Stop blaming students for the problems in the education system. The goal of the education system is to educate students - therefore, if the students are not being educated, it is the education system that's the problem.

9: Be more willing to kick people the fuck out. Schools are a little too hesitant to expel students, particularly for things like harassment. I don't think a kid should be thrown out for insulting another kid once in awhile, but if the school has several dozen complaints about bullying from different people, the kid should be kicked out, since he's obviously making the schools atmosphere hostile.

10: Be more willing to kick teachers the fuck out. Some teachers can't teach. These teachers should be fired. Period. For example, in high school we got a new German teacher. She could not speak German accurately at all. The third and fourth year German kids spent the entire class correcting her, and didn't learn anything. Most of the German I and II kids dropped because they realized that learning German wrong would just make it so that they had to not just learn it right, but unlearn the things that were wrong in the future. German exchange students called her "the worst adult German speaker" they'd ever met.

It took her 2 years to get fired. It should've taken her two months.

This is well thought out and pretty accurate. I'm not gonna give you a presidential style blowjob like Ryadn got, though.

[Quelesh]

I am confined to Earth. I am a captive of gravity. Ergo, every living being except for astronauts currently in space is a prisoner.

STOP OPPRESSING ME, PLANET!

Astronauts in space are prisoners too then, as they can't leave the space station without dying from space exposure (EVA suits notwithstanding).

This debate about the definition of prison and whether compulsory schooling constitutes imprisonment is silly and serves as an overly dramatic distraction from the real argument.

I basically agree with this statement. Whether or not to call modern schools "prisons" is a matter of semantics. It doesn't matter what the label is; it matters what the thing itself is.

There are similarities between schools and prisons. For example, it's a crime for a prisoner to leave the prison without permission and it's also a crime (truancy) for a student to leave the school during school hours without permission. However, there are a great many significant differences between them as well.

There are very few physical impediments to escaping school: the doors are not locked; students are not shackled; guards are not posted with guns.

Well, to be fair, there are schools in which the first and third of those statements are true, but they're not the majority. There are also institutions that call themselves "schools" in which the second statement is also true, but these are the "gulag schools," residential behavior modification facilities, and are not representative of actual schools.

1. Minors have a distinct legal status in all modern societies which accords them both more and fewer rights than adult citizens. This legal status is modern society's best attempt to account for the fact that children, while human beings with functioning thoughts and feelings, do not complete the physical, mental and emotional development necessary to exist within society until they are nearly 25.

If you're talking about brain development, the brain is never finished developing. It continues to change and develop throughout life. The average brain of a 15-year-old is considerably superior to the average brain of an 85-year-old in almost all respects (e.g. axon myelination, etc.). If brain structure were the basis for the legal status of minority, people would once again become minors around age 65.

In terms of maturity, while there are differences on the average between the maturity levels of 15-year-olds and 45-year-olds, differences within groups are greater than differences between groups (at least until you look young enough; this probably wouldn't be the case comparing 45-year-olds with 2-year-olds). There is considerable overlap among age groups in terms of emotional maturity and mental competence. Teenagers also often score higher than older adults in tests of intellectual functioning.

A five-year-old child is fundamentally incapable of operating as a self-reliant individual in society. This is a fact of nature, and it is both a moral obligation and in the best interest of society to protect children until they are self-reliant individuals.

This is true for most five-year-olds, at least in our modern society, though I wouldn't say that it's true 100% of the time. However, your basic point is correct; if you look young enough, you'll eventually find an age at which every person of that age is utterly incapable of taking care of themselves: newborn infants. Clearly it is necessary for adults to be completely responsible for providing for the welfare of newborn infants, and this responsibility should gradually be reduced until the child is generally able to care for herself.

The problem is that this happens all at once, rather than gradually, in our legal system, because of its strict chronological age limits. People become adults in reality (capable of taking care of themselves) gradually, but they become adults legally all at once, and the time at which this happens is based not on their actual maturity or competence but on their date of birth.

2. Because children are unable to care for themselves, and because parents choose to bring them into the world, parents are legally charged with care of children until the age of majority (or, in rare cases, emancipation). This is in the best interest of both children and society.

By referencing the age of majority here, you imply that individuals are unable to care for themselves until their eighteenth birthdays, without exception. It doesn't work that way. Different people develop (emotionally, intellectually and even physically) at radically different rates. There are some 16-year-olds (and some 30-year-olds, for that matter) whom I wouldn't trust as far as I could throw, and there are some 10-year-olds whom I would trust to be responsible if my life were at stake.

3. This legal status affords children special rights that adults do not have. No one is legally charged with my care; no one is legally obligated to feed, clothe or house me. My survival is entirely legally dependent upon me.

That depends upon your definition of "rights." I wouldn't necessarily say that an obligation upon one person creates a right for another person. However, that's a semantic issue. I'll grant your basic point.

4. This legal status also removes certain rights from children that all adults have. There are no restrictions upon my movement or activities that are not put on the movement and activities of all civilians (in general); no one gets to make decisions for me about where I go or what I do, so long as it is legal.

This is also, unfortunately, true.

5. These rights and restrictions must coexist. In order for parents to provide for children, a measure of power over children must be given to parents, for a child's own protection.

Is it necessary, in your opinion, for parental authority to be backed up by the police power of the state, as it is now? If a child runs away from home, the police will track her down and forcibly drag her back (or possibly put her in a real prison). Is this really necessary? Perhaps if leaving home without permission were not a criminal act, parents would have more incentive to provide for their offspring adequately and to not oppress or mistreat them too severely, as they would no longer have a captive audience.

The same inability of a five-year-old to hold a job and earn her/his own wages

I think that even a typical 5-year-old would be capable of working as a Wal-Mart greeter, though I suspect more frequent breaks would be required. I'm not saying that any 5-year-old (or anyone of any age) should be coerced into doing so, but I don't think they're incapable of it either. It's certainly not a categorical impossibility. In certain more primitive societies, even very young children work alongside their families. This seems to demonstrate that they are not universally incompetent.

makes her incapable of making rational decisions in other areas of life.

What's the connection? Incompetence in one area of life does not necessarily translate to incompetence in others. I would be an incompetent president of the United States, but that doesn't mean I would be an incompetent airline pilot. (I'm not saying that very many 5-year-olds could competently fly a B737, but I hope you understand my point, which is that both children and adults can be incompetent at some things and competent at others.)

A child of a certain age does not have the mental or emotional maturity to understand why it is important to go to school, or eat vegetables, or go to bed at a certain time.

While, as I've said, it's certainly true that there exists an age (newborn infancy) at which no one has "the mental or emotional maturity to understand, etc.," to say that no 8-year-old, for example, possesses that maturity is, in my opinion, just as silly as saying that every 8-year-old does. The human species is too diverse for such generalizations.

I agree that parents who are caring for their 8-year-old offspring are more likely than the child in question to understand the benefits of, for example, eating vegetables (full disclosure: I rarely eat vegetables myself, so I would be a hypocrite if I said that children should eat vegetables). I agree that parents could rightly try to convince their daughter to eat vegetables. I even agree that parents could make eating vegetables a condition of continuing to care for her, though I personally think this is going too far. However, since she has no legal right to leave the home, she's a captive audience, and since the parents are prohibited from kicking her out, they have to resort to other measures (such as hitting) to punish her if she refuses to eat her vegetables. This makes the parent/child relationship combative, instead of cooperative as it should be.

Also, as parental authority is backed up by the police force of the state, a parent's commands have the force of statute, as it's a crime ("being a child in need of supervision") to disobey them. I have a serious problem with this.

If someone argues that children of all ages do possess such maturity, no further debate can be held, because such a person denies and ignores the very facts of nature.

I don't argue that all children of all ages do possess such maturity, but I reject the argument that all children of all ages do not.

6. What debate CAN be held is at what age individuals should be afforded the rights and responsibilities of adulthood;

I don't think that "the rights and responsibilities of adulthood" should be granted on the basis of chronological age at all. Chronological age is not the biggest determining factor of maturity or competence (I should say that it's not a determining factor at all; it's merely somewhat loosely correlated with maturity and competence). I think that in cases in which it is necessary to discriminate against the incompetent (e.g. driving), a test for competence should be given rather than relying on a chronological age limit set in statute (in fact, we already have tests for driving competence, so it baffles me why we have a driving age at all), and that in cases in which it is not necessary to discriminate against the incompetent (e.g. voting), we should not do so.

As people develop and mature gradually, any statutory chronological age limit is necessarily absurd and arbitrary. Setting a driving age, for example, of 16 is silly, as there are many people, on both sides of the age line, whose actual competence level does not correspond to their legal age status (who are on the wrong side of the age line). More on-topic for this thread, this argument applies to the school leaving age as well (though I would argue additionally that education should not be compulsory, even for the incompetent, as nearly all children, including very young children, have a natural desire to become competent and generally attempt to do so via learning).

(It occurs to me, looking over what I've written, that I must have a big thing for parentheses as I use so many of them.)

to what degree parents should decide a child's circumstances;

If parents have the right to "decide a child's circumstances," this implies that parents also have a right to use physical force against their children to compel those children to be in the circumstances that the parents have decided upon, and that in cases in which parents are not able to so physically compel their children, the police have the right to arrest and imprison those children. Exceptional circumstances (such as self-defense, for one, or pulling someone, of any age, back before he accidentally runs out into a busy street, for another) notwithstanding, I don't think that anyone, even parents, has the right to use physical force against anyone else, even children.

and when outside agencies should intervene on behalf of a child's rights.

I think outside agencies (e.g. police) should intervene on behalf of the rights of a child under the same circumstances in which they would intervene on behalf of the rights of an adult. In particular, I think that the full protection of assault statutes should be extended to children, and that hitting them should be criminal in circumstances in which it would also be criminal to hit an adult. I think police agencies should protect children from others who would impose their will upon those children by physical force, just as the police do (theoretically) for adults.

The OP has argued that a child being abused should be allowed to free him/herself. While a compassionate argument, it ignores the questions of what constitutes abuse (anything the child does not want to do? having a curfew? being made to eat broccoli?)

I would say that the imposition of physical force is abuse. There are other acts that are abusive as well (emotional abuse, for example), but the use of physical force against another, except in very limited circumstances such as the defense of self or others, is always abuse, regardless of the ages of those involved.

and how the child's well-being will be insured after removal from the home (left on his/her own? taken as a ward of the state? given to relatives?).

There are other alternatives. I think it's possible for children to enter into voluntary arrangements with people who will care for their wellbeing. Usually, at least in our society, this is their parents, but when those parents are derelict or mistreat the child, it should be possible and legal to make other arrangements. If no one else is willing to care for the child, the state (disregarding for the moment my generally anti-state views) should offer to care for him itself, but such care should not be compulsory.

Also, only property can be "given" to someone, and human beings cannot rightly be property.

In the wild, a young animal who chose to leave the protection of home would be forced to survive on its own, and would likely suffer negative consequences, including injury and death. It would be sad if, as mostly rational and caring creatures, we could not provide better for our young.

I agree, but I don't think it's necessary to force children to be cared for. The problem, I think, is that children have far too few options. In the current system, in cases in which a child's parents are not actually violating statute (for example, by hitting the child in a manner which is particularly egregious), the child has no legal alternative to her parents' home at all, even if her home life is intolerable to her, despite her parents' compliance with statute. Even when her parents are violating the law, often her only alternative is to call the police on her parents and (if she's lucky) be taken into state custody and assigned to a foster home, an assignment on which she has no input.

7. While schooling has been portrayed as a government entity, it is, in fact, only possible through parent agreement and complicity. Children are registered in school by parents; parents suffer the consequences most often for truancy.

Schooling is possible without parental complicity. Parents who absolutely refuse to force their children to attend school can be jailed and lose custody of the children, replaced by foster parents who will force them to attend school (and if the child effectively resists her foster parents' efforts to force her to attend school, she can herself be put into an actual prison).

This is not a matter of government imprisoning children, it is a matter of parents making decisions for children about what is good for them.

But those decisions are ultimately backed up by the state and its police force.

While parents do not always make the best decisions, this right is, as mentioned above, a necessary part of parents' protection of children until they reach adulthood.

I hope I've adequately explained why I don't think this is the case. I think children can be quite adequately protected in a voluntary system in which they are not threatened with arrest.

To argue against this right--to say parents should have no power over children in any way--makes society's ability to provide for and rear children to adulthood impossible.

To say that parents should not have the right to use physical force (their own or that of the police) against their children is not to say that they "should have no power over children in any way." Or at least it depends upon the definition of "power." Parents have considerably more experience living within the world than do their young children, and will therefore have considerable influence over their children while those children learn the ways of the world. This is called "natural authority," and I don't object to it. What I do object to is coercive authority, the imposition of force.

Now that's done, I have to go write some lesson plans. It's a surprising amount of work to imprison children.

Be careful, the OP will think you're admitting it.

[Quelesh]

They're awful. Allow me to present mine:

I agree with pretty much all of your suggestions here. Let me add one of my own: end age segregation. Stop segregating students by chronological age ("grade level" has become nothing more than a substitute for age) and instead either do not segregate them, or, if doing so is necessary, segregate them by knowledge and ability.

Primary and secondary school classes should be structured more like college. Each course may have prerequisites, but the prerequisites are all that's needed to take the course; age doesn't factor into it. People can graduate once they've taken all their required courses (and have enough credits otherwise), regardless of how many or few years it takes. Some people will graduate earlier and some later, and that's okay.

The U.S. state of Indiana is offering college scholarships to people who graduate from high school a year early. I think this is an excellent idea.

(I also obviously advocate changing the compulsory nature of schooling, but I think I've talked that one to death for now.)

[Linux and the X]

I agree with pretty much all of your suggestions here. Let me add one of my own: end age segregation. Stop segregating students by chronological age ("grade level" has become nothing more than a substitute for age) and instead either do not segregate them, or, if doing so is necessary, segregate them by knowledge and ability.

To expand on this, while I support ability-based segregation, I think the way it is done currently does not work. It should be possible to take advanced courses in one area while taking general, or even remedial, courses in another.

[Bottle]

I agree with pretty much all of your suggestions here. Let me add one of my own: end age segregation. Stop segregating students by chronological age ("grade level" has become nothing more than a substitute for age) and instead either do not segregate them, or, if doing so is necessary, segregate them by knowledge and ability.

To expand on this, while I support ability-based segregation, I think the way it is done currently does not work. It should be possible to take advanced courses in one area while taking general, or even remedial, courses in another.

I think it is an absolutely horrible idea to segregate kids based purely on knowledge and ability. That's what was done with me at one point, and it was not good for me. Social and emotional maturity NEEDS to be taken into account (and it currently is in most good schools).

[Biop]

Ok can anyone tell me when i will use Bioliogy in EOD When i join the army? Ill never be a doctor, Most of the shit i do at school is useless byeond belief.

[The Rich Port]

Ok can anyone tell me when i will use Bioliogy in EOD When i join the army? Ill never be a doctor, Most of the shit i do at school is useless byeond belief.

... Huh?

[Xsyne]

Ok can anyone tell me when i will use Bioliogy in EOD When i join the army? Ill never be a doctor, Most of the shit i do at school is useless byeond belief.

Dunno, seems to me like knowing the mechanisms of life would be pretty useful if your job description is "kill that guy over there".