#compulsory education

[arinewman7]

Compulsory Education

Briton Rivière

1887

[aprilthe0th]

The problem with the discourse around cheating in school is that it does not distinguish between the 3 types of school:

- Compulsory education, K-12 which you are forced to do by threat of state violence to your guardian, and for which most kids will be punished if they don't do all of the homework which often requires working upwards of 9 hours/day.

- College for college's sake, where you're getting a degree, the knowledge of which you will not use in your career. But you need to have a degree to get hired even though it's not actually a necessary qualification.

- And specialty degrees where you actually need the degree for your future job. Like being a doctor or engineer. And in many cases, if you don't actually know the things you're supposed to, people can get hurt.

I personally think that cheating is morally fine in the first two types, but should be heavily stigmatized in the third.

But, my personal take aside, my real point is that we should make the distinction.

[soyboyanarchy]

Every time I’m watching something American and someone mentions never having gone to school I am so impressed. Like damn you avoided the law for that long?? Only to then remember that in America it is in fact legal to homeschool your children

[ahumourlessworld]

Opinion | Is the Public School System Constitutional?

Education consists mostly in speech, and parents have a right under the First Amendment to exercise authority over what their children hear.

“Mr. Garland’s memo did acknowledge that “spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution.” That is true but doesn’t go nearly far enough. Education is mostly speech, and parents have a constitutional right to choose the speech with which their children will be educated. They therefore cannot constitutionally be compelled, or even pressured, to make their children a captive audience for government indoctrination.

Public education in America has always attempted to homogenize and mold the identity of children. Since its largely nativist beginnings around 1840, public education has been valued for corralling most of the poor and middle class into institutions where their religious and ethnic differences could be ironed out in pursuit of common “American” values.

The goal was not merely a shared civic culture. Well into the 20th century, much of the political support for public schooling was driven by a fear of Catholicism and an ambition to Protestantize Catholic children. Many Catholics and other minorities escaped the indoctrination of their children by sending them to private schools.

Nativists found that intolerable. Beginning around 1920, they organized to force Catholic children into public education. The success of such a measure in Oregon (with Democratic votes and Ku Klux Klan leadership) prompted the Supreme Court to hold compulsory public education unconstitutional.

The case, Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), was brought by a religious school, not a parent. The justices therefore framed their ruling around the threat to the school’s economic rights. But Pierce says that parents can educate their children outside state schools in accord with the parents’ moral and religious views.

Although the exact nature of this parental freedom is much disputed, it is grounded in the First Amendment. When religious parents claim the freedom, religious liberty seems an especially strong foundation. But the freedom of parents in educating their children belongs to all parents, not only the faithful. Freedom of speech more completely explains this educational liberty.

(…)

The public school system, by design, pressures parents to substitute government educational speech for their own. Public education is a benefit tied to an unconstitutional condition. Parents get subsidized education on the condition that they accept government educational speech in lieu of home or private schooling.

(…)

To be sure, Pierce doesn’t guarantee private education. It merely acknowledges the right of parents to provide it with their own resources. And one may protest that economic pressure is not force. But the Supreme Court has often ruled otherwise.

(…)

When government makes education compulsory and offers it free of charge, it crowds out parental freedom in educational speech. The poorer the parents, the more profound the pressure—and that is by design. Nativists intended to pressure poor and middle-class parents into substituting government educational speech for their own, and their unconstitutional project largely succeeded.

Most parents can’t afford to turn down public schooling. They therefore can’t adopt speech expressive of their own views in educating their children, whether by paying for a private school or dropping out of work to home-school. So they are constrained to adopt government educational speech in place of their own, in violation of the First Amendment.

A long line of Establishment Clause decisions recognize the risk of coercion in public-school messages. In Grand Rapids School District v. Ball (1985), the high court condemned private religious teaching in rooms leased from public schools. “Such indoctrination, if permitted to occur, would have devastating effects on the right of each individual voluntarily to determine what to believe (and what not to believe) free of any coercive pressures from the State,” Justice William Brennan wrote for the majority.

Coercion seemed central in such cases because of the vulnerability of children to indoctrination. Summarizing the court’s jurisprudence, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, concurring in Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), observed that “when government-sponsored religious exercises are directed at impressionable children who are required to attend school, . . . government endorsement is much more likely to result in coerced religious beliefs.”

(…)

Rights are “exceptions” to power, James Madison observed. That is, rights defeat power. But contemporary judicial doctrine allows power to defeat rights—at least when government asserts what is called a compelling interest. One might think that a state’s compelling interest in public education overpowers any parental speech right. Yet because such analysis allows power to subdue rights, it is important to evaluate whether the claimed government interest is really compelling.

The U.S. was founded in an era when almost all schooling was private and religious, and that already suggests that any government interest in public education is neither necessary nor compelling. Further, the idea that public education is a central government interest was popularized by anti-Catholic nativists. Beginning in the mid-19th century, they elevated the public school as a key American institution in their campaign against Catholicism.

In their vision, public schools were essential for inculcating American principles so that children could become independent-minded citizens and thinking voters. The education reformer and politician Horace Mann said that without public schools, American politics would bend toward “those whom ignorance and imbecility have prepared to become slaves.”

That sounds wholesome in the abstract. In practice, it meant that Catholics were mentally enslaved to their priests, and public education was necessary to get to the next generation, imbuing them with Protestant-style ideas so that when they reached adulthood, they would vote more like Protestants.

(…)

The inevitably homogenizing, even indoctrinating, effect of public schools confirms the danger of finding a compelling government interest in them. A 1904 nativist tract grimly declared that the public school is “a great paper mill, into which are cast rags of all kinds and colors, but which lose their special identity and come out white paper, having a common identity. So we want the children of the state, of whatever nationality, color or religion, to pass through this great moral, intellectual and patriotic mill, or transforming process.”

The idea of a common civic culture among children is appealing when it develops voluntarily, but not when state-approved identities and messages are “stamped upon their minds,” as the 1904 tract put it. Far from being a compelling government interest, the project of pressing children into a majority or government mold is a path toward tyranny.

The shared civic culture of 18th-century America was highly civilized, and it developed entirely in private schools. The schools, like the parents who supported them, were diverse in curriculum and their religious outlook, including every shade of Protestantism, plus Judaism, Catholicism, deism and religious indifference.

In their freedom, the 18th-century schools established a common culture. In contrast, public-school coercion has always stimulated division. It was long used to grind down the papalism of Catholic children into something more like Protestantism. Since then, there has been a shift in the beliefs that public schools seek to eradicate. But the schools remain a means by which some Americans force their beliefs on others. That’s why they are still a source of discord. The temptation to indoctrinate the children of others—to impose a common culture by coercion—is an obstacle to working out a genuine common culture.

There is no excuse for maintaining the nativist fiction that public schools are the glue that hold the nation together. They have become the focal point for all that is tearing the nation apart. However good some public schools may be, the system as a whole, being coercive, is a threat to our ability to find common ground. That is the opposite of a compelling government interest.

The public school system therefore is unconstitutional, at least as applied to parents who are pressured to abandon their own educational speech choices and instead adopt the government’s.

Parents should begin by asking judges to recognize—at least in declaratory judgments—that the current system is profoundly unconstitutional. Once that is clear, states will be obliged to figure out solutions. Some may choose to offer tax exemptions for dissenting parents; others may provide vouchers. Either way, states cannot deprive parents of their right to educational speech by pushing children into government schools.”

[melusinemuse]

Capturing the sentiment that would later be described by Gatto, a German philosopher by the name of Johann Gottlieb Fichte famously said in 1807 that “schools must fashion the person and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will.”

Echoing the idea of the factory model of schooling, education historian Kevin Currie-Knight explained that schools historically “inculcated students with habits that would fit them for industrial wage work,” which may inhibit creative pursuits. Economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis similarly argued that the father of American public education, Horace Mann, “was a supporter of the industrial system” and that public schools were meant to train students to take “on as their own the values and objectives of those in authority.” (x)

[fandom-star]

SCOTLAND BECOMES THE FIRST COUNTRY TO HAVE COMPULSORY LGBTI EDUCATION IN SCHOOLS!

Can I transfer to a Scottish school?

[podagogue]

Dude! So last year I dropped my initial secondary project of identifying and teaching/training students with disabilities because it wasn't sustainable since no one would genuinely support me in my school.

But yesterday, I got called by my side principal to the staff room. Of course I feared the worst, but then he invited someone what into the room. A bit walking a bit strangely. He also spoke strangely. Then I saw his thin arms (dude, everyone here has huge muscles) and they were shaking. The VP was deciding whether or not to admit him to the school and knew I could talk to him.

I asked him his name and had him write and while the writing was labored, he was definitely as smart as the other students he'd be joining in his middle school class!

I was all fired up to say to say that I'd teach him 1:1 if I had to. But no need. Due to the new FREE EDUCATION policy in Sierra Leone he could come here. And due to the compulsory education for children iyf a certain age, he'd have to be accepted somewhere. I'm so proud of my school!!!

[lasch-daily]

In soliciting public support, nineteenth-century reformers appealed to the belief that schools under proper professional leadership would facilitate social mobility and the gradual eradication of poverty or, alternately, to the quite different hope that the system would promote order by discouraging ambitions incommensurate with the students' stations and prospects. The latter argument probably appealed more strongly to wealthy benefactors and public officials than the first. Both led to the same conclusions: that the best interests society lay in a system of universal compulsory education which would isolate the student from other influences and subject him to a regular regimen, and that the system must be operated by a centralized professional bureaucracy.

Lasch, “Industrial Discipline to Manpower Selection”, Culture of Narcissism