Loyalty to the State
POSTED BY: canttakesky
UPDATED: Monday, March 31, 2008 03:34
VIEWED: 19263
PAGE 12 of 27
Tumbled to my nefarious plan, have you ?
Yes, truth is that not all of my recruits come from the rabbithole - I got a kinda socrates club goin at the local high school, started as a straight-up advice thing with a friends kid, who thought it was so cool to get straight answers from an adult for once they brought their friends, and we talk, sure.
I do discourage any outright illegal behavior on their behalf, but given the value of an ally in the "adult world" they're ok with that.
It's a bit amazing how limited technical/mechanical education is these days, as of late the topic has been appliance repair and how one can benefit from spending sixty bucks instead of six hundred when your washer breaks down.
-F
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Quote:Tell me Finn, is it legal to give kids chewing gum? Are there statutes regulating the minimum quality of chewing gum for kids?
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
So legislating homeschooling to be legal and applying minimum standards of education to homeschooling are essentially tantamount.
Let's bring the analogy closer to our debate. Is it legal to give kids food, water, clothing, shelter, and medical care? Are there statutes defining minimum standards of food, water, clothing, shelter, and medical care?
All you need for something to be legal is to NOT MAKE IT ILLEGAL. Everything not prohibited by law is legal by default. Yeah, that's how chewing gum gets away with it (sneaky bastards). All you need to make homeschooling legal is delete the phrase "capable of teaching." Short of that, define it to include parents. That's it. As soon as it is NOT prohibited, as soon as it is exempted from current prohibitions, it is legal. Just like that.
Now back to the issue at hand (keep your eyes on the ball, Finn): educational neglect. How does the state define other types of neglect without some minimum standard? Generally, they use evidence of harm combined with a judgment call from the judge and/or jury.
That's right. The statutes don't spell out exactly how many calories you are legally required to feed children or from which food groups. They don't spell out how many hugs to give a day, or minimum amount of parent-child bonding time. They just prosecute you if your child is noticed to be undernourished, or chronically depressed/aggressive/anxious. That is, they prosecute you if they find evidence of harm. There is no reason why this same model can't be applied ot educational neglect as well.
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Quote:So the biggest difference between cooking and educating is how easily you can detect severe neglect in that area "just by looking"? By that reasoning, every type of abuse that you can't detect just by looking should have annual screenings. Do you also want mandatory psychological evaluations for every child every year to prove that parents aren't abusing them emotionally? Why stop at only educational abuse?
Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:
Secondly, you can see malnutritian quite easily in a child. ...How do you work out if someone is being educated, or craply educated? Pretty hard to tell by looking.
And as to your first point, imagine if you will, that you are born into a society that believes proper physical nutrition is a universal right for all children. In fact, they tax all citizens to provide free, public meals for all children. From age 5 to age 18, breakfast, lunch, and dinner are provided by the state, who employs professional dieticians and cooks to
design and prepare those meals. Private mealhouses use the same model to provide meals for parents for a low fee, and join public mealhouses so families can still eat together. After a short while, almost everyone eats at these mealhouses, 3 meals a day. Meal planning becomes considered a specialized activity that should be left to credentialed professionals.
After a while longer, some parents decide they can cook just as well, if not better than professional meal planners. They are disturbed that the annual nutritional testing given at public mealhouses show widespread deficits in nutrition. They want their kids to eat at home. They withdraw their children from public and private mealhouses, and call themselves homecookers. The state makes it legal to cook at home, but requires that parents submit annual proof that their cooking meets professional meal planning standards, including having their children tested for nutritional deficits. Parents wonder why they have to meet these criteria to continue cooking, when failure to do that same in public mealhouses results in no loss of cooking privileges for them.
Despite all the hoops and hurdles, homecooking parents grow as a group. More and more children withdraw from public and private mealhouses to eat homecooking, and they like it. However, whenever a child suffers from nutritional neglect from homecooking, the case is touted as an example of the potential dangers of allowing homecooking. Homecookers and professional meal planners struggle on the legislative battleground over how much oversight the state needs to have over cooking at home.
Whether "most of us" cook at home or educate at home is an artifact of societal norms and regulations.
Quote:You mean, capability? Which capabilities exactly?
not necessarily about guilt or innocence, but about capicity.
Quote:There is a distinction between education and training. Education is the acquisition of knowledge. Training is the acquisition of skills, usually very specialized skills. No one would dispute that training
So surgeons, architects, engineers, computer programmers, biologists, mechanics, electricians, pilots all learn through magic, do they? Think I'd prefer to use the services of those who have a formal qualifications, thanks
all the same.
usually requires apprenticeship to persons (usually professionals) with the desired specialized skills. For the average person, it is hard to acquire piano playing skills without being trained by someone who plays the piano. Same thing goes for surgical skills, piloting skills, car fixing skills, and any other skill that involves physical manipulation.
Some fields such as history, political science, and philsophy are entirely based on mental knowledge obtained through education. Education can be obtained in different ways, one of which is Do-It-Yourself (DIY). Other fields are a mixture of education and training, such as medicine and architecture and piloting. There is no reason that the education part can't be done by yourself, t
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Quote:Yes.
Originally posted by canttakesky:Quote:Tell me Finn, is it legal to give kids chewing gum? Are there statutes regulating the minimum quality of chewing gum for kids?
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
So legislating homeschooling to be legal and applying minimum standards of education to homeschooling are essentially tantamount.
Quote:Yes.
Originally posted by canttakesky:
Let's bring the analogy closer to our debate. Is it legal to give kids food, water, clothing, shelter, and medical care? Are there statutes defining minimum standards of food, water, clothing, shelter, and medical care?
Most of these things are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. I’m not sure how clothing is regulated but I’m pretty sure allowing your child to go naked in an environment in which clothing was needed would be viewed harshly.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
...would be viewed harshly.
Huh
SergeantX
"Dream a little dream or you can live a little dream. I'd rather live it, cause dreamers always chase but never get it." Aesop Rock
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Quote:The FDA regulates *businesses* that sell these products.
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
Most of these things are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.
You want to make me work for it? Fine. Are there statutes that regulate how PARENTS are required to dispense these products to their children? Are there statutes that regulate how many calories parents must give to kids and from which food groups? Are there statutes that tell parents what kind of housing they must provide to be good parents? Or what kind of clothing their children must wear in each season? Are there laws that explicitly govern PARENTS and PARENTING choices?
Don't go misinterpreting these questions again. I know you are smart enough to know what I am asking. So if you go off on some tangent about business regulations again, I would have to interpret that as intentional refusal to counter my point and continue the debate.
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I think CTS is so full of parent's "rights", Sarge is so full of anti-government, and Frem is so interested in "recruits" that they've entirely lost sight of child's welfare. Seems- once again- to more an issue of control than anything else. More later.
---------------------------------
Let's party like it's 1929.
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Quote:Just because you find yourself unable to come up with any substanstive argument against the point I made, doesn’t mean I’m misinterpreting anything. Yes, the FDA regulates businesses. The businesses they are regulating sell products to the families of children. So the food that parents are providing their children, the food you think is completely unregulated, is in fact highly regulated by the FDA in the vast majority of cases before it ever reaches the mouths children in the US.
Originally posted by canttakesky:
Don't go misinterpreting these questions again. I know you are smart enough to know what I am asking. So if you go off on some tangent about business regulations again, I would have to interpret that as intentional refusal to counter my point and continue the debate.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:Huh? I think you are so full of self-righteous hubris that you actually believe you are the only person here who cares about children's welfare. (No, I don't really think that because I feel I know you better. But your accusations sure make it sound like that.) Cmon Sig. Give people the benefit of the doubt that you would like us to give to you, eh? Of course we all want what's best for the children. The debate is what is the best way to achieve that in a complicated world. And if you *really* believe your way is the only right way, and everyone who has a different perspective must not care about children as much as you do, then there is no word for that except hubris.
Originally posted by SignyM:
I think CTS is so full of parent's "rights",
The law already presumes parents to be both innocent and competent for child-rearing, until evidence of harm proves them guilty and incompetent. I am looking for some intellectual consistency of why education should be singled out as legally requiring routine monitoring, when no other child welfare need (food, clothing, shelter, even medical care) has that requirement. How does that translate into "so full of parents' rights," let alone "entirely lost sight of child's welfare"?
It feels like the War on Terrorism debate. If you question the way the problem is being addressed, some people immediately hand out accusations of not caring about America's welfare, or of being unpatriotic, or even of treason.
Let's just debate about the issues without attacking each other's internal commitments shall we? I mean, I don't agree with you and Finn and Mason, and I think in the end, your proposals would hurt many children. But I know you mean well, and I'm not going to attack your commitment to their welfare as part of the debate. How about you do the same for us? Let's move forward with the assumption that we all care about kids and not go there.
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Quote:Oh good grief. I didn't say food is unregulated. I said parents are not regulated in how much food and what kind of food to give? What part of putting PARENTS in all caps did you not understand?
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
the food you think is completely unregulated, is in fact highly regulated by the FDA in the vast majority of cases before it ever reaches the mouths children in the US.
I think we've reached that usual point in the Finn-CTS debate where you obtusely refuse to answer a simple question by purposely miscontruing it and providing an answer to a different question that was never asked. Despite attempts to redirect the question, you insist on parroting the same irrelevant answer. Apparently, this is your style. Fine. It just means the debate is over. Have a nice day.
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