05-12-2008, 10:24 PM
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Congressman
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Join Date: Dec 2007
Userid: 133 Location: Buffalo, New York, USA
Posts: 5,760
Rep Power: 8
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Originally Posted by GeneCosta
Children are not the property of their parents; they are unique individuals who proceed from the womb lacking noticeable "rights" like voting due to their inability to make presumably accurate or self-reflective decisions.
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Not property but certainly the responsibility of parents. When governments can give birth to children then governments can take responsibility for them. Until then, government had better keep its damned hands off!
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As such, all kids deserve an education.
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No one "deserves" an education.
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I don't know anyone who would look back and congratulate their parents on keeping them willfully ignorant and uneducated.
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You wrongly assume that all parents would do this. Besides, there are different kinds of education and it should be tailored to meet the needs of particular families/communities/cultures.
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I view every legal decision's consequence not in terms of arbitrary "rights" but instead biological conclusions.
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In terms of biology, what is best? I think mandatory education, to some degree, is acceptable. Mandates on how one cares for children shouldn't be abolished. We don't say 8 year olds can make the choice to have sex with a 40 year old man, for instance.
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In terms of biology, what is best is what the parents decide. But I'm really sorry that you have such a poor view of rights.
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It's in the best interest of the individual and community that every man and woman be given the best possible education.
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It's up to the parents to decide what's best for their children, not you and certainly not some damned government. When governments start giving birth to children then they can decide what's best for those children.
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The problem with our current system is deep, and mostly has to due with an unwillingness to actually throw around heterodox ideas.
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Your silly notion of trusting the government to provide education is not heterodox.
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I believe in democratizing campuses starting from the secondary school, creating a national standard, eliminating the failed policy of NCLB, concentrating more efforts on summer programs, expanding the arts, booting private firms out of school, focusing more on vocational and career-oriented education early on, reworking how schools are funded, and using a technocratic demarchy model to create textbooks (not corporate textbooks) - from which the teacher and/or student can pick.
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How about we just leave it up to the parents where the decision-making belongs.
__________________
A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
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