It would be a cynical, exploitive state that would make public schools available only to those students who wanted to attend, since the schools themselves would necessarily become more appealing to the better students, as the state’s resources would cater to their needs more and more, and less and less on retaining and teaching the unmotivated students who would simply drop out. The class structure of our culture would become MUCH pronounced, as kids who felt unmotivated (if only for a period in their lives) would be thrown to the wolves of fast-food employment, manual labor, prostitution, drug-dealing and worse, and the students who felt more motivated would get all the well-paying, cushy jobs–and the state would be able to wash its hands because these people chose their own destinies.
Without people like you complaining about being forced to attend school, we would know that we were in danger of allowing a culture such as I describe, so thank you for telling us that we’re on the right track with our current policy.
They should be responsible for maintaining their own existence. You see, going to school is equivalent to the child’s job or occupation. Parents are obligated to support their child while he is getting an education. If the child decides that going to school is not what he wants, then he should be required to find a way to pay for his own rent, utilities, food, clothing, etc.
Or course, this ignores whether or not the child is competent enough and mature enough to actually be able to do these things.
When I was in my mid-to-late teens, I never found it frustrating. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to make it on my own. The problem comes when someone is mature enough want more freedom, but still too immature to realize that they do not yet have the necessary skills to support themselves and their new-found freedom.
Much like how, if you don’t earn a paycheck, you don’t eat, and if you don’t work, you don’t earn a paycheck. I guess adults are forced into labor, too.
And most of the time (at least, when I was in my early teens), how I wanted to spend my time would have been detrimental to my future. Sitting around watching TV and playing Nintendo all day would not have equipped me to find a job later in life. In other words, I simply did not have the requisite maturity to make such an important decision.
It’s not a cop out or a lack of respect that brings a parent to say that. It’s that sometimes, a kid simply won’t understand something until they’re older. That’s the whole point, actually.
For instance, Johnny’s seven years old:
“Now, now, Johnny, you need to turn off that Nintendo and go to school.”
“But why? School’s boring.”
“Well, you’ll need to have and education if you want a job when you’re older.”
“I don’t need school! I’m going to be a Power Ranger when I grow up!”
“Just turn off that Nintendo and get ready for school, young man! You’ll understand when you’re older.”
Look at it in legal terms: IANAL but it seems a pretty fair legal argument that a person who was allowed to screw up his life by being allowed to drop out of school at age 7 could sue the state at age 23, arguing “I was 7 freaking years old, man. You grownup assholes knew perfectly well that a stupid 7-year old kid shouldn’t be making such important decisions and you let me anyway.” I don’t know that I’d award him damages, but I just might.
Now, if your argument is is “I’m not talking about 7 year olds,” then you’ve got a slippery slope. Obviously, as a society, we’ve set the cutoff for making decisions about dropping out somewhere around 16. If you want to argue it should be 15, go ahead and make your case. But whatever standard you decide, you’ll have to be pretty persuasive that you’ve chosen a reasonable cutoff for making mature decisions. Are you prepared to tell someone that he’s got no case against a state that threw him to the wolves at age 11? 9? 14? Make your case.
Sounds like your problem is with the free market system, the law of supply and demand, and simple cause and effect, not mandatory education. The government is not blocking the hiring of high school dropouts. If mandatory education laws were revoked, it would not suddenly become easier for high school dropouts to find lucrative work.
It used to be possible for dropouts to make pretty good money as factory workers, and the reason why this is no longer the case is not because of stricted mandatory education laws. It’s because those kinds of jobs have been largely automated. Unskilled workers are no longer qualified for much other than low-paying service industry jobs. The current economic situation is such that many employers have no difficulty filling those jobs with people who do have high school diplomas, or even college degrees.
*I think you must be using a pretty loose definition of “not tolerated”. Kids who didn’t do their work weren’t sent to prison, were they? I’ll bet they weren’t made to pay fines or subjected to corporal punishment either. What horrible, unfair punishment were kids actually risking by refusing to do their work?
*So the letter of the law is relevant when it’s convenient to your position and not when it isn’t? The letter of the law states that children must attend school, but it does not hold that they must do any work there, that they must do well on their schoolwork, or that they must graduate from high school. It does not deny dropouts their civil rights. They are allowed to vote, drive cars, run for public office, buy a home, get married, and go into any line of work that will have them. This is true even if they left school before they were legally permitted to.
All right. So we’re back to this: how can we decide whether a person, regardless of age, is equipped to understand the decision to leave school in the full context of his life and circumstances? What exactly does he need to know in order to make an informed decision?
I agree. Leaving school would also be a terrible decision for many people. But again, I must distinguish between someone who makes poor choices and someone who should be legally prevented from making choices at all.
What if the law were changed so that you couldn’t be held liable for the consequences of your kid not going to school?
I’m not aware of any medical evidence for (a), specifically any evidence that all 18 year olds are better at decision making than all 16 year olds - sounds like a high standard, but since all 18 year olds are allowed to make this decision and all 16 year olds are prevented from doing so, I believe meeting that high standard of proof is important. If some 16 year olds are qualified to make the decision, they should be allowed to do so, just as if some women are strong enough to carry bodies from a burning building, they should be allowed to train as firefighters.
As for (b) and (c), those are just aspects of the law as it exists today. And in fact, we have not agreed as a society that 18 is the age where one is prepared for making decisions; you can make decisions about your own medical care around age 13 in most states IIRC. Teenagers can choose not to have a lifesaving operation, but they can’t choose to pursue their own interests instead of studying local history.
Well, while that is the exact opposite of what I believe, at least you realize it’s oppressive. That’s an important step.
That sounds reasonable enough.
That’s one problem. The other problem I’m concerned about comes when someone is mature enough to want more freedom and has the skills to support themselves, but the law prevents them from doing so. I agree that the first one is a problem, but no one else seems to care about the second one.
Except adults can choose not to get a job, and run a business out of their home instead, or mooch off their friends and relatives, or whatever. They can settle for a low-paying job and eat nothing but 25 cent mac & cheese. Some are better options than others, but they aren’t breaking the law by making bad decisions there. You can’t say the same for a teenager who decides he’d rather educate himself, or who is simply satisfied with the education he’s already received so far.
From what I’ve read, kids who aren’t forced to go to school don’t sit around playing Nintendo all day for long. It’s easy to look at what a kid does in his free time between school days and say that’s what he’ll do all day, but it’s not accurate.
Kids whose parents have “unschooled” them, or who attend places like Sudbury Valley School, could spend all their time sitting in front of the tube, and sometimes that’s what they do with their newfound freedom… for a few weeks. After that they realize, just like you or I would, that watching TV all day is just as boring as going to school all day.
What’s wrong with this parent that prevents him from telling his kid that being a Power Ranger isn’t a viable career option? Seems to me that either (1) it’s a cop out - he could explain but chooses the easier path of “just believe me and do what I say”, (2) he doesn’t respect his child enough to realize that even a 7 year old can learn that Power Rangers aren’t real, or (3) he’s dumber than a sack of hammers and literally can’t explain the issue.
All right, let’s run with that. Suppose that kid sues the state and wins a million dollars in damages. This inspires his 25 year old cousin to sue the state too: “I was 18 freaking years old, man. I thought I didn’t want to go to college, but you grownup assholes knew perfectly well that a stupid 18 year old kid shouldn’t be making such important decisions and you still didn’t force me to go.”
The trial then devolves into unsubstantiated bickering: “No, 18 year olds are capable of making those decisions.” “Was not.” “You were too.” “Prove it.” “I don’t have to, everyone knows it!” There’s no more evidence in this trial than there was in the 7 year old’s trial, so the judge awards a million bucks to the cousin too.
His 50 year old uncle decides to hop on the money train as well: “I was 30 freaking years old, man. I thought I wanted to be a janitor, but I really should’ve gone back to school and become an accountant. You grownup assholes knew perfectly well that a stupid 30 year old kid shouldn’t be making such important decisions, and you let me take a crappy job anyway.” The state’s lawyers still can’t come up with any more evidence to introduce in his trial, and pretty soon the state is bankrupt.
Well, that’s no good. We can’t let the 7 year old’s case set such a terrible precedent. The state should’ve argued (1) the kid has failed to show that his age made him incapable of making important decisions (“you grownup assholes should’ve known” is not evidence), (2) the state has no obligation to prevent citizens from screwing up their own lives, and (3) the kid has failed to show that his life was irrevocably screwed up as a result of leaving school anyway, since he was free to go back to school the moment he realized he missed out on some important learning, and he still has that option at age 23.
That’s true. I’m still bothered by the fact that some jobs require a high school diploma, even though they don’t require all the skills and knowledge that are necessary to get a diploma, but I have no examples offhand, and I’m not sure what to do about it anyway.
I guess what led me to bring up the career-limiting aspect is that it makes the whole situation slightly more coercive: the government mandates that you spend several hours in a building all day, and you can be legally punished if you don’t. In that building, there’s nothing for you to do but schoolwork, and the folks who run the building make sure you know that if you don’t do schoolwork, they’re authorized to punish you, but if you do, you’ll have an easier time getting a better job. They make you go to school and use a carrot and stick to make you work - but even if we ignore the carrot, they still have the stick.
BTW, as much as we disagree on this, and well, pretty much everything else, I appreciate your comments. Whenever my arguments have a weak spot, you point it out, without the circular logic or deliberate misinterpretations I sometimes have to deal with.
Whatever punishments the school had to offer. Sorry, I don’t have my student handbook anymore. Presumably suspension (in or out of school), detention after school or on the weekends, etc. The point is the school has the ability to discipline students for not working, and if you’re going to argue that it doesn’t matter because you don’t think those punishments are very harsh, I’m afraid that’s irrelevant. If you commit a crime and you’re only sentenced to a token fine or a dozen hours of community service, that’s not very harsh, but you’re still being punished, and the law is still a law.
The effect of the law is what’s relevant. Even if truancy laws aren’t enforced often, knowing they exist and are occasionally enforced is enough of a threat to discourage many people who want to avoid school. And even if avoiding schoolwork isn’t literally a crime, the effect of the overall situation is that you’re forced to be where the schoolwork is, given no other option, and threatened with a form of punishment if you don’t do it.
A teenager can make decisions about certain medical care- abortion, birth control, prenatal care and STD’s. Apart from those issues, you’ll have to give me a cite to show that the doctor who performs a lifesaving operation on my 15 year old daughter with my consent, but not hers, is subject to legal action of some sort, or that the one who treats her with her consent , but not mine is notsubject to any legal action. That’s what really determines who has the legal right to make the decision. It’s possible that the doctor will factor in my daughter’s feelings while deciding what he or she will do, just like it’s possible that I will factor in my daughter’s feelings when deciding whether to consent or not. I might even allow her to make the decision herself. But that doesn’t mean that her consent is either necessary or sufficient .
Power Rangers was a bad example, and the exchange was really too short. Change it to " I don’t need school, I’m going to be a professional (baseball player, basketball player,skateboarder, singer etc) when I grow up , and add an hour’s worth of explanation about how few people make it in those fields, and while it’s great to work toward that dream, you’ll still need a back-up plan if it doesn’t work out, and even if you do make it, having a more than a second grade education might help keep you from being taken advantage of, at the end of which you still have a seven year old who’s convinced that he will be the one in a million who makes it, and then you end up with a parent saying “You’ll understand when you’re older”. The first time. After that, you get to “you’ll understand when you get older” a lot quicker.
If the decision not to attend school was coupled with the decision to become emancipated, then the judge could decide whether a person within the compulsory education age range was equipped to make that decision, and remove the obligation to attend school if he is emancipated. Because in reality, even if education was only compulsory until age 10, few parents would allow their 11 year old to drop out. Plenty of parents wouldn’t allow their 17 year old to drop out, even if they legally can. Doesn’t do an 11 y. o. or a 15 y.o. much good if the law says he can drop out but his parents won’t let him. One of the things he needs to know if if he is capable of being self-sufficient if he leaves school, and if he’s unwilling to relieve his parents of the responsibility to support him, it’s pretty clear that he is either not certain of his capability or simply doesn’t want to take on the responsibility of supporting himself.
I might be able to give you an example, although I’ll have to defend it as well.
I temped my way through college, and the agency that I worked for required a high school diploma. (I believe they would accept a GED.) I thought that was a bit funny, since I possessed the basic skills needed for low-level office work long before I graduated from high school.
Temp agencies conduct their own qualification tests for typing, data entry, and filing. They check out your attitude and professional appearance when you come in for the interview. Beyond that, functional literacy and basic math skills are sufficient for most assignments. At some jobs I had duties that I suspect could have been carried out equally well by a trained chimpanzee.
So why require a high school diploma if they don’t need you to know anything about history and science or be able to understand Shakespeare? Probably because in the absence of a high school diploma, they have no proof that you can read, write, or do math at all. The agency could administer their own tests in these areas, but this would be a lot more trouble, effort, and expense for them. It would also do little to increase their pool of qualified workers. Many high school dropouts would not possess the needed skills, and kids still in high school would have limited available work hours. It’s easier to just require a high school diploma. Changing this policy wouldn’t benefit the temp agency.
*Thank you. As often as we’ve disagreed, you’ve always been quite pleasant and even-tempered about it (sometimes much more so than I’ve managed to be!), and I can see that you are sincere in your beliefs.
*Out of school suspension sounds like a reward for a student that hates school and doesn’t want to do schoolwork. Detention is a more severe punishment because it infringes on the student’s free time, but I’m not sure that it’s not technically voluntary. If a student does not show up for detention after school or on the weekend, would they be in violation of truancy laws? I honestly don’t know.
*Personally, I cannot recall ever being threatened with even the mildest of punishments on the occasions when I chose not to do my work. I was just reminded that my grade would be affected. Some schools may be stricter about these things, but I would argue that most school punishments either require the student’s voluntary participation or amount to nothing more than social disapproval.
As an adult I cannot imagine letting such things prevent me from doing what I really wanted to do. I think children are much more easily pressured or coerced into doing things they don’t really want to do, but I also think that’s a good reason for having them in a protected environment until they’re more mature.
There are well known developmental stages humans go through while growing up. There’s more variance as one gets older - it is scary how babies track the books. This has nothing to do with rationality in the adult sense, just biology. We’ve mostly decided as a society that 18 is the age of mature judgement, I’ll not argue that 17 or 19 could be better. But even if a 12 year old could pass a drivers test, that doesn’t mean he should be allowed to drive. In California new young drivers have restrictions on things (like driving with lots of kids in the car) that have led to accidents, and this has been very successful. Ignoring developmental issues doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
We all do things that we regret later. That doesn’t mean we were incompetent at the time and should’ve been prevented by law from doing them, though.
Is that supposed to be less offensive? :mad: Compare it to “You’re no dumber than any other woman.” There’s a place for insulting entire classes of people, but this ain’t it.
No, actually, they never told me that. My parents treated me with respect. What you describe is patronizing and it’s a cop out: “I’ve failed to convince you of this today, but someday I know you’ll see the light anyway - because how could I, an adult, believe something that isn’t true?”
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So there is nothing you’ve ever done, or are doing now, that you won’t look back on and regret, given more experience and better judgement later? The reason parents have to sign contracts is to prevent kids from being taken advantage of. Saying a 12 year old is not as capable of making important decisions as a 22 year old is not an insult, it is a fact. As we get older we have more experience and better judgement, until we reach a point where we have less. I’m sure your parents didn’t let you do everything you wanted to when you were a kid.
As for convincing: sometime you will try to argue rationally with a screaming eight year old, and you might remember this thread. It’s a real treat, I assure you. Many parents believe when they start that sweet reason will work every time. We all say :smack: boy was I dumb. There, now I can pit myself.
Guin, he could just as well have got his ideas from here. If you read My Ishmael, Quinn has a lot of interesting things to say about our present schools and how they are mostly just a way of keeping young adults out of the job market to eliminate competition; also about how we have no real compelling interest to “fix” the school system, since if we actually had one that works, the job market would become a nightmare. I’m a big fan of the Sudbury Valley system as well; can anyone raise any well-founded objections to that model?
Just to put some evidence behind my statements about development stages, here is a cite.
(Warning: pdf). No doubt there are some 17 year olds who can suceed quite well on their own - after many go away to college before they are 18. If there were some sort of absolute test of maturity, that can be used as an absolute cutoff. During my life the voting age has dropped from 21 to 18, and the drinking age has gone from 18 to 21 in many states.
School is getting you ready for more options than might be apparent when you are young. When my daughter was 11 she was making more per hour than I was acting. If she had dropped out of school and auditioned full time, she might have been able to make a good living. She never wanted to, we wouldn’t have let her, and this was good because when she got a bit older she decided that it wasn’t for her. It was good that no one decided she didn’t need school.
I’m not familiar with it, but I’m certainly in favor of school reform. As a high school student I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to transfer to a progressive alternative program that provided students with much more freedom than a mainstream school. We couldn’t just do whatever we wanted, but we were free to choose all our own classes, work on our own projects, do independant study courses or even design and co-teach a class of our own.
This was great fun for me and I think many students would be much happier in such a school. However, there were some that found it too unstructured for their needs and voluntarily returned to the mainstream school system. Others became disruptive or lazy (we were required to earn a certain number of credits each term, and the attendance policy was pretty strict) and had to leave to program.
That variance is exactly what I’m talking about. Children and teenagers don’t develop according to a fixed schedule; some will always be more mature than others at the same age.
Successful in what sense?
As I said, everyone does things they regret later. I’m no exception. But what does that prove?
I suppose so. It’s also a fact that a 22 year old isn’t as capable of making important decisions as a 45 year old, don’t you think? And in ten years, you yourself might be more capable of making important decisions than you are now.
But that doesn’t mean you or I should be prevented from making important decisions, just because we might someday be more capable than we are now. The important question is how capable is capable enough, and how do we know when someone has gotten there, considering that everyone matures at a different rate?
This is a pretty circular argument, mainly because you’re refusing to state what YOU think should be society’s proper exercise of a mimimum age standard. Do you think a 7 year old can make the choice to drop out of school? If not, why not?
Please read the first few posts again. I don’t think there should be minimum age standards - that’s why I’m not proposing a new one.
Since the law only uses age as a stand-in for some other quality (in this case, the competence to choose your own education), and that other quality doesn’t directly correspond to age, I believe measuring the other quality is more fair.
Not any of the 7 year olds I’ve met. But do you understand why I’d still be uncomfortable setting an age limit at 8, or any other number?
No, I really don’t. If you consider a 7 year old too young to make a mature, informed, intelligent decision, then those same arguments can reasonably be used until we get a lot closer to the current age of majority. And if you don’t, well, then, there’s very little sense discussing this with you. Please explain to me the grounds on which you would restrict a 7-year old in any way from making choices we currently leave to his parents.
Or are you saying that you’d want society to impose some elaborate maturity-testing process to allow a mature 7 year old to demonstrate that he, unlike his peers, has adult-like abilities? If so, could you describe exactly what kind of procedure you have in mind? I’m confused as to what you’re proposing, beyond “It really sucks to be a child, and it sucks worse to be treated as one.”
As to your OP, that’s fairly vague as well. You claim this entire thread derives from the one about cheating, where you claim that
If this were all you saying, I can’t imagine that anyone gave you any grief over it. 1) Okey-dokey, cheating doesn’t mean you’re “a bad person overall.” But it sure doesn’t mean you’re a good person, and it sure isn’t anything you want to admire or condone, either. And 2) Sure, we all have some sympathy for mixed-up, immature kids doing foolish things. So what? If a teenager is really determined to screw up his life, all society can do is put a few obstacles in his way, but we can’t really prevent him from achieving his goal in the end. You really want a little patronizing slack from me? You got it.
We can do this in, basically, a couple of different ways. We can either decide, on a case-by-case basis, what are the necessary pieces of information, relevant experience and overall balance of priorities to make a given decision, and then determine whether the person in question possesses that information. Or we can establish some sort of proxy for that complex process - such as determining that people who are legally adult and not declared legally incompetent can make decisions for themselves. In the latter case, we’d further establish some general means of determining legal adulthood, such as age, which maps fairly well to acquired knowlege, experience and priority-setting.
I get what you’re saying – the current process disenfranchises some who should be able to make their own decisions, just as it enfranchises some who should not. Really, I get it. Where we differ (as I see it) is on two things. First, the degree of imprecision is, in my opinion, relatively low – that is, setting the age of legal adulthood at 18 is right most of the time. Further, I think a move to a more precise system would be a terrible burden on society as a whole. Individually testing each and every person in society would not only be a huge amount of work, but it would lead to the potential for disenfranchisement based on unfair testing. Age is a very fair means of determining adulthood – unless you die, you will someday turn 18 and be a legal adult.
If the measure of adulthood is instead “do you have what it takes to make decisions” then you (and I, and everyone else) will be at the mercy of organizations who determine those standards. If you fail to meet whatever arcane criteria standards-setting bodies decide on, you’d be legally unable to decide your own fate. That is, to me, a terrifying prospect, and it’s a fairly logical consequence of your position.
What system are you proposing as an alternative to age-based adulthood, and how would you enact it? You’ve previously admitted that universal enfranchisement is not workable, but continue to resist any system based purely on age. So you must have something in mind, right? Does your system give you a greater chance of being declared an adult and free from the terrible oppression of having to learn things you don’t care about instead of using your time as you wish, or a lesser one?
How would you do so?
I’d still be morally obligated. I am a parent. I would quite willingly give my own life for my children. “Oppressing” them in the short term is a very small price to pay for increasing the likelihood of their success in life.
(a) was an off-the-cuff remark, but… the hormonal changes attendant to adolescence are strong, and do (in my influence and observation) influence decision-making. (b) and (c) are not simply aspects of the current law, they are reasons for its existence.
I really think you’re missing my point again (or I’m not stating it clearly enough). What I am saying is, in essence, we need some means of determining legal adulthood. I agree with you, as I stated above, that the system we use now is wrong sometimes. Where we disagree is in the need for change. I think the system is right most of the time, and that no reasonable alternative has been presented. Unless and until you can present a reasonable alternative, which we can then discuss, I don’t know how much further we can go.
My apologies. To be honest, I don’t think it is oppressive. I think it feels oppressive to the kids, but I don’t think it is myself. I should have put quotes around the term.
I disagree with you, although only partly on point 1.
Cheating does not always and instantly make you a bad person, but it’s a point of evidence in favor of “bad person.”
In the context of high school, there is, as discussed in the linked thread and this one, an alternative to cheating. Your claims of unspecified-and-never-experienced-but-understood-to-be-dreadful punishment notwithstanding, the reason for cheating is not to avoid doing the work, it is to get the desired result without doing the work.
The outcome of being in high school for 4 years and getting passing grades is that you get a piece of paper that certifies you as having a number of basic skills. If you do not in fact have the skills, you should not have the certification. And cheaters have avoided demonstrating that they have the skills.
If all you want to do is avoid the work, that’s an option, and an honest one. While I have not been in high school for many years (1980-84, if you’re curious), there were plenty of my classmates who avoided doing any work at all, including some very good friends of mine. The choice they made was that, in their opinion, the chastisement they received (including visits to their homes by truancy officers) was a reasonable tradeoff for not doing work or attending classes. I disagreed, but honored their choice and still consider them to be good friends. Had they instead decided to cheat their way through school, I’d have stopped speaking to them.
I think you’re confusing your (high-minded) cause with the true motivation of cheaters. While you can construct a case that involves someone cheating or plagiarizing to “fight the system” the fact remains that they are getting an unearned result from their action. And that makes them a cheater, and may indeed make them a bad person.
Many parents believe when they start that sweet reason will work every time. We all say :smack: boy was I dumb. There, now I can pit myself.