The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School

Re:The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School by potatolicious on Sunday October 02, 2011 @07:41PM (#3064431)

Are you seriously proposing we go back to pre-public schooling society - you know, the one where the vast major of the population was completely uneducated since education was strictly reserved for the wealthy?

Laissez-faire brings out some admirable qualities in people, but it is also an extremely unequal system with many detrimental effects on society (including the rich). There's a historical reason why we invented public schools, public libraries, public parks, etc.

I find it difficult to understand how someone with an awareness of history can support a completely laissez-faire society where the default answer to everything is "let the market figure it out". This is not a new idea, and the present state of the world only exists because we had to suffer through centuries of unbridled capitalism and classism.

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Re:The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School by lhnn on Sunday October 02, 2011 @07:47PM (#3064442)

Now that we have things like affluence, the 'primed pump' of an educated society, the NEED for an educated society, and finally, the Internet, I don't see why we need nearly the government involvement in education that we did 50-100 years ago.

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Re:The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School by mcherm on Sunday October 02, 2011 @11:53PM (#3064971)

I am not convinced we DO have a sufficiently educated society. I see serious candidates for public office who are rejecting science (http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/a-fundamental-r...). I think democracy itself requires an educated populace, and that an egalitarian society requires at least a basic level of equality of opportunity for all.

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Re:The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School by Mvandenbergh on Monday October 03, 2011 @04:37AM (#3065510)

I think the case can be made more easily for government involvement in education than in almost any other area of life. Purely because in a certain small % of cases, parents simply won't take any steps to see their children educated. That isn't a choice the child is making. Whether that means that the government should also run the schools themselves is of course a separate question.

Some of the world's best school systems are highly decentralised and some are highly centralised.

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Re:The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School by maxxxxx on Sunday October 02, 2011 @08:56PM (#3064565)

You forget there are a lot of people who don't have the things you mention.

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