The Very-Many-Questions-Not-Worth-Their-Own-Thread Thread XXXIV

[Synobun]

Why is education for children compulsory and not voluntary?

Answers can be fairly broad; what is the context behind this?

 

[Chukchi Husky]

Answers can be fairly broad; what is the context behind this?

It was something I was told a while ago by someone I know who has a university degree said that education doesn't work. They said that how they would improve things was to make schools voluntary so not to force any child who doesn't want to go to school, reintroduce corporal punishment and close the universities.

 

[Synobun]

It was something I was told a while ago by someone I know who has a university degree said that education doesn't work. They said that how they would improve things was to make schools voluntary so not to force any child who doesn't want to go to school, reintroduce corporal punishment and close the universities.

Where did he go to school? I want a Bachelor's in being a dunce cap too.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

Where did he go to school? I want a Bachelor's in being a dunce cap too.

Bath Spa University

 

[Valka D'Ur]

It was something I was told a while ago by someone I know who has a university degree said that education doesn't work. They said that how they would improve things was to make schools voluntary so not to force any child who doesn't want to go to school, reintroduce corporal punishment and close the universities.

So it's someone who wants to drag the world back to the pre-Renaissance, bring back superstition instead of science, and eliminate literacy?

This whole thing is reminding me of the many conversations I've been in with people who complain about paying school taxes. "I don't have kids/my kids are grown/my kids aren't old enough, so why should I have to pay school taxes?"

My answer: Because it's impossible for each parent to foot the whole cost of a child's education by themselves (are they going to physically help build the school in the first place, and contribute to the teachers' salaries? Are they going to pay for each child's lab equipment?), and so the cost is spread out. I never minded paying the school tax even though I've never had kids. I had a pretty decent education myself, and as I tell others: That 12-year-old kid you're helping out with your taxes today might grow up to be a firefighter or doctor who will some day save your life.

 

[Traitorfish]

It was something I was told a while ago by someone I know who has a university degree said that education doesn't work. They said that how they would improve things was to make schools voluntary so not to force any child who doesn't want to go to school, reintroduce corporal punishment and close the universities.

People say that conservatives want to take us back to the '50s, but I didn't realise they meant the 1050s.

 

[Samez]

Perhaps it was ment more like the Montessori system: instead of forcing children to learn stuff they are currently not intetested in, you could encourage them to learn the stuft they are.
It is not exactly the same, as education is not optional but the students could at least choose what to learn.

 

[Cutlass]

It was something I was told a while ago by someone I know who has a university degree said that education doesn't work. They said that how they would improve things was to make schools voluntary so not to force any child who doesn't want to go to school, reintroduce corporal punishment and close the universities.

That person is a worthless jackass.

 

[sophie]

It was something I was told a while ago by someone I know who has a university degree said that education doesn't work. They said that how they would improve things was to make schools voluntary so not to force any child who doesn't want to go to school, reintroduce corporal punishment and close the universities.

Corporal punishment is literally counterproductive in childhood development and education. Scientific studies have borne this out.

So it's someone who wants to drag the world back to the pre-Renaissance, bring back superstition instead of science, and eliminate literacy?

This is a mischaracterization of the pre-Renaissance. Also of the post-Renaissance.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

This is a mischaracterization of the pre-Renaissance. Also of the post-Renaissance.

So everyone was literate and attended university during the last millennium?

 

[warpus]

Why is education for children compulsory and not voluntary?

Because basic education (grades 1-12 or whatever) teaches you a lot of the basics you will need to understand to have a chance competing in life against all the other kids who got a good education. Not educating your children puts them at a big disadvantage and sets them up for failure in life. In some ways it is like not providing food or shelter to your children.

But also because a country's economy relies on a reasonably well educated population. So governments make it mandatory and make sure it is funded.

 

[Takhisis]

Here is what I ended up doing.. First I tried to separate the pierogies into individual pierogies, but that didn't work. So basically I had to grab clumps of dough/meat and form them into new pierogies. I threw them into a pan with melted butter and fried them up

Spoiler :

Turned out okay

Raves thread is that way -->

It was something I was told a while ago by someone I know who has a university degree said that education doesn't work. They said that how they would improve things was to make schools voluntary so not to force any child who doesn't want to go to school, reintroduce corporal punishment and close the universities.

Is this one of those ‘friends’ we've already told you are doing no good to you or themselves?

 

[sophie]

So everyone was literate and attended university during the last millennium?

No. But nor was everybody illiterate and superstitious during the last millennium. And neither was everybody literate and attending university after the 14th century. I am an academic, and as such I don't think you'll find many on these boards more willing to espouse the benefits and virtues of knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge per se than I. However, the goods you pointed to (the pursuit of universal literacy, the importance of broad-based education as a national good, a positivist approach to scientific knowledge rooted in secularism, etc.) are developments which found their origin beginning in the back half of the 17th century, and didn't become a genuine movement really until the 18th and 19th centuries. And even then, only after the conclusion a robust and contentious epistomological debate which raged among academics and philosophers in France, Germany, England, and Scotland for much of the 18th century. Your characterization would find much better exempla in L'Encyclopédie, and the works of Montesquieu and Hume than in, say the Enchiridion militis christiani.

I mean, if anything, you'd find the virtues of preservation of knowledge, and education as an essential force for good much more readily espoused in the court of Charlemagne, and within the monastic orders of the 12th and 13th centuries than you would among the spiritualists and the prominent Italian families of the 15th and 16th centuries.

It's also important not to make a blanket declaration that the Medieval world was backwards, illiterate, and superstitious. Some of the most profoundly beautiful literary contributions of the Western canon came from the Medieval period. Das Niebelunglied, Tristan und Isolde (Gottfried von Strassburg), and the letters of Ulrich von Lichtenstein were written in 13th century. The Carmina Burana from the 10th to the 13th. Einhard and Lupus of Ferrières were writing in the 9th century, and Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham were writing in the 13th. The Canterbury Tales were written in the 14th. Literature didn't spring into being in the 15th century. Nor did literacy.

Also it's important to recognize the Renaissance for what it was. In very broad strokes, it can be understood as two distinct movements:

1) Humanism. In many ways, this can be seen as a development emerging from earlier movements within Catholic theological debates. Latin writers, particularly the works of Cicero had been highly prized in teaching good rhetorical practice essentially from the Classical period onward. The translation of Aristotle's Organon, and most especially the Organon with the commentaries by Maimomides and Averroes spurred a revolution in Christian theological debate and Biblical exegesis, most prominently seen in the works of writers like Peter of Abaelard, Thomas Aquinas, and (perhaps ironically) in William of Ockham. The idea that the knowledge and virtues of Classical writers could be taken and applied to contemporary issues was something which never truly went away in the west, and became particularly pronounced from the 12th century onward.

Put very simply, humanism is the idea that:
a) The societies of the antique period were more moral and virtuous than those of the present day. This was borne out in standard forms of Biblical exegesis - people in the past (per the Bible) lived longer lives and interacted more personally with God, and the life expectancy appeared to trickle off over time. The general perception was that life was getting more chaotic and more depraved, and that this was problematizing the advent of the second coming.
b) The societies of the antique period were more moral and virtuous because they possessed access to special knowledge which we have since lost.
c) By studying the societies of the past, we can gain access to this special knowledge
d) Once we gain this special knowledge, we can give it to the masses, leading to a more moral or virtuous society.
e) Once the body of the Church has been made more moral, we can accelerate the advent of the Second Coming of Christ, as described in Revelations.

This is an important thing to keep in mind when studying the 15th and 16th centuries. It was a time of crisis. Crisis is a problematic term in historiography (because every time can be described as a "time of crisis", given the right framing), but the 15th and 16th centuries were a genuine time of crisis in the sense that there was an pernicious, broad-ranging anxiety among Western European Christians that society was collapsing in on itself due to an increase in moral depravity and a breakdown of good Christian virtues. Humanism emerged as an answer to this crisis. This is why the humanists were obsessed with history and philology. If we can examine the Romans and Greeks, if we can read the Bible in its original form, we can gain access to special knowledge and return the mixed body to its more moral form. Erasmus's mission wasn't to make the general populace literate or more critical. His mission, rather, was make the clerics more well versed in the Bible so they could better instill Christian values in priests' respective congregations. Luther translated the Bible into German so that German-speaking Christians could better understand that the holiness ethic as it was commonly taught by the Church was wrong, and this is immediately apparent through a proper reading of Paul.

And it's also important to remember that humanism wasn't the only proffered answer to this crisis. The spiritualists in Germany and Spain (the alumbrados) were big, rather, on getting away from textualism and emphasizing, rather, personal, experiential relationships with God and faith.

2) As humanism gained cachet among the literati and the Western Christian élites, the realization emerged, particularly among smaller city-states in Italy, that humanism could be deployed as a political weapon. This is a big point which Ada Palmer often hammers home. The change that happened in Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries wasn't that reading and preserving Classical texts was beneficial - as I noted earlier, the monasteries had been doing this for centuries at this point. Nor was it that art is a cool thing. As I mentioned, that was a Thing that had been around for long before. The change, rather, was the realization that art and learning could be weaponized, and deployed to accrue legitimacy and geopolitical power. For small, provincial cities trapped between the rock and hard place of the Papacy and the geopolitical powers of the Empire and France, run by strongmen with no formal title or legitimacy (like the de' Medici), this was a godsend. Invest money in smart intellectuals with a hard-on for Roman aesthetic styles, and suddenly the French, Spanish, and Germans are less interested in besieging your town and pillaging it for all its worth, and more interested in playing nice and treat you like a political equal (at least until they steal all your secret Classical knowledge). The strongmen can then parlay their cultural power into geopolitical power: cardinals and advantageous marriages. And once you have your marital claws in the European continental dynasties, it becomes much harder to uproot your entrenched power.

That's the thing. It wasn't about pursuing knowledge for knowledge's sake. It wasn't about pursuing a more literate body politic. It wasn't about expanding the university. Leonardo and Brunelleschi and Poggio Bracciolini were commissioned to make works solely and explicitly to intimidate, cow, impress, or bribe the political enemies of the commissioner.

It's not terrible, by any means. We owe libraries of knowledge and galleries upon galleries of art to this endeavor. We wouldn't have De rerum natura today without Poggio Bracciolini, and the rediscovery of Greek is thanks to a generations-long, ludicrously expensive endeavor on the part of Cosimo de' Medici. But it wasn't a philanthropic pursuit. It was a political maneuver with the explicit aim of gaining a geopolitical edge. And it was one still solely applicable to the nobility. Argumentatively, it's the same as calling the US military a good because they gave us velcro, jet engines, and the internet, etc.

 

[sophie]

Ok I know our current batch of mods really hate double posts, but I have some other random thoughts kicking around that I don't want to append to the above post, which is mostly about what the Renaissance was and not other things.

1) The Inquisition wasn't really a Thing, and especially wasn't a particularly violent Thing in the Medieval period.
2) Witch hunts also weren't really a Thing in the Medieval period. Both of those are largely Early Modern phenomena.

 

[Ferocitus]

It was something I was told a while ago by someone I know who has a university degree said that education doesn't work. They said that how they would improve things was to make schools voluntary so not to force any child who doesn't want to go to school, reintroduce corporal punishment and close the universities.

Nike on another recruitment drive?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

No. But nor was everybody illiterate and superstitious during the last millennium. And neither was everybody literate and attending university after the 14th century.

Show me where I said either of the above. You can't, because I didn't. But I think it's fair to say that there were fewer literate people than illiterate people and fewer people attending universities than not attending universities.

It's also important not to make a blanket declaration that the Medieval world was backwards, illiterate, and superstitious. Some of the most profoundly beautiful literary contributions of the Western canon came from the Medieval period. Das Niebelunglied, Tristan und Isolde (Gottfried von Strassburg), and the letters of Ulrich von Lichtenstein were written in 13th century. The Carmina Burana from the 10th to the 13th. Einhard and Lupus of Ferrières were writing in the 9th century, and Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham were writing in the 13th. The Canterbury Tales were written in the 14th. Literature didn't spring into being in the 15th century. Nor did literacy.

For someone who calls himself an academic (and I'm not saying you aren't, but am simply pointing out something about this post), you are reading a lot into my post that isn't there.

Most of the history courses I've ever taken have focused on Canadian history. There were a few miscellaneous courses in college, mainly taken for interest's sake. The rest of what I know was either acquired during my years in the Society for Creative Anachronism (which stresses the importance of learning real history), or through recreational reading (of real history books).

I'm quite aware that literature has been around since before the 15th century, thank you. Part of my personal library includes English translations of various Roman and Greek authors. The Canterbury Tales was required reading in one of my college English courses, as were other works. I still have the copy I used in that course; I saw it on one of my bookshelves yesterday.

 

[Hrothbern]

I think the Renaissance is in the common opinion (as also taught at schools) is hugely overcooked in significance for our development after the fall of the Roman empire.
As if the post Renaissance cultures wanted to legitimate their exceptionality and imperialism by prooving they are (the true) successors of the Roman empire.
And that viewing some highlights during that period only as some bright candles, as some small stepping stones during those "Middle Ages" is underrating the importance of what really happened.
If you look where "the Renaissance" got momentum, you can see that it happened where guild, trade and urbanisation developed most, and generated the highest GDP per Capita.

Knowledge and knowledge spreading were an important tool for the entities and people in power. The techs changing the civs, the culture. The areas with the highest GDP per Capita had developed most succesfully during 800-1500.
That was a pure medieval achievement based on higher crop yields, crafting knowledge and open borders for trade. Generating a competitve middle class that needed more empowerment and freedom of handling than replaceable peasants to increase the tax potential for the ones in power.
Many ideas attributed to the Renaissance were already there during the Medieval period. There was only no market for them (like there was a market for guild craft knowledge). A critical scale size from city size or city clusters, from trading routes and correspondence, from like positioned citizens, was needed. And when that critical size was there, the printing press on top, chaotic development happened, confusing and unsettling as it was. A bit like now with internet and social media. The Renaissance was born in chaos and became a narrative of divine roots for the empires and the establishment.

And BTW
What is the difference between superstitious and hyped fear for terrorism ?

 

[Chukchi Husky]

So it's someone who wants to drag the world back to the pre-Renaissance, bring back superstition instead of science, and eliminate literacy?

This whole thing is reminding me of the many conversations I've been in with people who complain about paying school taxes. "I don't have kids/my kids are grown/my kids aren't old enough, so why should I have to pay school taxes?"

My answer: Because it's impossible for each parent to foot the whole cost of a child's education by themselves (are they going to physically help build the school in the first place, and contribute to the teachers' salaries? Are they going to pay for each child's lab equipment?), and so the cost is spread out. I never minded paying the school tax even though I've never had kids. I had a pretty decent education myself, and as I tell others: That 12-year-old kid you're helping out with your taxes today might grow up to be a firefighter or doctor who will some day save your life.

They do think that science is a mistake and wrong, pointing to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as societies based on science.

One of the reasons they gave was that they've gone through university, so there's no need to have them around anymore. They point out that universities cost the country far too much to run and that the country has no money, so either increase the costs to go to university to about four times what they are now or just scrap universities. They prefer to scrap universities as they attract the wrong kind of people, the people who feel that there are problems in the world that either don't exist or that they are so out of touch that they're not aware that no one actually cares about these problems or there's a good reason why people want these problems.

They also don't believe that education helps to get you a job. They have a degree and are unemployed, blaming that they can't get a job on 'positive discrimination'.

People say that conservatives want to take us back to the '50s, but I didn't realise they meant the 1050s.

I don't know about the 1050s, but possibly before the 1650s as they've said that parliamentarians winning the civil war was a mistake. They've also said that universal suffrage was a mistake. They feel that the less people voting the better as the more people voting, the more people will vote against the best interests of the country.

The one voting system that they do admire is the American electoral college, but said that it would work better if it was based on constituencies, not states.

Corporal punishment is literally counterproductive in childhood development and education. Scientific studies have borne this out.

They just say that the science is wrong, pointing out that the lack of punishment is the reason why modern crime rates are so high.

Is this one of those ‘friends’ we've already told you are doing no good to you or themselves?

Yes.

 

[Arakhor]

They're wrong - ignore them. You're wasting our time and yours in even thinking about this.

 

[Traitorfish]

I don't know about the 1050s, but possibly before the 1650s as they've said that parliamentarians winning the civil war was a mistake. They've also said that universal suffrage was a mistake. They feel that the less people voting the better as the more people voting, the more people will vote against the best interests of the country.

I'm gonna take a wild guess and assume that they imagine themselves being part of that minority who can be trusted to vote?

The one voting system that they do admire is the American electoral college, but said that it would work better if it was based on constituencies, not states.

But that's... already how Parliament works?