Peter I did not make any claim about employment being exploitative but perhaps I can explain why it can be seen that way.

I experience a real lack of confidence in my ability to negotiate with employers. My inherited brain functioning is mediated by high levels of the brain chemicals that produce anxiety and depression. I also lack appropriate socialisation skills because of my childhood experience of living in a socially isolated family and having to constantly move house and school so that my father could find employment.

Do you understand how disruptive and negative the psychological and social consquences of moving to a new community is for a family? And yet that is part of your agenda. Requiring this level of mobility destroyes the extended family model that is the foundation of all human societies.

But back to me and my problems; having these tendencies toward high levels of anxiety, being easily discouraged, and lacking in self-esteem, I simply don't have the social skills to negotiate with an employer. The employer has all the power and all the skills and is more able to make a choice that will advantage them, not me. This is the case for a great many poor dysfunctional people.

If I had all the advantages of an 'appropriate' childhood and a private school education, I may have learned to interact appropriately with those confident people like you. Perhaps I may even have learned to be greedy enough to overcome my dislike of competition and competitive interactions.

And the simple minded argument that you libertarians trot out all time about the workers 'choosing' to work for mill owners during the Industrial Revolution, is just self-serving nonsense. There was no real choice. Also, note that those 'robber barons' were Christians and supposed to be guided by the teachings of Jesus. You libertarians don't even pay lip service to a moral or ethical code.

Peter Hume,

Mollydukes makes a good point.
In your rush to defend industrial libertarianism, you fail to take into account the warping of human relationships inherent in such a system. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, people lived, plied their craft and farmed their plots in close-knit communal settings. They were interdependent and they conducted themselves accordingly. Children learned their skills and morals in the normal process of life unfolding around them.

Early industrialisation exploded traditional society and supplanted the people into an alien environment acting as little more than slaves to a mechanised system. Eventually the state was forced to intervene and mass education was cooked up as a complementary psychological training ground for children "to serve the system".

It's not a matter people being "desperate" for education. Children "learn" regardless. You don't appear to realise that the covert purpose behind mass education is to condition children for a smooth transition into consumer society. Alvin Toffler likened mass education to factory production itself. It's a tool of capitalism, not an encumbrance.

Poirot - your are correct. The assumption that 19th and 20th century democratic theorist based their call for the shift to democracy was citizens would be critically engagement and active participants in public debate. This is where education was to play a key role but it was to be an education system that existed independently of government direction. A government that determined the curriculum and imposed its perspective of what would be taught would, in JS Mill’s words, be “a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another.” Yet this seems to be what we have.

For those interested what a traditional conservative thinker has to say about the free market this is well worth listening to:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b013r2ld/A_Point_of_View_The_revolution_of_capitalism/
He comments that in order to succeed in the existing world people need to invest in educating themselves, for most that means going into debt but by the time they have accumulated that debt either the skills they bought are no longer in demand or already on the way out so they have to go further into debt to update their skills - it is like a dog chasing its tail.
John Gray is conservative in the mold of Edmund Burke and has written a great deal about liberalism. False Dawn, Straw Dongs and Enlightenment's wake are among his more interesting books.

Poirot
During the Industrial Revolution, there was a great increase in population. In Britain the population doubled in about 60 years. Before industrial capitalism came along, these people *died*. But apparently in saving them from that fate, capitalism did them no favours. Death was better than the dreaded capitalism, according to you guys.

Marx didn’t know about the population increase when he wrote. He theorized that capitalism had made the masses poorer, when in fact, for the first time in history, a social system provided for the increase in population so that instead of the poorest just dying, they now live at higher and higher living standards – like us!

But you guys’ understanding is still back in the early nineteenth century with Marx, still making the same assumptions that are flatly incorrect. You’re still alleging that capitalism makes the masses *poorer*. And you’re still alleging that public ownership of the means of production makes society *richer*.

But if this is true, why stop at education? Why not full governmental ownership and control of all means of production? What a Paradise we would enjoy then eh?

You have lost the argument, which is why you have not answered my questions, and have nothing but slogans about exploitation that beg the question.

Poirot, great about your son. I’m sure he’s better off for it.

You still haven’t dealt with the essential disproof of your argument. Go ahead – affirm that a minimum wage of 50 pounds a day in 1842 would have improved the condition of the masses. Crying “exploitation” does not change the facts
a) that poverty is better than death, and
b) you’re in favour of interventions that caused *greater* poverty, hardship and death.

And you contradict yourself. On the one hand you criticise capitalism for grinding the faces of the poor; on the other hand for mass consumerism.

So you keep coming down on the side of the argument that would cause the great mass of proletarians to just die; and when shown disproof, fleeing to refuge in more circular slogans about exploitation that assume Marx’s argument.

To allege compulsory state education is “a tool of capitalism” is just confusion. According to this theory, private provision of education is bad because capitalist, and governmental provision is also bad because capitalist. It’s an unfalsifiable belief. But if *government* education is “capitalist” - (?) - and capitalism is exploitative, then we agree that government education should be abolished, right?

Thus all your arguments are self-contradictory and false.

Mollydukes
“Desperation” came from Rusty Catheter, above.

I reject your
a) personal argument
b) begging the question
c) implying that you have understood and disproved the arguments without showing reason why.
All these are logical fallacies, and comprise most of your post.

As to the ethics, anyone would think it’s you who’s *opposes* unprovoked aggression and *in favour of* voluntary co-operation – the reverse of the truth! So you’re in no position to talk down to me about ethics or empathy.

Your argument assumes that you’d be worse off in a libertarian society, and better off under government education. But you have not shown why. Having Aspergers Syndrome doesn’t prove it.

For example last year I worked with a kid who had Aspergers, and his treatment at the hands of the government education system can only be described as abusive. This kid was highly anxious and had great difficulty socializing. In a class-room situation, he would just go into a panic attack, and would end up on the floor quivering and sobbing. Despite the fact that his mother tried *for years* to get a more humane and understanding response, and despite the fact that the school had *reams* of policies on disabilities, special needs, etc. the school was the worst bully of all. When he went into meltdown, the teacher would yell at him – in front of the whole class – “John! Get up right now! “John! Stop being stupid!”. It just blew all his fuses. It was cruel. When the mother confronted her, she lied. When the mother said she had recorded it, the teacher groveled.