Sorry peter, I did not read your piece. You see you used the code word for wanting to spend other peoples money on one of your hobbyhorses.

The moment I see "disadvantaged" I know someone wants to rip money off those who have worked for it, to spend it on their chosen people, usually someone who doesn't deserve the waste of other peoples money, & won't work for their own.

With every good intentioned bit of such spending, we always find excessive waste, with a net spared far too wide, all because of someone's ideology, & the usual bureaucratic stupidity of those who administer such schemers.

So sorry mate, if you want to waste my money on some hobbyhorse of yours the answer is no way. If it is worth doing, spend your own money, & that of anyone you can con into giving it to you, not the long suffering tax payers.

If the problem is with the current education system, fix that. It should only require the elimination of a few thousand bureaucrats & teachers to get it back to what it was

Struth, Jardine, you're really clutching at straws now! You're whinging because I didn't derive everything from first principles. Many things are so uncontroversial, even among the political right, that I wouldn't have to explain them to anyone else, yet you reject them, falsely accuse me of contradicting myself, and yet expect your preposterous claims to be taken at face value.

Yet again you begin with a lie: this time it's that I "don't critically think about state education". Nothing that I've told you demonstrates a lack of critical thinking. But you've already demonstrated your own lack of critical thinking by making stupid "if you believe X then you must believe Y" type statements,

I admit I had the benefit of state education, Indeed I've been to state schools in two different countries, so not only would I be very difficult to brainwash, but I've got a fair idea of what works and what doesn't. I also know that, at lest for most of my time at school, my parents would not have been able to afford to send me to a private school.

What experience of state education have you had? It sounds like you've had none and are just going by what you've heard on Another Brick in the Wall Part 2!

Your second objection is not valid, as parents have the options of sending their children to private school or home schooling instead.

Your third objection would only be valid if a central committee dictated ALL of the content. Though there's a curriculum, it doesn't cover everything that's taught or how it's taught.

(continued)
Your fourth objection appears to be a fishing expedition for contradictions. But I'm not biting! If you think you can supply a better definition of "rights" then you're welcome to try. If you want a dissertation on the relationship between force and rights, go ahead and write one - I can even check the errors for you if you like.

But regardless of whether you bother with that, your statement that "Therefore your defence of state education is irrational" is itself irrational, for although I told you I support all the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it was not actually the basis for my defence of state education.

So cutting to the chase, this is the real world, and not everything can be distilled down to a single criterion. Determining whether we need more and/or better education depends on many criteria including (but not limited to) the opinions of parents, children and teachers, academic success, acquisition of life skills, what else can be done, what works elsewhere, and what the opportunity cost is.

Aidan

I reject your attempt to divert the discussion into personal contingencies.

You're not thinking critically because
1. On the one hand you must support compulsory funding, curriculum and attendance, because that's what state education means. At the same time, when challenged to justify compulsion, you deny that it's compulsory.

So ... is it compulsory, or not?

You do understand, don't you, that if someone physically grabs hold of you against your will, and locks you in a cage where you have a 25 percent chance of being raped
a) that is a serious criminal offence, and
b) you have an action for damages;
even if they only threaten you with it?

Therefore you are not thinking critically when you deny that the compulsory scheme that you advocate is based on compulsion.

Therefore even according to your own standard,
a) you're contradicting yourself, and
b) it's indoctrination rather than education, because you're not thinking critically: - admitting it's compulsory and denying it’s compulsory, in the same thread.

2.
"Your second objection is not valid, as parents have the options of sending their children to private school or home schooling instead."

You're ignoring a parent is still forced to pay for your compulsory brainwashing PLUS the education costs of private schooling.

Therefore you're equivocating = not comparing apples with apples = not thinking critically, so by your own definition it's indoctrination, not education.

3.
"Your third objection would only be valid if a central committee dictated ALL of the content."

It remains valid, and your argument is invalid, to the extent that the State dictates curriculum content. THEREFORE you have no way of knowing whether the service satisfies the evaluations of persons they're supposed to be serving, better than a voluntary dispensation.

Therefore you cannot justify compulsory state education, are not thinking critically, and by your own standard you have been brainwashed.

4.
"If you want a dissertation on the relationship between force and rights, go ahead and write one.”

I'll write it in one sentence: a right cannot consist of aggression or threats of aggression against another person because the whole purpose of ethics is to stop problems of scarcity being solved in that way – ‘might is right’.

So you're contradicting yourself again. There's no such thing as a "right" to threaten to imprison people to force them to submit to your taking their property.

Just think. When, during your entire life, did state school ever teach you that state education is based on threatening to imprison people to enforce funding and attendance? First class? No. Second class? No. Year 12? No.

You've never thought about it critically in your life. You are contradicting yourself at every turn. You're only proving you’ve been indoctrinated into believing that compulsion is virtuous, and is not even compulsion, so long as the state is doing it; and that problems of scarcity are magically solved by threats of force: completely irrational.

You're even contradicting yourself by participating in the discussion, since according to you, it doesn't matter whether people disagree with you, the issue is *not* to be solved by reason or agreement, it's to be solved by compulsion.

Is that correct or not?

Thank you for proving categorically and repeatedly that the State has brainwashed you to confuse compulsory with voluntary social relations – the most fundamental ethical error possible - and that rights are whatever the State says they are no matter how self-contradictory: - and you’ve swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

You’re only exhibiting that you’ve been taught it doesn’t matter that what you believe and say is demonstrably untrue.

All
Notice how no-one can defend compulsory state education without immediately falling into a jumble of self-contradictions, and illogic, especially pretending that it's all voluntary after all?

Jardine, I think I've worked out why you think I'm contradicting myself: our exchanges have three participants: you, me and your strawman. But you have trouble telling the difference between me and your strawman. Hence you assume I hold certain opinions even when I've told you I don't.

1. Most people would regard "state education" to mean "education provided by the state". Yet you, perhaps realising that you've lost the argument if you stick with the standard definition, decide to redefine it as "compulsory funding, curriculum and attendance".

But if that's your definition, how does that fit in with your earlier claim that "State schooling should be abolished. It is precisely the talented and disadvantaged who suffer the most in its sausage-factory approach: bored out of their minds"?

Does it mean:
a) You've contradicted yourself?
b) You think "state education" and "state schooling" are completely different things?
c) You think compulsory funding, curriculum and attendance" necessarily results in a sausage factory approach with the talented and disadvantaged bored out of their minds?

If it's the last option, can you explain how?

Finding of schools is not based on prison, so your rant about locking people up in a cage is irrelevant, though I will point out that if at any prison there's a 25% chance of being raped, whoever runs that prison is grossly negligent.

Your assumption that I'm not thinking critically because you see what you regard as a contradiction shows a lack of critical thinking on your part, not mine.

2. State schools are funded by the state, not the parents. How the state gets its money is a matter for the residents/citizens of the state, though typically it has very little, if anything, to do with the threat of imprisonment (if taxes go unpaid, confiscation of property is the more usual recourse). And at least in many cases, the increased productivity from a better educated workforce is itself greatly exceeds the cost of the children's education over their lifetimes.

And your acquisition of equivocating is a non sequiter.
(tbc)