When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

Yet if you don't know math, you can be ripped off. If you can't read the contract or understand law at all, you can be manipulated.

A thousand or so vocal Facebook users found on anti-mask groups were surveyed... Not exactly the epitome of representativity...

94% of them say they will refuse to be vaccinated against COVID-19... Both educated and anti-science. Maybe their educational system failed them, or there are other important factors at play.

57% believe in a global Zionist conspiracy theory... 52% think the Illuminati are attempting to control the population...

I don't buy the "FPTP gives strong government" argument. Even if we accept that FPTP gives the government "clarity and a definitive mandate" (a very dubious claim given the chaos of the last few years), what's so great about strong government? The whole point of democracy is to prevent the government from getting too strong; if we really wanted strong government we'd abolish parliament and go back to letting the monarch decide everything.

Many, many European countries have proportional systems in which it's very rare for one party to get a clear majority and governments are almost always coalitions. Would Norway, Sweden or the Netherlands really be better off under a system like FPTP that effectively disenfranchises a large majority of the electorate?

The Russian Empire was authoritarian. It was not totalitarian under any definition of the term I’ve ever encountered. There was an extremely lively press, active intellectual life and real if toothless political opposition. It was absolutely nothing like under the Soviet boot.

> How did educated, liberal society respond to such terrorism? What was the position of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party and its deputies in the Duma (the parliament set up in 1905)? Though Kadets advocated democratic, constitutional procedures, and did not themselves engage in ­terrorism, they aided the terrorists in any way they could. Kadets collected money for terrorists, turned their homes into safe houses, and called for total amnesty for arrested terrorists who pledged to continue the mayhem. Kadet Party central committee member N. N. Shchepkin declared that the party did not regard terrorists as criminals at all, but as saints and martyrs. The official Kadet paper, Herald of the Party of People’s Freedom, never published an article condemning political assassination. The party leader, Paul Milyukov, declared that “all means are now legitimate . . . and all means should be tried.” When asked to condemn terrorism, another liberal leader in the Duma, Ivan Petrunkevich, famously replied: “Condemn terror? That would be the moral death of the party!”

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/10/suicide-of-the-l...

You seem to be implying that the home alternative of public schooling doesn't also accomplish these goals as well. Home schooling has a curriculum and standards just like public school does.

I'm not gonna blindly advocate for home schooling but I think anyone who cares enough about their kids' education to look into options other than public school probably also cares enough to pull it off if it's the option they wind up choosing.

>School is probably the best public invention to systematically distribute knowledge to the masses. Some like to point out "dropouts", "self-taught" geniuses or the "lucky few" as models instead of exceptions to the rule.

The further your kids are from the mean student the crappier the job the public school situation will do. It's like the difference between registering a new car at the DMV and bringing in a pile of papers to prove chain of custody on some junk that's only able to be street legal through some arcane technicality. The first transaction is painless. The latter is not. When you ask the system to do something it's well practiced at doing you get shit service.

>School's purpose is not to teach obedience or even getting a job. It is there to teach us critical thinking, and consequently, how to be a good citizen.

And if you think it's successful at that for any reasonable definition of "success" then you're clearly living in a different 2020 than I am.

Look through history, even before widespread government funded schooling everything was just as crap as it is today. You had just as many popuist leaders, pants on head retarded popular culture movements, witch hunts, all the same crap we have today. The only thing that's changed is that as society have become more advanced and richer we've become more able to avoid pain and violence.

Also, school is very much about obedience to an arbitrary system. They don't overtly state it but it's pretty damn obvious if you look at how the carrots and sticks are set up.

>An educated population is also less prone to fall into totalitarianism. Ex: Nazi Germany and Mao's China burned books and persecuted the educated (1984 style).

Sure. But it's pure lunacy to conflate what's good for society with what's good for any specific kid(s). There's definitely a lot of overlap but there's also a lot of non-overlap.