811–820 of 868 posts
I was Alex (my name is not Alex). Graduated high school in 97, but with a 2.1 GPA (yeah, pretty bad). Went to community college while working part time, living in a 'separated' household (mom/dad did the splits), supported both my parents both emotionally and financially (as much as I could) through their transition and new living arrangements. We were all immigrants, and still learning the ropes in this wonderful co…
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As a counterpoint, Boston spends more per student than every other city ($31.3k in 2023 dollars): https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/05/30/metro/boston-now-spen... . But the outcomes are quite poor. How can society justify spending more on the same institutions that have miserable outcomes? In the private sector, less revenue forces belt-tightening, purchasing software and tools that enhance productivity, and ultimatel…
The families need money. Kids from impoverished and broken homes make poor students that ruin the experience for the everyone in the school. Their misery is contagious. Throwing it at schools won’t solve it because teachers are doing everything they can to support kids but teachers have no control outside the school day. Increase foster care budgets and social welfare programs. If America can afford Musk naziposting…
Maybe we should be investing ways to get parents to go to church? They would turn into better people.
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> One kid should not be allowed to ruin a class. The only thing I ruined for other students when I was in class was forcing them to look at my stupid haircut. My punishments were for truancy. I went to school, but spent all of my time in the computer lab because with severe ADHD without any academic support rendered class pointless. One crusty old Korean War vet teacher flat-out told me he "didn't believe in IEPs," a…
We are talking past each other. Kids that need help should get help. One form of that help is holding kids back so that they get a second chance to master material they need for the next year. If you progress kids that are not ready you burden the teacher the next year as they have to provide more differentiated instruction. We should reduce the stigma of holding kids back by doing more regularly. Its cheaper than th…
I don't actually think we are. If you've made a point I haven't addressed, I'm happy to address it.
> Kids that need help should get help. One form of that help is holding kids back so that they get a second chance to master material they need for the next year. If you progress kids that are not ready you burden the teacher the next year as they have to provide more differentiated instruction. We should reduce the stigma of holding kids back by doing more regularly. Its cheaper than the wide array of tier 1 and 2 interventions.
Did you read the paper in the comment you replied to? Because empirical evidence doesn't support that.
> Kids that have violence/social issue should be removed from kids that are ready to be in school. I know teacher who have kids who have been disruptive and they can not discipline them. Suspensions/ Alternative / Expulsions should be used when appropriate for the benefit of everyone else.
Still betting you didn't read those papers. Suspension/expulsion is absolutely one of multiple ways to remove a kid from the other kids. Unfortunately, it's one that necessarily removes any help or actual behavioral correction the kid could have gotten, and they're waaaay more likely than most other kids to need more intensive help. Suspension is a codified way for schools to abdicate their responsibility to manage the environment within the schools. So you responded to it? Great. You're not the ruler by which everyone is measured, and the data doesn't support your anecdote.
> I don't know if you have kids, but mine are in a very liberal school in a very rich area. Very unlike where I grew up, and they cannot run an elementary school. Both my kids are Add/Dyslexic. My wife observed a class and the teacher had no ability to create a calm learning environment. There were emotionally disturbed kids in the same class who screamed / ran out of the room. 2x this year my son was asked to go fetch a kid who ran from the room because the kid that ran likes my son. We had a 504 plan which could not be implemented because there is no bandwidth.
Zero people here are arguing that kids with disruptive behavioral problems should be in classrooms with mainstream kids. You're the one saying that suspensions et al are the best way to solve that. They weren't when I was in school, and they aren't now. Schools not having the funding or the staff to do what they need to do doesn't turn a harmful non-answer into an answer, or make it less harmful.
> We need to look at how we teach kids fundamentally because what we have been doing for the last 30 years hasn't worked.
Sure. For most of the past 30 years we've been indiscriminately handing out suspensions and failing to offer support for kids that need it. My entire high school career happened squarely within the past 30 years. Maybe we should try looking at the data we have rather than just saying what feels right and doubling down on the back in my day tough love nostalgia.
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I wasn't really intending to compare the countries. Just to point out that something which was being attributed to America (a decrease in poverty) was actually happening because of China.
This doesn't make sense. If your point is that global poverty is decreasing because people in China are moving from subsistence farming to factory jobs, then the people ultimately doing the "lifting" are the ones buying the products the Chinese factories are producing, i.e. not Chinese people. But that point is a couple decades out of date by now and even then the situation was more complex than just "people in rich…
You know money is just paper, right? When we give China paper in return for something of value from their country, that is a bad deal for them unless they can trade the paper and get some actual good in return. China runs a trade surplus, which means they give away more than they get back, so it is actually a bad deal for them. It's one that makes their country poorer because they are giving away more than they get back. Almost all economists agree that China's trade surplus is bad for its economy, is even worse for its citizens, and should be reduced.
People in China were lifted out of poverty through the creation of manufacturing centres. These cities and factories were built by the Chinese, not by the west. It is ridiculous for us to try and take credit for their advancement when all we have done is exploit them.
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As an anecdote on the topic of education, as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in rural South Korea in the 1970s, I routinely visited secondary schools that (at the time) were little more than drab warehouses for large (-70 students/class) using ragged textbooks and ancient furniture. Spirits were high, though, and these farm kids were successfully learning math through basic differential calculus plus a daunting array of o…
See my highest level comment for a discussion of why blaming the family is intellectually lazy.
Go to school, get good grades, don't borrow money, look after your health, get a job, be polite, pay your taxes - these are all the fundamentals of a good culture and are massively predictive of success. Lots of this advice is millennia old. It's not the role of a liberal government to culturally indoctrinate its people.
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> It violates core liberal fundamentals. People have the right to be as involved of parents as they see fit, and to raise their children with values of their choosing. If that's "core liberal fundamentals," then maybe liberalism is, at heart, rotten. Your take on it certainly is. I don't respect a parent's "right" to neglect or mistreat their children. Society collectively is entitled (in fact, obliged) to intervene…
> How can you possibly believe that the government, with its myriad checks and balances, is too susceptible to corruption to intervene in family life, but that parents, whose power over their children should be absolutely unchecked in your view, cannot be corrupt? Because generally parents care a lot about their children. That has been a universal experience. There are of course some rotten outliers, but those are th…
Oh please. This could be used to justify anything. I could say that murder is uncommon, and when it does happen, that's "the exception that proves the rule." Moreover, the prison system is corrupt and violent. Therefore we should stop prosecuting murderers.
> Because generally parents care a lot about their children. That has been a universal experience.
"In the 2012, Canadian Community Health Survey- Mental Health, 32% of Canadian adults reported that they had experienced some form of abuse before the age of 16. 26% had experienced physical abuse; 10% had experienced sexual abuse; 8% had experienced exposure to intimate partner violence." [1] Clearly this is a massive problem, and I don't accept "well what if we pretended it didn't happen" as a solution. If you believe parents are "universally" caring, I suggest you open your eyes and stop relying on your preconceptions.
Besides, being caring is not the issue. If a caring but misguided parent raised their children in the woods, cutting them off from society and education, that would still be an evil act. I have no interest in allowing extreme moral relativism to get in the way of preventing things which we all agree are evil.
> Whereas governments are mostly comprised of faceless bureaucrats who will generally care far less about a child.
I'm sure faceless bureaucrats don't care much about murder victims either. Again, that's not an excuse to stop prosecuting murderers. A bureaucracy does not depend on the enthusiasm of its participants to serve a purpose.
> And you may not believe me, but just look at referendums or bills about parental rights and public's reaction to those.
Which ones? If you've got a referendum to the effect that the public largely does not believe that CPS should ever intervene in families, I'd love to see it. Alas, I suspect you're referring to something much narrower and less relevant.
[1]: https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/health-promo...
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> It violates core liberal fundamentals. People have the right to be as involved of parents as they see fit, and to raise their children with values of their choosing. If that's "core liberal fundamentals," then maybe liberalism is, at heart, rotten. Your take on it certainly is. I don't respect a parent's "right" to neglect or mistreat their children. Society collectively is entitled (in fact, obliged) to intervene…
Liberalism as an ideology can be derived from two axioms: 1) All people are moral equals 2) There is no moral oracle It follows from these that no person has a source of moral authority to impose their views on another. What gives you or anyone else the moral right to intervene in someone else's family, presumably by force, over their objections? This isn't a rhetorical question. I'm earnestly hoping for a clear answ…
Those axioms don't really create a consistent or substantial ethical universe. If I'm a serial killer and I say, "don't worry, we're all moral equals. You're just as entitled to kill me as I am to kill you," then I'm not violating your first principle. And if you were to respond, "killing like that is simply wrong," you'd be violating your second principle and setting yourself up as a moral oracle.
The core of liberalism is not an underlying system of ethical axioms: Mill was both a liberal and a utilitarian, but you can just as easily argue against liberalism from a utilitarian standpoint—moreover, the position you're evincing here is liberal but anti-utilitarian. No, the unifying source of liberalism is the political status quo which produced it. The real champions of liberalism were the capital owners who stood to profit by it, and who had the influence to bring it about, ousting the aristocracy in the process. The idea that liberal hegemony is a moral triumph and not a political one is simply history being written by the victors.
> Liberalism is the ideology responsible for our prosperity.
It's more correct to say that liberalism and industrial prosperity were both products of the industrial revolution, rather than one being responsible for the other. Illiberal authoritarian powers like China and India are demonstrating that industrial prosperity is eminently attainable without liberalism, although I wouldn't consider that an endorsement of their respective ideologies.
> The first step on the path to evil is thinking you know better.
The first step to literally anything is thinking you know better. You can't escape the duty of having to make judgements. Inaction is itself an action that can cause harm, and there's no a priori reason to privilege the choice not to act.
> Raising hateful, illiterate children injures no one else.
It injures the children. Besides which, raising a sufficiently hateful child does injure others if you ultimately induce that child to commit a hate crime.
> Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. - Declaration of the Rights of Man - 1789
The operant question here is what it means to "injure someone else" and how we intend to "limit the rights of other men to assure others' enjoyment of the same rights." Natural rights are a very flexible concept. Do I have a right to healthcare, or do hospitals have a right to deny me care for profit? Do I have a right to dump my garbage in the river, or do you have a right to clean drinking water? "Natural" rights are an oxymoron; every right is contrived, and deciding which rights we choose to legitimize and prioritize allows us to sculpt a flavour of natural rights theory to suit any belief system whatsoever. For example, just about anyone would agree that a person has a right to evict a violent burglar from their home. A conservative might further argue that Americans have a right to violently detain illegal immigrants in defence of their borders. Finally, a Nazi might plead that Aryans have an absolute right to defend their homeland from ethnic invaders. By tweaking exactly which rights you get and to what extent you get them, you can justify practically anything. That's why I find utilitarianism so much more rigorous.
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Liberalism as an ideology can be derived from two axioms: 1) All people are moral equals 2) There is no moral oracle It follows from these that no person has a source of moral authority to impose their views on another. What gives you or anyone else the moral right to intervene in someone else's family, presumably by force, over their objections? This isn't a rhetorical question. I'm earnestly hoping for a clear answ…
> Liberalism as an ideology can be derived from two axioms Those axioms don't really create a consistent or substantial ethical universe. If I'm a serial killer and I say, "don't worry, we're all moral equals. You're just as entitled to kill me as I am to kill you," then I'm not violating your first principle. And if you were to respond, "killing like that is simply wrong," you'd be violating your second principle an…
This is exactly it. Your freedom is a function of your relationship to those who can use legitimate force against you - of how much power is held over you. If you can be killed without consequence then you're only as free as you are strong. This is a description of liberal anarchy, which is the natural state.
I guess I should have elaborated that the it is a liberal order which guarantees everyone an equal right do everything which injures no one else. It is the pursuit of order while maximising the freedom of the natural state that motivates the liberal. So the response isn't "killing like that is simply wrong", it's that violence without due process is disorderly.
> the position you're evincing here is liberal but anti-utilitarian
It's not actually, it's anti-authoritarian, which is a synonym for liberal. I'm arguing that the only legitimate use of (physical) authority is in the maintenance of a liberal ecosystem. It is not legitimate to use authority to intervene in the outcomes that ecosystem produces. You've not directly answered my question:
> What gives you or anyone else the moral right to intervene in someone else's family, presumably by force, over their objections?
The answer, should you produce it, would presumably justify any authoritarian intervention in pursuit of a utilitarian objective.
> prosperity is eminently attainable without liberalism
This was tried and failed in the Soviet Union for a reason. It will fail the same way every time power is concentrated in human hands. Liberalism-authoritarianism is a one-dimensional axis. Power is either diluted or concentrated. Neither outcome is utopian, but the failure modes differ. Giving relatively large amounts of power to the average individual produces all sorts of negative outcomes (eg. school shootings), but the consequences of concentrated authority are always catastrophic. The old adage about eggs and baskets applies. Distributed power is antifragile.
> Deciding to privilege non-intervention over any other course of action is itself a choice that can cause harm.
This is an opinion. I disagree. The harm is caused by the agent (person) or natural circumstance that triggered the outcome. If you get sick it's the disease that causes harm, not the person who didn't care to help you. If you're pushed out a window, it's the person who pushed you that caused the harm, not the one who didn't catch you.
> It injures the children.
This is also an opinion. People disagree axiomatically about what sort of upbringing constitutes injuring a child. Some would say failing to enforce attendance of religious school is injurious. You're sure you know best?
> Natural rights are a very flexible concept.
They're not really. It's pretty simple, you have the same rights you would in a state of nature with no other person intervening. So yes clean air and water, but no not the professional services of other people. Yes rights are only meaningful when they intersect with the rights of others. The entire liberal thesis is that the right of people to choose how to live supersedes the authoritarian pursuit of collective outcomes. We can still pursue them, just on a voluntary, consensual basis.
I like the message, but I feel like this is bad data visualization. The width of each group of people is not the same, so it's somewhat meaningless to visually compare groups without being able to see the raw percentages. For example, the "Many Adverse Experiences" group is stretched to be longer than the other groups so that proportionally fewer people in that group appear to be a larger proportion than the same pro…
This is usually the case for most stories published in The Pudding.