He asked school. Do you have reading comprehension problems?
No I don’t. Do you? It sure seems like it.
I know exactly what he said.
Abortion is ok because it’s a part of the mother’s body.
Do they think parenting is slavery too? Just so you know I liked my school very much.
while you can equate a child to property in some respects, you cannot do it in every respect, because a child is a potential sovereign individual.
in the way you could look at a child like property, the parents create the child out of raw material, they then have the obligation to nurture the child, or give the child to someone who will.
at some point, different for everyone and impossible to define, the child becomes an adult and assumes responsibility to tend itself, then it can no longer be considered to be property.
ethics might not provide the perfect answers to the parent-child relationship, even libertarian ethics.
fortunately we have gene survival coded within us that makes us, except in extreme circumstances, cherish and protect our children to the point that we would give our lives to save our children.
so, where ethics fumbles, evolution recovers the ball and moves it forward.
How are you defining slavery?
That’s great, I’m sure others did too. But my statement was in response to a general one & it holds true. Was it a state school though? I should have been clearer I guess, as that is what I was generally referring too - although all private schools essentially have to conform to the states standards of testing, so they can set the learning agenda / guidelines / rules.
Slavery or enslavement means to us the right to punish in any way. Block explains in great detail why Rothbard and others are wrong about voluntary slavery contracts in Toward a Libertarian Theory of Inalienability.
One problem with the idea of “children as slaves” is that children are not full moral agents and can’t agree to a binding slavery contract. Another is, as I have explained before, that parents simply do not and can not own children in such a manner.
Voluntary, coercive, or both?
I don’t think the issue is a moral one for these norwegian libertarians. If we accept that a state will arise out of anarchy, then it is reasonable to try and make the state as good as we can with it around rather than letting anarchy happen and having no control over whether or not we get a state which promotes liberty.
How do you define prison? And I went to state school of course. I was never religious.
I hated school from a young age, and used to run away until grade 7 when the state-appointed psychiatrist prescribed some powerful (government-subsidized!) antidepressants and transferred me to a school outside of the city. I became sedentary, lost all and every passion and gained a staggering amount of weight. It was a prison in mind and body.
The purpose of school has nothing to do with education. It is to keep young people out of the labour market, away from society and kept disciplined and tuned to the voice of authority.
And if you learn a thing or two, you get to keep it as a bonus.
A place or condition of confinement or forcible restraint.
Going hand in hand with the spread of public education have been compulsory attendance laws, which have forced all children up to a high — and continually increasing — minimum age, to attend either a public school or a private school certified as suitable by the state apparatus. In contrast to earlier decades, when a relatively small proportion of the population went to school in the higher grades, the entire mass of the population has thus been coerced by the government into spending a large portion of the most impressionable years of their lives in public institutions. We could easily have analyzed compulsory attendance laws [p. 120] in our chapter on involuntary servitude, for what institution is more evidently a vast system of incarceration? In recent years, Paul Goodman and other critics of education have trenchantly exposed the nation’s public schools — and to a lesser extent their private appendages — as a vast prison system for the nation’s youth, dragooning countless millions of unwilling and unadaptable children into the schooling structure. The New Left tactic of breaking into the high schools shouting “Jailbreak!” may have been absurd and ineffective, but it certainly expressed a great truth about the school system. For if we are to dragoon the entire youth population into vast prisons in the guise of “education,” with teachers and administrators serving as surrogate wardens and guards, why should we not expect vast unhappiness, discontent, alienation, and rebellion on the part of the nation’s youth? The only surprise should be that the rebellion was so long in coming. But now it is increasingly acknowledged that something is terribly wrong with America’s proudest institution; that, especially in urban areas, the public schools have become cesspools of crime, petty theft, and drug addiction, and that little or no genuine education takes place amidst the warping of the minds and souls of the children.1
So, how are you defining slavery?
No. You answer Daniel’s question first. Don’t avoid it.
No. You answer Conza’s question first. What is slavery? You brought these up - you answer them. Don’t avoid it.
The proper libertarian position on children is that children have all the same rights as adults and that parents not only do not own their children, but are also prohibited from initiating force upon them (regardless of the excuse used). Parents have the right to choose whether or not to provide for their children and may kick their children out at any time.
The non-initiation axiom and right of self-ownership apply from birth (arguably from conception). Therefore, parental “rights” are very strictly limited under libertarian law. If parental beliefs contradict the non-aggression axiom, they are prohibited from acting on their beliefs.
Children who are victims of aggression have the right to drag their parents into court just as any other crime victim has the right to take the person who aggressed against them to court.
Was this all against your parents’ wishes or are you against parenting at all?
I am not against parenting. But it never occurred to anyone at the time to work out why. Nobody questioned whether the school was doing its job, it must have been family problems.
As to my parent’s wishes: without going into too much detail, it was the threat of ‘child protection’ measures that drove them to consent to subject me to treatment. My mother was frequently ill and in hospital, there were two other children 10 years younger than me and my father worked to feed us all.
It was the path of least resistance, but would be much worse now as parents are now fined for ‘truant’ children. The schools, as usual, can do no wrong.
But back to to the OT: the state has used childhood education as a means for legitimizing the view that children must be controlled. The very act of going to school is performed as a cargo cult ritual; you attend school, therefore you must be getting smarter!
Parenting should be left to the parents, and the time of independence decided mutually by parent and child.