An education is incredibly cheap. All it takes is your time, and some books (which can even be substituted for the vast amount of free resources available online). If you want your education to be recognized, then include the additional cost of taking a few tests.
The only reason an education is expensive now-a-days is because the state “provides” it. The accreditation system, regulations, teachers unions, etc., all serve to increase costs.
Moreover, the poor would probably be better off in long run without a formal education than with state mandated indoctrination public school.
Ask yourself this question. If the families are poor, is it better for the child to be in school or working? I’m sure that income is far more important to the family in the vast majority of cases. Forcing children to go to school instead of allowing them to work (which would allow them to buy things they need more urgently) is incredibly cold hearted. In fact, those poverty stricken areas are more poverty stricken then they would otherwise be.
Also, one learns many marketable skills in the workplace; Simple things such as responsibility, diligence, initiative, professionalism, punctuality, ect. And what do you learn in public school? A few useful things such as math, science, and grammar. But also, idleness, dependency, obedience, mediocrity, and so on, since one’s school life is micromanaged by what are, for the most part, low IQ, low income, self-righteous, oblivious mouthpieces who couldn’t hack it in the marketplace if their lives depended on it.
What is so great about public schools that we should want poor children to go to them? If anything, they are a disservice.
Ha! I added the brackets to try to clarify what I meant, but apparently it wasn’t clear.
I’m disagreeing with this statement of yours, because I think you’re making a false distinction between things that need to be learned by formal instruction and things that don’t. All a baby/child needs to learn anything is a sense that it is worth learning. This applies to walking, talking, maths, cooking, etc. Just because we’re not the only species that walks does not change anything about whether formal instruction (by which I assume you mean schooling) is needed or not. Whether something is considered a “human invention” or not is irrelevant to how best to learn something. Every human action could be considered a “human invention”.
No, actually that was very clear. How does one walk not like a human. Did we walk like chimps until some guy invented the human walk?
Is human action itself a “human invention”? Assuming you’ll answer no, then neither is walking like a human and neither is language. It’s part of our biology and not some cultural history. If you find some remote human tribe that has been isolated from the rest of the world and has never made contact with anybody else, then you’ll find that they walk like humans and talk like humans.
And you’re not making any distinction between what is already part of your biological makeup before you even begin to open your eyes and the intellectual knowledge that you can later acquire. You are almost completely denying the fact that you have innate cognitive abilities already imprinted in your DNA.
You first need to have some built-in hardware before you can do anything. Language just happens to be one of those things, among many others. Certainly walking like a human.
Perhaps you’d like to add this book to your list before the language instinct:
By the way, my answer to the OP is that no, many children who receive a public education today probably wouldn’t receive an education without public schools. Because they wouldn’t be able to afford the cost of private school tuitions.
We can come up with any number of reasons for why this might not be, but it’s obvious to me that if they’re poor, they’re not going to have money to pay for certain things. Poor people already have a hard enough time affording the basics.
Does this justify using taxpayer funds to pay for these people to get educations? I don’t know. For some people it does, for others it doesn’t.
But we can’t blame them for it? Why not? Because you get why they were doing it? I can get why a murderer would murder his child, but should I not blame them for murdering their child? Or does this non-blame only concern poor people stealing for their own benefit? What if it is was a rich person stealing for his own benefit? Or a poor person stealing for the benefit of a rich person? Or a rich person stealing for the benefit of a poor person? What difference does it make what their economic statuses and their intentions are? Are not all thieves “thieves” for the same reason, that is, they chose to thieve?
Why? Never mind. I get why.
Yes, there are. You could take the money they voted to steal away from them and then kick them in the stomach.
Can you define “human invention” for me? As I said, I don’t see a clear line between what is biological evolution and what is cultural evolution.
I am not denying that DNA is important; as I see it, genes determine how quickly/effectively someone can learn various things. All humans have a high propensity to learn to walk and talk. The son of a great composer has a high propensity to learn music. Other animals have high propensity to learn different things, and low propensity to learn language. All due to DNA. Is this what you mean by “innate cognitive abilities”?
But babies cannot walk or talk; they must be learned somehow. Babies are highly motivated to learn to walk and talk because they perceive that they are useful things to learn to do. Children perceive the usefulness of learning how to do things like basic maths. Older children perceive the usefulness of learning a skill that will earn them a living. I don’t see why the process of learning would be different in any of these situations.
Thanks - I’ve just ordered them both, along with How The Mind Works. I’m not well read in evolutionary psychology as you can probably tell.
My main reason for posting was that I wanted to address the assumption in the OP that schooling is necessary or even always the most effective way of educating children, and the corollary of that: that parents who do not force their children to attend school are being irresponsible parents. My recent reading of the unschooling literature convinced me this is not at all the case.
This has nothing to do with God, this has to do with politics. If people have nothing and they see other people with stuff, they’re going to want to take it. Whether that’s right or wrong is irrelevant to me. You asked a simple question: “would poor people be able to afford private schooling for their children?”
How many poor kids do you know that are going to private schools? I went to private schools. They’re expensive. So poor people didn’t go. Poor people understand this better than you or I do, so they try to get state funding for public schools. I don’t blame them. I’d do exactly the same thing.