The government has the authority to do this because the airwaves are a limited natural resource held in public trust.
The government ought to do this because it is in the public interest to have a well-educated populace that enables a larger and more productive economy of skilled labor. Doctors and engineers are taught, not born.
Obviously, here as everywhere that the public interest is invoked, there is a balance to be stuck between this interest and the rights of the individual. But we as a society have overwhelmingly supported public education in various forms for centuries. Since the government (i.e. society's decisionmaking apparatus) has the lawful authority, there is no reason the will of the people should not be followed.
Honestly, the biggest problem I have with this requirement is the trash that the networks sometimes try to sell as "educational". The Flintstones is probably the most infamous example of this.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
The government ought to do this because it is in the public interest to have a well-educated populace that enables a larger and more productive economy of skilled labor. Doctors and engineers are taught, not born.
For this to be true, it would have to be shown that "educational television" succeeds in its mission of promoting education in children.
My personal opinion is that "educational TV" does not, in fact, promote the kinds of skills that I think are desirable in school, work, or play. TV is inherently a passive medium. A child who is watching, say, Bill Nye the Science Guy, may be learning something about science, which is good. But what they are learning about education is pretty bad. Educational TV tells kids, "Everything you need to know will be shown to you. You will never need to learn how to do something yourself." As a result, kids are growing up expecting knowledge to just be handed to them, rather than trying to learn on their own through being hands-on.
For this to be true, it would have to be shown that "educational television" succeeds in its mission of promoting education in children.
My personal opinion is that "educational TV" does not, in fact, promote the kinds of skills that I think are desirable in school, work, or play. TV is inherently a passive medium. A child who is watching, say, Bill Nye the Science Guy, may be learning something about science, which is good. But what they are learning about education is pretty bad. Educational TV tells kids, "Everything you need to know will be shown to you. You will never need to learn how to do something yourself." As a result, kids are growing up expecting knowledge to just be handed to them, rather than trying to learn on their own through being hands-on.
If an "educational show" is just a bare recitation of facts, this might happen. And I'm certainly not suggesting that a show of any format can substitute for immersive and interactive educational programs (i.e. school). But a well-crafted show that gets kids excited about the whole process of discovery can be a valuable supplement to their regular education. In my own primary school class, I can remember dramatic differences in enthusiasm between the children who watched Bill Nye and Wishbone and those who didn't. (Of course, it's possible the causation runs the other way, and the kids with more innate curiosity were more attracted to these shows. In fact, I suspect the causation probably goes both ways. But whether innate or learned, encouraging this curiosity is still to be desired.)
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
For this to be true, it would have to be shown that "educational television" succeeds in its mission of promoting education in children.
My personal opinion is that "educational TV" does not, in fact, promote the kinds of skills that I think are desirable in school, work, or play. TV is inherently a passive medium. A child who is watching, say, Bill Nye the Science Guy, may be learning something about science, which is good. But what they are learning about education is pretty bad. Educational TV tells kids, "Everything you need to know will be shown to you. You will never need to learn how to do something yourself." As a result, kids are growing up expecting knowledge to just be handed to them, rather than trying to learn on their own through being hands-on.
Depends, some of it's quite good and acceptable like Sesame Street where the kid actually memorizes stuff and interacts to a degree. There are more aspects to passivity such as trying to learn a new language, although this is better done through watching a full movie or something in the language than watching something like Dora the Explorer that keeps going between two languages. Since the person has to develop an entire new "thinking entity" inside of their head, rather than thinking in English and then trying to go to the other language.
The passivity is more or less parent's fault and the schools. If you hand a child movie instead of a book, then expect the child to watch more movies than read books. If the teacher isn't giving hands on work, and instead dislodges the math from the actual testing in science. You reach a deficit of skills.
That and parents also discourage children from playing outside, tearing objects a part, and so on. There's also a deficit where parents take the children and show them how to repair something simple like replacing an electrical outlet. Instead, today we hire people to fix such things.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
I personally just can't wait until MTV airs "Science with the Kardashians" or something like that.
Forcing every station to do this just seems silly. There are some stations that kids have no business coming anywhere near (MTV or Comedy Central for example, or even worse, Faux news) and others where a kiddie show would merely water down the rest of the channel (most 24-hour-news channels).
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Hey kids! Don't like rules? Tired of having your lulz censored by terrible, terrible people called "moderators"? Big fan of metal? Check out Metaln☺☺☺☺! This is probably the worst possible forum to advertise it on!
Added bonus: we're holding a songwriting contest in march with a registry drive going on right now! Check it out, plus the opportunity to earn $50!
I personally just can't wait until MTV airs "Science with the Kardashians" or something like that.
Forcing every station to do this just seems silly. There are some stations that kids have no business coming anywhere near (MTV or Comedy Central for example, or even worse, Faux news) and others where a kiddie show would merely water down the rest of the channel (most 24-hour-news channels).
I think this only applies to broadcasters, like CBS, NBC, etc. Not to cable channels or satellite channels.
"Everything you need to know will be shown to you. You will never need to learn how to do something yourself."
It seems like many students get this opinion no matter what. Maybe not on a collegiate level but certainly in grade school. It's kind of hard to encourage anything but a passive nature in a lecture-focused curriculum.
In my own primary school class, I can remember dramatic differences in enthusiasm between the children who watched Bill Nye and Wishbone and those who didn't.
These were some of the greatest kids shows ever. Somehow a little dog acting out classic literature made me want to read it.
These were some of the greatest kids shows ever. Somehow a little dog acting out classic literature made me want to read it.
I know, right? Only looking back on it do I realize how sophisticated the books were. I mean, no way was I otherwise going to read Pride and Prejudice or Frankenstein or Don Quixote when I was, what, six or seven?
Also, Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey is a great game.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Do I Contradict Myself? Very Well Then I Contradict Myself.
I know, right? Only looking back on it do I realize how sophisticated the books were. I mean, no way was I otherwise going to read Pride and Prejudice or Frankenstein or Don Quixote when I was, what, six or seven?
Also, Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey is a great game.
Well, those shows are good, however reading the actual books can and do also achieve the same result. There's more bedtime stories out there than just whats for "their reading level."
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
Yet another barrage of groundless assertions from WUBRG, and he manages to jump off the slippery slope despite my deliberately slip-proofing my post with the sentence, "Obviously, here as everywhere that the public interest is invoked, there is a balance to be struck between this interest and the rights of the individual". Dude, get some perspective. Whenever you or someone like you uses the words "fascist dictatorship" to describe moderate and democratically-endorsed government intervention made for the benefit of the public, you are spitting on the memory of every hose-beaten and destitute wretch who has suffered under actual fascism.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Small increments of tyranny are exactly what must be recognized as deliberate affronts to liberty. Do I need perspective to allow tyrants to nickel and dime me into bondage?
Sesame Street has been around for what, decades? You'd think that they would have "nickel and dimed you into bondage by now"...
Dude, I'm a Libertarian, I'm just as frustrated by certain things right now as you are, but a small amount of government regulation where the benefit to the people greatly outweighs the cost to the people should be ok.
The broadcast stations are using a finite resource, it'd be nice if they didn't devolve into 24/7 Flavor of Love and The Hills channels...
Quote from Educational Effectiveness of Sesame Street: A Review of the First Twenty Years of Research, 1969-1989.[/quote »
Research studies that have focused on the educational effectiveness of "Sesame Street" are reviewed, and a summary and synthesis of research results are presented. Educational effectiveness is defined as effectiveness in areas related to beginning schooling and the early years of the child's formal education. From the more than 100 empirical studies of the impact of "Sesame Street," 16 were chosen because they collected data on individual children. On the whole, the studies with the strongest designs indicate that "Sesame Street" had a significant positive impact on the children in terms of the variables measured and relative to the children in other groups studied. In addition, the effect was large enough to have shown up in studies with very small samples. The research studies reviewed in this report indicate that "Sesame Street" has had a significant positive impact on the pre-reading and school-readiness skills of children in the United States, Australia, Canada, Israel, and Mexico. An appendix contains summaries of all 16 studies. (Contains 35 references.) (SLD)
You can read the study, but it's had a lot of good. There's other research that all says the same thing about Sesame Street. Gulags, indeed teaching children useful skills and having them want to learn.
I may not be a Jew, nor a trade unionist, but I realize that false balance can serve to confuse people into accepting atrocities one small step at a time.
If you were arguing iatrogenics, I could see your point. However, this presumption that edutainment is some propaganda machine to make kids more malleable to corrosive influences, is unjust. Children receive their early biases from parents, and the rest from their generation and lastly native culture. So while I agree that marketing is a big problem in our society, but so is making people immune to it.
We do not need a balance of individual rights against government tyranny. We do not need a balance of legally-mandated programming, via television, for children. We do not need government to commandeer private property for people deemed "undereducated." Public trust doctrine does not entitle government to ownership of all resources in a territory, does it? Or is this a matter of perspective?
Yes, it does. Control over children and property is ancient. The education of children in this country was established by the Puritans to be compulsory. Involvement in controlling a child's education environment dates back thousands of years. Society has been enculturated, seen the benefits, and has immensely advanced civilization by in part controlling a child's education to help create a literate framework. Even Jefferson was for socialist education by merit.
Most of the edutainment stuff that works is designed for 2-6 years old that is mandated. Beyond that most children will probably have switched over to action adventure stuff like Pokemon and more detailed edutainment stuff like the Discovery Channel.
Small increments of tyranny are exactly what must be recognized as deliberate affronts to liberty. Do I need perspective to allow tyrants to nickel and dime me into bondage?
So you're telling me Liberty Kids is going to turn our children into right wing goons? Where's your evidence? Where's your research? You can make a case for consumerism connected to any child's show, however education based stuff is the de facto norm. Baby Einstein, which does ☺☺☺☺ for really little kids that it targets, as well as issues with encouraging more ADHD behaviors from children that watch too much television.
However, I can singularly argue that any responsible parent does make sure to moderate exposure. As for consumerism, parents model consumer behavior for children that carries well into adulthood. So even inundated with all these advertisements to buy products and is reinforced with culture emphasizing material wealth, people still do indeed fight it. It's just as simple as telling your kid no, or my favorite to tell a toddler to get a job.
Well, those shows are good, however reading the actual books can and do also achieve the same result. There's more bedtime stories out there than just whats for "their reading level."
Oh yeah, although I think Don Quixote would be a year's worth of bedtime stories, and as a six-year-old boy I considered Pride and Prejudice to be a "girly book." Anyhoo, you're definitely right in that reading ahead of a kid's grade level does wonders. I was just saying that the program made it a lot more interesting than if my grade-schooler self picked up the source material and tried to read it all the way through.
Oh yeah, although I think Don Quixote would be a year's worth of bedtime stories, and as a six-year-old boy I considered Pride and Prejudice to be a "girly book." Anyhoo, you're definitely right in that reading ahead of a kid's grade level does wonders. I was just saying that the program made it a lot more interesting than if my grade-schooler self picked up the source material and tried to read it all the way through.
You really have to graduate the kid into them, and even then some aren't appropriate until they're older. Some kids only really resonate while they're young with certain books as well. Some authors like Jack London that are fairly recent, in literary terms, are good bridges. I'd argue even the Iliad, Odyssea, and Anneid are good. It's just really depends on the kids temperament.
Although, if you're trying to teach them a different language when they're really young. Then yea, read in both languages. It makes it more fun for the kid to learn the other language.
So WUBRG, are you an anarchist? Insisting that we could survive without government is crazy... who would stop criminals?
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"If you're Havengul problems I feel bad for you son, I got 99 problems and a Lich ain't one." - FSM
"In a world where money talks, silence is horrifying."
Anarchy is an ideal, along with communism and every other economic system. Ideals try to address some real problems, but not all of the real problems; ideals cannot bring peace, solving some problems while creating others.
Government may stop criminals, but that's a band-aid solution. What creates criminals? How should we try to stop criminals while leaving the motivation for crime, and the environment that makes crime easy or lucrative, unaddressed?
Conflicts of beliefs, on the interpersonal level (and intrapersonal level), facilitate crime. There can be government, but it must cede its authority to the individual, who is sovereign, or else that government shall be considered oppressive, and a cycle of justice / injustice shall ensue.
Yea, this is part of social contract theory, however you haven't exactly defined anything nuanced about it.
In reality, some structures of human organization turn out to be more effective at fostering peace and prosperity, than do others. The better governments are the organic ones, which establish loose standards, rather than strict rules, for most actions. People don't like being forced into cults, but, usually, people agree to go along to get along in comfortable ways.
Not always, as people seek to improve and explore the world around them. In particular with education, we've created a culture bent on acquisition of material goods, a warped system of finances, and a two income trap where families lack redundancy.
Those who choose to change things are faced with precedence, and much strong wind backlash. The old historical point about how institutions are shaped by their originators and later how institutions shape the people that grow up within that system. However, there's also a third and very engendering key to this in the effect that the first generation agrees with a system but the breakaway sects begin upon normally the third generation. So there are multiple macrosystems you're glossing over in politics.
When people try to use government to exploit rules and laws to achieve some ideal system, rather than simply allowing organic peace to grow from sovereign, earnest individuals, and manipulating the society and culture in the process, peace and prosperity are inevitably sacrificed. I do not want that.
So basically you're a libertarian as in socially liberal and what I can presume to be fiscally conservative by extension.
Yes, individuals do have to make compromises for society's sake (which really means, for rulers' sake), but so should society (rulers of society) compromise for individuals' respective sakes.
Children are naturally curious and caring. They're not the pathetic, bored idiots that humanists take them for. The Federal Communications Commission should be ashamed to try to influence children so blatantly and disrespectfully like this.
Children mimic and take on the aspects of those around them to cobble together a personality through experimentation. Most of the education issues are not at the young child age, but rather during the teenage years. Looking at the research and talking to people for years about it, I find it to be a complicated affair that lays some where between the fault of bad leadership in administration, teachers not able to be fired, parents, and lack of agility to get kids into specific schools that are tailored for certain problems.
If the benefit to the people greatly outweighs the cost to the people, then private entrepreneurs should be jumping at the opportunity to do this, shouldn't they?
Yes, in some places they are indeed and are failing miserably like Baby Einstein and other products to turn normal kids into gifted children. "Gifted" have precious abilities, but it's more related to a certain type of temperament that has to be influenced. Wunderkids are especially rare, but the typical child that is raised in a high SES environment does outperform lower SES students because of economic and socio-cultural factors.
Businesses are in the ground to make money, however public broadcasting, a form of socialism, does provide great children's programming. Sesame Street has shown results by taking marketing strategies and aiming them at education to get children to want to mimic and get inspired to learn and explore their world more. Now, Nickelodeon does provide some good child's programming and so does a few other channels that are on cable.
People are moving away from cable to online formats and getting their local broadcasting through a special chip in their computers. Then some people still only use their basic television set ups. So that leaves fourchannels as ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and without government PBS. Out of the three main stations, ABC is the only one with Saturday morning cartoons which are of questionable educational value. There's some other channels, but the kids programming is sparse and normally airs early in the morning.
So for poorer children that are not in school, PBS is basically the poor man's Nickelodeon, Disney, or whatever praytell else is on cable these days. Since the research has shown that the "propaganda" has given good outcomes, it is socially justified to brainwash children into learning the alphabet and other such skills and values.
By enforcing educational programming through formal regulation, the federal government inhibits private competence in management of communities; the government is basically saying, "We do not trust individuals to act generously or responsibly in the interest of children, and society generally. So, we must force them to do so."
Yea, we've done it as a society for about 400 years because we need good citizens that know actually how to read and do math. We set a mandate and provide some social funding, and yet market forces produce some good stuff like Sesame Street and dare I say Dora the Explorer.
Television has moved toward instant made celebrities with cameras following around people with the "celebrities" like Snooki and her predecessor Paris Hilton. The trend in television these days is to have more channels and less variety in programming. This started with FX and moved to catch on with other channels that have huge libraries of old run shows. So therefore children's programming has been crowded out and been replaced with informercials on public stations and on the cable channels more blocks aimed at adults.
We don't need these sorts of inspired video games for people to play either:
The federal government forces its private beliefs about humanism on society at large. Yet, since humanism is considered a philosophy rather than a religion, separation of church and state does not appear to have jurisdiction in these matters.
Classical liberalism and protestantism to be exact with education in general. Plato really got the whole ball rolling with the idea on public education, and then men like Comenius took it to a level, mused about by Jefferson and some other Founders, and then it was birthed in the states by Horace Mann and sold by folks like John Dewey. So in short, the pantheon of public education is very diverse. Humanism is just one of the structures that has nurtured public education, but it's more under classical liberalism.
Ok, but why shouldn't private educational institutions implement these things out of their own interests? Why should the federal government exercise control over peaceful individuals conducting private business transactions?
Because society has deemed the responsibility to educate the youth through broad systems to be one part of government's responsibility to help create a citizen. Watching Sesame Street at a young age, getting a socialist public education, and going to a socialist library to read varied works ranging from John Dewey to Alisa Rosenbaum allows to create leaders for the future of this country.
The fundamental question that must be asked: Is the proper priority of government to secure peace, or to force progress perhaps at the expense of peace, offending liberty and ignoring criticism?
By offering cheap education to the masses is one of the foundational responsibilities found in the works of our Founders like Franklin and Jefferson. An illiterate public is not a free society, and it weakens social mobility. There's also especially issues on women's rights as more conservative societies tend to not educate their women and regard them as chattle. So society has taken
to redistribution of the wealth in part to dedicate itself to combat creating a fundamentalist heaven through economic and social justice. It is all about connectivity, connectivity, connectivity.
So, children do not naturally want to become proficient in areas that make themselves and their peers comfortable?
Exposure to good material like Sesame Street doesn't kill individualism, it nurtures it. There is a direct correlation between education and financial success and connectivity. Granted it doesn't take much education to make money, but indeed being literate makes it a hell of a lot easier to accomplish connectivity, though.
You really have to go back to Rosseau and his advocacy for childhood exploration. By providing a good "garden" to explore, children are free to accumulate knowledge on their own. Once the child gets to a stage, if they choose to learn more about Hitler, for example, they're free in our society to read Meine Kumpf without social problems.
Yea, we set minimum standards in society so we don't have children overly influenced by people like her. We allow her to have her time and place, but not to overrun the airwaves with lowbrow junk. Really, you're handing me nothing but the same philosophy with questions. No data, no research, no history, no projection about our whole socio-cultural framework at all.
Edutainment does not have to be normal, nationalist propaganda. Any message that limits or directs conceptualization, comprehension, or motivation, falls into the category of soft propaganda; instructing someone what to believe can be accomplished, or, at least, influenced, through instructing that person how to believe.
You seriously must not have kids or watch early morning shows, because Fox in particular has recently gotten rid of their early morning cartoons in favor of infomercials. So, instead of cartoons based on heroes and some edutainment they instead show some nature show to hit the minimum standard and then place on real propaganda to sell products. Your market philosophy has yet to convince me that socialist PBS is inferior to what the market can offer outside of perhaps Nickelodeon and a handful of other channels on cable.
It's one thing to demonstrate physical reactions, but it's another thing to insist that they are desirable or good. It's one thing to say the alphabet, but another thing to impress that literacy is dignified and illiteracy should be looked down upon. "Sesame Street" (Copyright 2010 Jim Henson Productions) promotes the message that a group of people of homogeneous ethnicity is strictly inferior to a group of people of heterogeneous ethnicity.
Illiteracy opens people up to be abused by people that are, as literate people generally are able to keep records and enforce governance more easily than other people that cannot. Connectivity is key, and even poor people in the middle of forsaken wastelands want their children education because they know that being educated means in part they can become a part of the power structure.
If you study how much actual education many WWII veterans had, it was rather low. Yet, they could read and write which allowed them to connect and defeat a large force that would have otherwise eventually disrupted their way of life through conquest.
Today, for example the same rate of education is in India. There was a project to put out computers to peasants to sell their goods. The peasant through his basic education found the website for the Chicago market that set the price of the goods he was selling. In a limited amount of time these peasants were able to time the market and sell their goods for higher prices and improve themselves through this connectivity. The computers lent out to these areas has improved the lives of these people, but their basic education from socialist sources enabled them to improve their livelihood through self determination.
So, the USA should be a Puritan nation? Who cares what Puritans, or any other religion, tries to dictate?
Nope, but the 400 years precedence certainly makes it one hell of an argument to continue meddling in the affairs of people that don't teach their children to read.
We also have environmental issues and law enforcement issues that go unaddressed. Streamlining children's expectations has had "unintended consequences."
Your implying something without being very specific on what evidence you have used to reach such a conclusion.
Anarchy is an ideal, along with communism and every other economic system. Ideals try to address some real problems, but not all of the real problems; ideals cannot bring peace, solving some problems while creating others.
Government may stop criminals, but that's a band-aid solution. What creates criminals? How should we try to stop criminals while leaving the motivation for crime, and the environment that makes crime easy or lucrative, unaddressed?
Conflicts of beliefs, on the interpersonal level (and intrapersonal level), facilitate crime. There can be government, but it must cede its authority to the individual, who is sovereign, or else that government shall be considered oppressive, and a cycle of justice / injustice shall ensue.
Yea, this is part of social contract theory, however you haven't exactly defined anything nuanced about it.
In reality, some structures of human organization turn out to be more effective at fostering peace and prosperity, than do others. The better governments are the organic ones, which establish loose standards, rather than strict rules, for most actions. People don't like being forced into cults, but, usually, people agree to go along to get along in comfortable ways.
Not always, as people seek to improve and explore the world around them. In particular with education, we've created a culture bent on acquisition of material goods, a warped system of finances, and a two income trap where families lack redundancy.
Those who choose to change things are faced with precedence, and much strong wind backlash. The old historical point about how institutions are shaped by their originators and later how institutions shape the people that grow up within that system. However, there's also a third and very engendering key to this in the effect that the first generation agrees with a system but the breakaway sects begin upon normally the third generation. So there are multiple macrosystems you're glossing over in politics.
When people try to use government to exploit rules and laws to achieve some ideal system, rather than simply allowing organic peace to grow from sovereign, earnest individuals, and manipulating the society and culture in the process, peace and prosperity are inevitably sacrificed. I do not want that.
So basically you're a libertarian as in socially liberal and what I can presume to be fiscally conservative by extension.
Yes, individuals do have to make compromises for society's sake (which really means, for rulers' sake), but so should society (rulers of society) compromise for individuals' respective sakes.
Children are naturally curious and caring. They're not the pathetic, bored idiots that humanists take them for. The Federal Communications Commission should be ashamed to try to influence children so blatantly and disrespectfully like this.
You don't have children yet, do you? They mimic and take on the aspects of those around them to cobble together a personality through experimentation. Most of the education issues are not at the young child age, but rather during the teenage years. Looking at the research and talking to people for years about it, I find it to be a complicated affair that lays some where between the fault of bad leadership in administration, teachers not able to be fired, parents, and lack of agility to get kids into specific schools that are tailored for certain problems.
If the benefit to the people greatly outweighs the cost to the people, then private entrepreneurs should be jumping at the opportunity to do this, shouldn't they?
Yes, in some places they are indeed and are failing miserably like Baby Einstein and other products to turn normal kids into gifted children. "Gifted" have precious abilities, but it's more related to a certain type of temperament that has to be influenced. Wunderkids are especially rare, but the typical child that is raised in a high SES environment does outperform lower SES students because of economic and socio-cultural factors.
Businesses are in the ground to make money, however public broadcasting, a form of socialism, does provide great children's programming. Sesame Street has shown results by taking marketing strategies and aiming them at education to get children to want to mimic and get inspired to learn and explore their world more. Now, Nickelodeon does provide some good child's programming and so does a few other channels that are on cable.
People are moving away from cable to online formats and getting their local broadcasting through a special chip in their computers. Then some people still only use their basic television set ups. So that leaves fourchannels as ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and without government PBS. Out of the three main stations, ABC is the only one with Saturday morning cartoons which are of questionable educational value. There's some other channels, but the kids programming is sparse and normally airs early in the morning.
So for poorer children that are not in school, PBS is basically the poor man's Nickelodeon, Disney, or whatever praytell else is on cable these days. Since the research has shown that the "propaganda" has given good outcomes, it is socially justified to brainwash children into learning the alphabet and other such skills and values.
By enforcing educational programming through formal regulation, the federal government inhibits private competence in management of communities; the government is basically saying, "We do not trust individuals to act generously or responsibly in the interest of children, and society generally. So, we must force them to do so."
Yea, we've done it as a society for about 400 years because we need good citizens that know actually how to read and do math. We set a mandate and provide some social funding, and yet market forces produce some good stuff like Sesame Street and dare I say Dora the Explorer.
Television has moved toward instant made celebrities with cameras following around people with the "celebrities" like Snooki and her predecessor Paris Hilton. The trend in television these days is to have more channels and less variety in programming. This started with FX and moved to catch on with other channels that have huge libraries of old run shows. So therefore children's programming has been crowded out and been replaced with informercials on public stations and on the cable channels more blocks aimed at adults.
We don't need these sorts of inspired video games for people to play either:
The federal government forces its private beliefs about humanism on society at large. Yet, since humanism is considered a philosophy rather than a religion, separation of church and state does not appear to have jurisdiction in these matters.
Classical liberalism and protestantism to be exact with education in general. Plato really got the whole ball rolling with the idea on public education, and then men like Comenius took it to a level, mused about by Jefferson and some other Founders, and then it was birthed in the states by Horace Mann and sold by folks like John Dewey. So in short, the pantheon of public education is very diverse. Humanism is just one of the structures that has nurtured public education, but it's more under classical liberalism.
Ok, but why shouldn't private educational institutions implement these things out of their own interests? Why should the federal government exercise control over peaceful individuals conducting private business transactions?
Because society has deemed the responsibility to educate the youth through broad systems to be one part of government's responsibility to help create a citizen. Watching Sesame Street at a young age, getting a socialist public education, and going to a socialist library to read varied works ranging from John Dewey to Alisa Rosenbaum allows to create leaders for the future of this country.
The fundamental question that must be asked: Is the proper priority of government to secure peace, or to force progress perhaps at the expense of peace, offending liberty and ignoring criticism?
By offering cheap education to the masses is one of the foundational responsibilities found in the works of our Founders like Franklin and Jefferson. An illiterate public is not a free society, and it weakens social mobility. There's also especially issues on women's rights as more conservative societies tend to not educate their women and regard them as chattle. So society has taken
to redistribution of the wealth in part to dedicate itself to combat creating a fundamentalist heaven through economic and social justice. It is all about connectivity, connectivity, connectivity.
So, children do not naturally want to become proficient in areas that make themselves and their peers comfortable?
Exposure to good material like Sesame Street doesn't kill individualism, it nurtures it. There is a direct correlation between education and financial success and connectivity. Granted it doesn't take much education to make money, but indeed being literate makes it a hell of a lot easier to accomplish connectivity, though.
You really have to go back to Rosseau and his advocacy for childhood exploration. By providing a good "garden" to explore, children are free to accumulate knowledge on their own. Once the child gets to a stage, if they choose to learn more about Hitler, for example, they're free in our society to read Meine Kumpf without social problems.
Yea, we set minimum standards in society so we don't have children overly influenced by people like her. We allow her to have her time and place, but not to overrun the airwaves with lowbrow junk. Really, you're handing me nothing but the same philosophy with questions. No data, no research, no history, no projection about our whole socio-cultural framework at all.
Edutainment does not have to be normal, nationalist propaganda. Any message that limits or directs conceptualization, comprehension, or motivation, falls into the category of soft propaganda; instructing someone what to believe can be accomplished, or, at least, influenced, through instructing that person how to believe.
You seriously must not have kids or watch early morning shows, because Fox in particular has recently gotten rid of their early morning cartoons in favor of infomercials. So, instead of cartoons based on heroes and some edutainment they instead show some nature show to hit the minimum standard and then place on real propaganda to sell products. Your market philosophy has yet to convince me that socialist PBS is inferior to what the market can offer outside of perhaps Nickelodeon and a handful of other channels on cable.
It's one thing to demonstrate physical reactions, but it's another thing to insist that they are desirable or good. It's one thing to say the alphabet, but another thing to impress that literacy is dignified and illiteracy should be looked down upon. "Sesame Street" (Copyright 2010 Jim Henson Productions) promotes the message that a group of people of homogeneous ethnicity is strictly inferior to a group of people of heterogeneous ethnicity.
Illiteracy opens people up to be abused by people that are, as literate people generally are able to keep records and enforce governance more easily than other people that cannot. Connectivity is key, and even poor people in the middle of forsaken wastelands want their children education because they know that being educated means in part they can become a part of the power structure.
If you study how much actual education many WWII veterans had, it was rather low. Yet, they could read and write which allowed them to connect and defeat a large force that would have otherwise eventually disrupted their way of life through conquest.
Today, for example the same rate of education is in India. There was a project to put out computers to peasants to sell their goods. The peasant through his basic education found the website for the Chicago market that set the price of the goods he was selling. In a limited amount of time these peasants were able to time the market and sell their goods for higher prices and improve themselves through this connectivity. The computers lent out to these areas has improved the lives of these people, but their basic education from socialist sources enabled them to improve their livelihood through self determination.
So, the USA should be a Puritan nation? Who cares what Puritans, or any other religion, tries to dictate?
Part of what philosophers, historians, social commentators, social scientists, lawyers, and even hard scientists try to do is provide a context for policy and decisions. Looking at where an idea came from and how it spread is one way to argue for and against a particular cultural aspect/social construct like public education.
Massachusetts was the place where the Common School Movement was birthed by people like Horace Mann, which had a long tradition of public education going back to the Puritans. The Puritans can be stretched back to the influence of Comenius, and Comenius can be stretched back farther to the ancients which in turn influenced men like Jefferson that also adored public education.
See, this is why a good philosopher needs a robust knowledge on the history for the subject at hand. It gives context to a discussion by which to take something deeper. Although, I should have been more clearer on to infer the power of precedence and socio-cultural impulses.
Puritans put in compulsory education and publicly mandated funded education, because parents weren't educating their children to read and write. Basically, parents work all day and don't have the time to educate their own children, so we outsourced it.
Scrounging for extensions on their underwater home mortgages, intoxicating themselves unconscious every weekend, buying poison wrapped in familiar, popular brand names for their children, laughing hysterically at anyone who questions the Narrative omnipresent in the media, chugging sleeping pills each night and chugging coffee and stimulants each morning.
Appearances and preconceptions do not tell you anything, especially gussied up in polemicism to try and make the point sound empirical and profound. This is nothing more than a proclamation of your own belief that furthermore undermines your market argument and does not make much for a cohesive narrative in and of itself.
Wal-Mart, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Google, Monsanto, British Petroleum, etc., are ubiquitous corporate entities who thrive on insecurities in personal self-esteem. It may be hard to accept that taking advantage of negative self-esteem has become so mainstream a practice that it is now ingrained in Western culture, but it has.
So in a more direct argument, let us compare British elections to American elections. If the people are to be sovereign, then they must have connectivity to their electorate. However, connectivity often comes at a price with television advertisement in the states. The British do not allow political advertisements on television, and therefore have lower entry costs to go into campaigns. This democratizes power by restricting freedom of expression where a negative marketing influence places greater financial strain on candidates. Hillary Clinton still has a $750,000 outstanding campaign debt that she cannot raise money herself for as she is Secretary of State, and therefore must use her husband and other beneficiaries to raise money to pay off that debt.
Furthermore, some forms of socialism do indeed spread more democracy around and increase competition that have positive effects on choice.
Science is a cognitive system, so it belongs in the same category as religion. The USA federal government does not have a religious disposition, it has a scientific disposition. So, it is not a theocracy, but it operates exactly like a theocracy without the element of divinity.
Where do you get this stuff at, Popper? The sense I get from your writings is that you bootstrap together a macrotheory from various philosophical works and then try to jackboot that macrotheory into arguments. The "jackboot effect" is achieved through a lack of robustness and conciseness in your arguments.
"Scientific disposition," I'd argue against that as most politicians are either businessmen or lawyers. Therefore, it is an economics and precedences based institution with a lot of it built more off of philosophy than science. One of the major arguments about US leadership is that advisors cannot talk numbers to them, however with Chinese leaders, who are mostly engineers, advisors can speak numbers and technical specifics with them. It's not really a proposal to be more like the Chinese, but rather we need a more robust leadership where money is not the primary factor for political outcomes. Therefore, we lack a scientific disposition and more of a reactionary based precedence approach to dealing with problems.
The bigger issue is that we have to whip ourselves into a frenzy as a culture to do anything about large problems. We declare "war" on damn near everything, throw money and force at the issue, and often a quick and simple solution that in the long term does not pay off.
Children are naturally curious and caring. They're not the pathetic, bored idiots that humanists take them for. The Federal Communications Commission should be ashamed to try to influence children so blatantly and disrespectfully like this.
"Humanists" (no matter what you mean by that term) do not take children for pathetic, bored idiots. Realists, however, do recognize that a child's natural curiosity can either be nurtured or stifled, and that an enriching environment that includes shows like Sesame Street is good for nurturing it, while leaving children to their own devices in a boring adult-oriented world tends to stifle it.
If the benefit to the people greatly outweighs the cost to the people, then private entrepreneurs should be jumping at the opportunity to do this, shouldn't they?
Private entrepreneurs are not in business to benefit "the people", and though letting them do their thing often works out to the people's benefit anyway, it is not always the case. Entrepreneurship is great in a market where costs and benefits are obvious and payoffs immediate. But for massive, long-term projects that require the coordinated expenditure of a society's resources in vast amounts, endeavors like waging a war, landing on the moon, or educating the next generation, the society needs a government. Government may not be a very good way of doing these things, but there is no better.
By enforcing educational programming through formal regulation, the federal government inhibits private competence in management of communities; the government is basically saying, "We do not trust individuals to act generously or responsibly in the interest of children, and society generally. So, we must force them to do so."
Absolutely. And I submit that the electorate (to which the government answers) is perfectly correct to mistrust.
The federal government forces its private beliefs about humanism on society at large. Yet, since humanism is considered a philosophy rather than a religion, separation of church and state does not appear to have jurisdiction in these matters.
The only thing you can mean by "humanism" here is a dedication to thinking critically and thereby avoid buying into false ideas. This is not "humanism" as it is normally defined, and your sneering attempts to discredit it are completely empty of persuasive force. You yourself are right now wielding the skepticism that is the beating heart of the scientific method - wielding it spectacularly poorly, but wielding it nonetheless.
"Sesame Street" (Copyright 2010 Jim Henson Productions) promotes the message that a group of people of homogeneous ethnicity is strictly inferior to a group of people of heterogeneous ethnicity.
And where are these responsible adults? Scrounging for extensions on their underwater home mortgages, intoxicating themselves unconscious every weekend, buying poison wrapped in familiar, popular brand names for their children, laughing hysterically at anyone who questions the Narrative omnipresent in the media, chugging sleeping pills each night and chugging coffee and stimulants each morning.
And yet you still say that we should trust everyone to act in children's best interests?
Science is a cognitive system, so it belongs in the same category as religion. The USA federal government does not have a religious disposition, it has a scientific disposition. So, it is not a theocracy, but it operates exactly like a theocracy without the element of divinity.
And with the element of truth. The difference between the "cognitive systems" of science and religion is that science produces observably - indeed, dramatically - beneficial results. Science education teaches people how to discover the truth about the world around them. It does so with but a single commandment: "Good ideas are those that are not contradicted by the observable facts." From this commandment, plus a dedication to reverifying and promulgating the good ideas, science has paid dividends far greater than anything any religion has ever been able to deliver.
Now, it's understandable that you'd be hostile to the scientific method, since your ideas are contradicted by the observable facts (and, indeed, each other). But it's a a bit of a stretch to expect us to throw down our belief in science on your mere say-so.
Here, how about a reading assignment: The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan. You can probably skim the first half or so, since it deals primarily with debunking UFOlogy, and to the best of my knowledge that is one delusion from which you do not suffer (though your repeated citations of David Icke's website are worrisome). The book's relevance to this discussion really begins around the chapter called "The Baloney-Detection Kit".
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
And with the element of truth. The difference between the "cognitive systems" of science and religion is that science produces observably - indeed, dramatically - beneficial results. Science education teaches people how to discover the truth about the world around them. It does so with but a single commandment: "Good ideas are those that are not contradicted by the observable facts." From this commandment, plus a dedication to reverifying and promulgating the good ideas, science has paid dividends far greater than anything any religion has ever been able to deliver.
Now, it's understandable that you'd be hostile to the scientific method, since your ideas are contradicted by the observable facts (and, indeed, each other). But it's a a bit of a stretch to expect us to throw down our belief in science on your mere say-so.
Here, how about a reading assignment: The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan. You can probably skim the first half or so, since it deals primarily with debunking UFOlogy, and to the best of my knowledge that is one delusion from which you do not suffer (though your repeated citations of David Icke's website are worrisome). The book's relevance to this discussion really begins around the chapter called "The Baloney-Detection Kit".
Yea, but this falls under pragmatism in general by which Dewey in particular was a big advocate of for arguing educating the youth. Although, I wonder if Sagan was influenced by Dewey in part, or whether it was science that singularly influenced him.
However, there's issues with a hubris that comes through "predictability" of "scientific tests" like IQ tests, SAT tests, tracking, and a plethora of other soft science devices that have been held out as a singular measuring device for success in academia. So this emphasis on "prediction" with the ultimate power of knowledge under the standards movement has been deleterious to children.
I'll go back to my point on Fox only showing some old wilderness documentaries in the mornings and then going straight to informercials. The ideal of channels showing a minimal amount of edutainment has created that egregious response to meet minimum standards to more grabs like some of the stuff they used to do in the 70's and 80's when the conservatives starting to do more content control. The content in specific children's shows had where certain shows "encouraged groups" but the characters engaged in group-think. For example, in a specific point of the literature goes on with about how one character wanted pizza and the others wanted ice cream. So instead of the one character getting ice cream and meeting up with the others, the one character just "went along with the crowd." It was just really bad writing and meddling.
So science and specific bad studies have been abused to try and control media. While I'll expect the point about the full scientific process weeding out these inefficiencies, it just seems that funding good edutainment like Sesame Street set the best precedence to spread for more shows that spawned from it like Barney or Dora the Explorer. Anything beyond that like with censor meddling, tends to stifle creativity.
Government may stop criminals, but that's a band-aid solution. What creates criminals? How should we try to stop criminals while leaving the motivation for crime, and the environment that makes crime easy or lucrative, unaddressed?
Crime happens, at least in theory, because of either scarcity (need) or dissatisfaction (perceived need). So to completely eliminate crime we either need to brainwash the populace, create infinite resources (and that arguably wouldn't stop some problems), or have instant-response police robots.
Conflicts of beliefs, on the interpersonal level (and intrapersonal level), facilitate crime. There can be government, but it must cede its authority to the individual, who is sovereign, or else that government shall be considered oppressive, and a cycle of justice / injustice shall ensue.
Yeah, no. I'm not sure what you consider "crime" or not, but there's nothing "oppressive" about the government locking up a serial killer for life.
It's one thing to demonstrate physical reactions, but it's another thing to insist that they are desirable or good. It's one thing to say the alphabet, but another thing to impress that literacy is dignified and illiteracy should be looked down upon.
Er, well, putting it as bluntly as that, it's still true; illiteracy has no benefit at all, whereas literacy is strictly better in every way. Like, if illiteracy is this, literacy is this.
"Sesame Street" (Copyright 2010 Jim Henson Productions) promotes the message that a group of people of homogeneous ethnicity is strictly inferior to a group of people of heterogeneous ethnicity.
Okay, that's just a little bizarre. How in the world could you possibly "fix" that?
So, the USA should be a Puritan nation? Who cares what Puritans, or any other religion, tries to dictate?
That's quite a logical leap. Just because the Puritans were strictly religious and had religious motive for promoting universal education, that doesn't mean that the concept of universal education is a bad one.
Science is a cognitive system, so it belongs in the same category as religion. The USA federal government does not have a religious disposition, it has a scientific disposition. So, it is not a theocracy, but it operates exactly like a theocracy without the element of divinity.
Um, dude, this is balls-out crazy talk. I applaud your conviction, but, er...
In no way does scientific thinking even approach religious thinking.
The federal government, also, ain't scientific. And if you think there aren't elements of religious thinking in, say, Congress, then you don't pay attention to politics very much.
If the government thought like scientists, we'd see a lot less rash decision making. It wouldn't be perfect, but (for example) there'd be no arguments about abortion, gay marriage, DADT, global warming, evolution, etc. And the arguments they did have would be based on fact and theory. Not on "gut feeling," "common sense," and the Bible.
@Captain_Morgan: I don't know what happened, but you doubled your post somehow. Just fyi.
So in a more direct argument, let us compare British elections to American elections. If the people are to be sovereign, then they must have connectivity to their electorate. However, connectivity often comes at a price with television advertisement in the states. The British do not allow political advertisements on television, and therefore have lower entry costs to go into campaigns. This democratizes power by restricting freedom of expression where a negative marketing influence places greater financial strain on candidates. Hillary Clinton still has a $750,000 outstanding campaign debt that she cannot raise money herself for as she is Secretary of State, and therefore must use her husband and other beneficiaries to raise money to pay off that debt.
On the flip side, the British electoral system is not proportional (or as proportional) to population, so some people are concerned that minority parties are underrepresented.
I'd also like to point out that the Green Party and the Conservative Party (that's what, leftist and center-right?) actually agreed to a coalition government. Le gasp! If only it could happen here, even for six months (the projected lifespan of said coalition government)!
As for the "scientific disposition," I'd argue against that as most politicians are either businessmen or lawyers. Therefore, it is an economics and precedences based institution with a lot of it built more off of philosophy than science.
I'd argue that they don't even know basic economics, or willfully ignore economic theory if their lobbyist handlers say no.
Oh, and @Blinking_Spirit: I enjoyed reading that post. Just sayin'.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Do I Contradict Myself? Very Well Then I Contradict Myself.
I'd also like to point out that the Green Party and the Conservative Party (that's what, leftist and center-right?) actually agreed to a coalition government. Le gasp! If only it could happen here, even for six months (the projected lifespan of said coalition government)!
I watched a very good debate between all the little parties from 2004, it was very eye opening on the issues they face to try and go mainstream. There were the Socialists, Libertarians, Constitutional Party, Green Party, and I think one more for the presidential debate at a specific college. They had some very interesting ideas from being on the outside looking in.
I'd argue that they don't even know basic economics, or willfully ignore economic theory if their lobbyist handlers say no.
Economics was probably the wrong choice, "business" would have been a better choice then as the presumption is that a "businessman" can use management skills to bear on government for "fiscal discipline." Frankly, it'd be nice to see more hard scientists like medical doctors or engineers with some more social scientists like economists.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
Fact: Snuffleupagus is The Big Lie of Sesame Street. An outrageous claim which becomes believed by the population. His purpose is to soften the minds of children and prepare them to accept The Big Lie of the One World Government when the time is right.
"I want peace in reality." What the hell does that mean? At least these "idealists" that you naysay had a platform for their ideals and a more concrete plan to achieve their ideal world. You say that they 'fix one problem and create another', but what is a 'problem'? Wanting a world without 'problems' is way more quixotic than the most 'idealistic' idealist you can think of.
Conflicts of beliefs, on the interpersonal level (and intrapersonal level), facilitate crime.
Yet you've been arguing that you're afraid of a lack of individuality. You don't want any crime, you think that crime stems from conflicts of beliefs (I would argue that differing belief is a sign of individuality), and that the REASON BEHIND CRIME (which you posit as conflict of belief) should be prevented. It appears to me that you're arguing for exactly what you're detesting.
We're all under some form of government at this moment, and yet, we're exhibiting individualism in beliefs. There is not homogeneity but heterogeneity in our thoughts, ideals, beliefs, etc. If that was not the case, there would be no debate forum because everyone would agree.
As for edutainment, the education is not as pure as going directly to the source. Yes, reading the thick classic book has more educational value than the tv show that tells the story or reenacts it somehow. But guess what? Kids want to have fun. They want to interact. They want to move around. They have a short attention span. Making education fun to children will encourage them to have more enthusiasm for education later on.
Letting private companies host these shows is ridiculous. If you want propaganda, then that would be the way to brainwash children. Let's have private interests control these shows, so that they can embed their products inside of the show and break up the show with overt advertisements (commercials).
Yea, this is part of social contract theory, however you haven't exactly defined anything nuanced about it.
"The social contract" exists to maximally preserve existing individual liberty, rather than redistribute it evenly among all people according to a select group's ideal. If that theory begins to be used to attack its members, rather than defend them, it is being misapplied.
When innocent people start getting bossed around by government, because government insists that's in the best interest of society at large, even though no transgression of the peace has occurred, the government becomes in violation of "the social contract."
Those who choose to change things are faced with precedence, and much strong wind backlash.
Any belief system burdens society if it becomes too tenuous. When children are taught forcefully that the universe operates according to natural laws which are always fair and just, and that evolution began randomly, the connotation in those messages is that it's the child's own fault if he or she offends someone.
Basic mechanical education is fine, but education in the USA has gone beyond that now.
Children are being put on a massive guilt trip that leads directly to rampant consumerism, drug addiction, etc. It is demoralizing to hear day in and day out for sixteen years that one's life is based in accident and one's negative emotions do not belong in a societal structure that is the lesser of two foreign, imagined evils.
Since this demoralization is implemented not at the individual level, but at the structural level, by schools boards, city councils, textbook-publishing companies, and market research agencies, I call it "structural demoralization."
So basically you're a libertarian as in socially liberal and what I can presume to be fiscally conservative by extension.
Do I want the USA federal and state governments to try to enslave every subsequent generation through debt obligations? No; not because that would be "socially unjust," but because I understand that, just as past generations have sought to escape enslavement, so shall future ones, and I want peace, rather than conflict.
Can we please resolve conflicts, instead revolve around conflicts? Revolutions don't work the way people have been led to believe they do.
Children mimic and take on the aspects of those around them to cobble together a personality through experimentation. Most of the education issues are not at the young child age, but rather during the teenage years. Looking at the research and talking to people for years about it, I find it to be a complicated affair that lays some where between the fault of bad leadership in administration, teachers not able to be fired, parents, and lack of agility to get kids into specific schools that are tailored for certain problems.
That's because education exists not for the benefit of the child, but for the benefit of the culture. The children themselves are incidental to the grand cultural system of Corporatism.
Yes, in some places they are indeed and are failing miserably like Baby Einstein and other products to turn normal kids into gifted children. "Gifted" have precious abilities, but it's more related to a certain type of temperament that has to be influenced. Wunderkids are especially rare, but the typical child that is raised in a high SES environment does outperform lower SES students because of economic and socio-cultural factors.
I think that most children are gifted, and proper education is simply a matter of guiding the child's interests to express his or her giftedness maximally, without fear or doubt. Does educational programming follow this respectful, customized approach? No; it fits everyone into the same curriculum, because what matters to the FCC is the curriculum (the culture), not the child.
Sesame Street has shown results by taking marketing strategies and aiming them at education to get children to want to mimic and get inspired to learn and explore their world more.
Inspiration of children is their parents' role.
By subversion of the parents' role, corporatism has undermined the importance of familial relationships. This further allows children to be structurally demoralized & spiritually exploited, so the process reinforces itself in a positive feedback loop; the children grow up to be more aloof parents, and the corporatists justify further encroachment into the family and community as standard practice.
So for poorer children that are not in school, PBS is basically the poor man's Nickelodeon, Disney, or whatever praytell else is on cable these days. Since the research has shown that the "propaganda" has given good outcomes, it is socially justified to brainwash children into learning the alphabet and other such skills and values.
It is not socially justified to brainwash children into learning the alphabet or anything else. Research may have shown that outcomes of brainwashing have been "good," but moral judgment is the jurisdiction solely of the sovereign individual, not government.
Education does not reduce crime; education merely repackages crime. Sure, people can learn that getting caught breaking the law will result in punishment; this simply effects greater deliberation in their crimes. Let me cite some examples of this... oil spill; bailout #1, bailout #2, bailout #3; military action in Iraq; Enron; Watergate; Bernard Madoff's ponzi scheme, the federal government's ponzi scheme.
How are those things relevant to the alphabet? Manipulation of symbols and meaning; flags and corporate logos are the higher version of Alphabet of which adults learn to rationalize ignorance.
To teach children to learn a formal alphabet with no intuitive meaning beneath it, is to prepare them to separate symbols' conceptualization from what the symbol is supposed to represent. Sure, that makes them literate, but it also makes them take things out of context.
Education is a zero-sum endeavor; higher thought is a trade-off, not a net gain. Simply because government misunderstands this fact, does not mean that it gets to impose its ignorance on the rest of the people.
Yea, we've done it as a society for about 400 years because we need good citizens that know actually how to read and do math.
At what cost? Literacy and logic may serve to compensate for some of the unhealthy interpersonal interactions that come along with structural demoralization, but not entirely, nor even largely. Isn't society at large still quite dissatisfied with the lack of integrity and sincerity in the public sphere, despite professionals' proficiency in the humanities?
Television has moved toward instant made celebrities with cameras following around people with the "celebrities" like Snooki and her predecessor Paris Hilton. The trend in television these days is to have more channels and less variety in programming. This started with FX and moved to catch on with other channels that have huge libraries of old run shows. So therefore children's programming has been crowded out and been replaced with informercials on public stations and on the cable channels more blocks aimed at adults.
If children want to learn, there are other options than watching educational programming, foremost among them being a trip to the elders' homes. Even if the children do not realize the academic detail of lessons, they can still harness moral instruction and basic mechanical technique. From where comes this coldness towards children, that they exist somehow separately from the rest of our society?
Humanism is just one of the structures that has nurtured public education, but it's more under classical liberalism.
I gathered that public education is seen as liberation from the flawed methodology of traditional religion, by Western civilization. For this reason, much of the youth has become enamored with television quiz shows rather than with real history and spirituality.
The term "classical liberalism" may be accurate, but it references an older environment. Now that the West has endured industrialization for so long, generations have gotten used to mass production, the theory of general relativity, and social darwinism; hence, interpretation of that from which we must emerge, has shifted. No longer must the shrewd ego rebel against simply religion, but also it must rebel against the secular establishment. That's why "humanism" is the term I prefer to describe the rejection of both religion and nationalism, in favor of corporatism; it sees any overt assertion of authority as suspect-- we are all "but human."
Because society has deemed the responsibility to educate the youth through broad systems to be one part of government's responsibility to help create a citizen.
Where in the U.S. constitution is there deemed to government responsibility to create a citizen through broad educational systems?
Watching Sesame Street at a young age, getting a socialist public education, and going to a socialist library to read varied works ranging from John Dewey to Alisa Rosenbaum allows to create leaders for the future of this country.
I suppose that a leader is someone who listens to the ordained authority figures' appeals to reason, and obeys every petty rule whether or not she understands its full context?
So society has taken to redistribution of the wealth in part to dedicate itself to combat creating a fundamentalist heaven through economic and social justice. It is all about connectivity, connectivity, connectivity.
I guess you can say that, but none of that is in the U.S. constitution, nor in Common Law, because such would make the law indubitably biased. Government infringes on personal sovereignty when it mandates education or acculturation, just as I would infringe on personal sovereignty if I declared, "Attest to the fact that The Beatles are the greatest band of all time, or I'll throw you in prison."
Besides, too much of science is incorrect, anyway, and the scientific method only reinforces the idea that the only essential elements to truth are empirical evidence and immunity to reasonable criticism, throwing aside important aspects of experience such as intuition and organic, holistic inference.
Even the theory of general relativity has led to misunderstanding of dark energy:
Exposure to good material like Sesame Street doesn't kill individualism, it nurtures it. There is a direct correlation between education and financial success and connectivity. Granted it doesn't take much education to make money, but indeed being literate makes it a hell of a lot easier to accomplish connectivity, though.
Why do you keep referring to Sesame Street as "good?" It's a show about monsters living in the street, being treated normally by humans-- perversion, imo.
How should our subjective judgments factor into federal policy-making? I think God is good, and better than Sesame Street. Let's force children to worship God. There is a direct correlation between reverence and spiritual success.
Where in the Bill of Rights or the U.S. constitution does it mention a right to "connectivity?"
You really have to go back to Rosseau and his advocacy for childhood exploration. By providing a good "garden" to explore, children are free to accumulate knowledge on their own.
Perhaps, but the problem is that knowledge can be a detriment if applied carelessly. Even with a grand garden of knowledge, children can still become prejudiced if not given guidance and nurturing and respect. I could even correlate a wider knowledge base to a greater propensity to take for granted that educated youth can forgo nurturing, and therefore become more prejudiced.
Yea, we set minimum standards in society so we don't have children overly influenced by people like her. We allow her to have her time and place, but not to overrun the airwaves with lowbrow junk. Really, you're handing me nothing but the same philosophy with questions. No data, no research, no history, no projection about our whole socio-cultural framework at all.
That's because there is simply no historical precedence for the level of corruption in our society, and the degradation is so pervasive that none care to research it, as everyone considers it normal and a part of the human condition (hence, brainwashed).
Captain Morgan, I recall that you like to use the metaphor of the carrot and the stick; sometimes, incentives serve to persuade people to cooperate or compete, and, sometimes, punishments serve to dissuade people from going to the extreme in cooperation or competition.
The caveat that must be added to the carrot-and-stick idea, is that human judgment uses cost-benefit analysis, so people may tolerate some punishments as acceptable risks to achieve their own goals, derived from their frame of reference.
As long as the media portrays a figure, such as Paris Hilton, as the epitome of decadence, the debate can be framed in people's minds such that, as long as people feel they're "above" Paris Hilton morally, they deserve some degree of dignity, so they are easier to manipulate than in the absence of such comparison.
Your market philosophy has yet to convince me that socialist PBS is inferior to what the market can offer outside of perhaps Nickelodeon and a handful of other channels on cable.
When people boycott television broadcasters in lieu of edutainment, the market should respond, if it's capitalist. No such boycott has happened yet, has it?
Illiteracy opens people up to be abused by people that are, as literate people generally are able to keep records and enforce governance more easily than other people that cannot. Connectivity is key, and even poor people in the middle of forsaken wastelands want their children education because they know that being educated means in part they can become a part of the power structure.
The U.S. constitution and Common Law hold that the power structure is the sovereign state and individual (Chisholm v. Georgia).
The computers lent out to these areas has improved the lives of these people, but their basic education from socialist sources enabled them to improve their livelihood through self determination.
Nope, but the 400 years precedence certainly makes it one hell of an argument to continue meddling in the affairs of people that don't teach their children to read.
Where are the results? The USA and Europe are bankrupt and their manufacturing bases have been outsourced to Brazil, Russia, India, and China. If anything, the self-indulgence accompanying formal mandatory education has allowed the West to be taken advantage of, economically and politically, by more cunning societies.
Your implying something without being very specific on what evidence you have used to reach such a conclusion.
Children are led to believe that positions of authority automatically make people act responsibly, when, in reality, positions of authority merely allow people to act more corruptly, if not carefully scrutinized by the public.
Education can cross the line between honing skills and indoctrination, and it has. Where is the evidence? Look around; does it seem like skilled craftspeople are repairing things that break and preparing for future bumps in the road?
Or does it seem like self-indulgent narcissists in universities are rationalizing away crisis after crisis because of humanism?
"Oh, it's just human nature, that nobody really knows anything about the president's past, or cares about the Gulf coast, or remembers that the Symmington Amendment outlaws U.S. economic aid to nations, such as Israel, who have undeclared atomic weapons, like those Israel recently tried to sell to South Africa."
Part of what philosophers, historians, social commentators, social scientists, lawyers, and even hard scientists try to do is provide a context for policy and decisions.
Looking at where an idea came from and how it spread is one way to argue for and against a particular cultural aspect/social construct like public education.
Another way is to meditate and pray about what is best to do.
Massachusetts was the place where the Common School Movement was birthed by people like Horace Mann, which had a long tradition of public education going back to the Puritans. The Puritans can be stretched back to the influence of Comenius, and Comenius can be stretched back farther to the ancients which in turn influenced men like Jefferson that also adored public education.
See, this is why a good philosopher needs a robust knowledge on the history for the subject at hand. It gives context to a discussion by which to take something deeper. Although, I should have been more clearer on to infer the power of precedence and socio-cultural impulses.
What am I supposed to take from that context that is deeper? That Jefferson and Comenius were influenced by the ancients, so they must have been right, if their influence lasted thousands of years?
Puritans put in compulsory education and publicly mandated funded education, because parents weren't educating their children to read and write. Basically, parents work all day and don't have the time to educate their own children, so we outsourced it.
Outsourcing is a notoriously abominable practice.
If parents weren't teaching their children to read and write, that was their prerogative. Maybe they didn't want to pay the mental costs of literacy.
"Scientific disposition," I'd argue against that as most politicians are either businessmen or lawyers. Therefore, it is an economics and precedences based institution with a lot of it built more off of philosophy than science.
Campaign ads and speeches are planned using scientific data from market research and polling. Politics is a science, beyond even what is taught as political science; there are organizations which literally study how to manipulate demographic behavior through financial and cultural incentivization, which the lobbyists for corporations, who control politicians, have at their disposal.
The bigger issue is that we have to whip ourselves into a frenzy as a culture to do anything about large problems. We declare "war" on damn near everything, throw money and force at the issue, and often a quick and simple solution that in the long term does not pay off.
That's because our society has been structurally demoralized.
Realists, however, do recognize that a child's natural curiosity can either be nurtured or stifled, and that an enriching environment that includes shows like Sesame Street is good for nurturing it, while leaving children to their own devices in a boring adult-oriented world tends to stifle it.
A child's curiosity is the body's physiological inclination to explore the physical and emotional limitations of the relationship between the child's body and its environment, so that the child's body establishes intimate familiarity with the environment's timescales, materials, and energies.
Nurturing a child's curiosity properly, requires physical activity and emotional interpersonal interaction, that registers with each of the child's cells, so that the events are experienced holistically and directly, as each cell is designed to receive and evaluate.
Stifling this curiosity is what televised edutainment does, since it does not register holistically with the child's cells on an active, physical plane; it is done through pixels on a screen with sounds from an amplifier. This confuses the child's body, and presents a profoundly different source of engagement than the child's cells are naturally prepared for.
The adult-oriented world is such because adults are so lost in their own bodies and physical environments. Children should be nurtured directly into the adult-oriented world without hesitation, so that their bodies and minds are not deceived and shocked later on during teen age.
Private entrepreneurs are not in business to benefit "the people", and though letting them do their thing often works out to the people's benefit anyway, it is not always the case.
The people are customers to entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs sell their goods and services to people, and it is up to people to shop according to priorities that serve their own long-term interests. Well, there is a point here; now that the USA is fascist, entrepreneurs really only service the government and its short-term interests.
Still, if our society had not been brainwashed so thoroughly by educational programming and a humanist educational system, I trust that people, acting as customers of private entrepreneurs, would be diligent enough to consider the interests of their children and communities when shopping.
Government is certainly not going to protect the environment. Realists admit that individual cooperation and non-cooperation is the only filter through which economic actions occur. From there, the organic structure of an economy is clear; however, this depends on law enforcement and sound means of exchange, too. And, that's precisely why individuals should have to provide those, as well.
Entrepreneurship is great in a market where costs and benefits are obvious and payoffs immediate. But for massive, long-term projects that require the coordinated expenditure of a society's resources in vast amounts, endeavors like waging a war, landing on the moon, or educating the next generation, the society needs a government. Government may not be a very good way of doing these things, but there is no better.
War and moon-landing do require immense coordination among people, which, I agree, the vehicle of private entrepreneurship cannot expend alone. So, war and moon-landing should not be done.
Educating the next generation would also be a massive undertaking, were it necessarily coordinated. However, one child can be educated at a time; this can be done gradually by a couple of people. Then, the organic result may be an educated generation, and, even better, each child's education is customized to his or her own disposition and purpose. Instructors won't talk to him in metric while he only cares for Imperial Measurements.
I wonder, if there is no better way to educate children than through government and its educational programming, how did humanity manage to survive prior to the existence of government / edutainment?
And I submit that the electorate (to which the government answers) is perfectly correct to mistrust.
I think that may be because, sometimes, you attach individuals to their respective decisions, without looking at the broader context that weaves them and makes them inescapable.
According to the article, Sesame Street's representation of diverse racial groups provides for learning about social practices different from one's own. It concludes that the episodes could serve as an example through which educators could breach the topic of multiculturalism.
And yet you still say that we should trust everyone to act in children's best interests?
Let's not rationalize a reverse in cause and effect. It is the placement of trust, for raising children, in government instead of family, which has enabled the degradation of society. Look beyond the individual, and see the long-term cultural trend; a man runs away from his son's mother, and she goes onto welfare. Her son grows up without a father, and has a son of his own, from whom he then runs away.
Now, in our society of consumerist drug-addicts, can people raise children sufficiently well? No, perhaps not. But the alternative of impersonal government raising children to worship science, industry, ability, and corporatism has led us to the point where the USA has a debt to GDP ratio of 90% on balance sheet and Congress is still passing spending bills to "save jobs."
Let's stop rationalizing, and admit that any course of action is going to be painful, no matter what. The question is, do we want to violate our own expectations and ambitions, or do we want to violate people's lives? I want peace in reality.
Science education teaches people how to discover the truth about the world around them.
Which is that, if someone takes offense in your presence, it must be because of something you personally decided to do, with the intent to offend him or her, because the universe has been proven to be completely fair and just in its every event.
The only injustice in the world comes from human beings, claims science education; every natural event has a cause and effect; every natural event has a purpose and a reason. If you don't understand, well, hey, that is your fault, not the universe's. Maybe the truth is that you just don't belong here.
Hence, the Georgia Guidestones and the eugenics programs of the corporatists, tearing humanity apart any way possible.
From this commandment, plus a dedication to reverifying and promulgating the good ideas, science has paid dividends far greater than anything any religion has ever been able to deliver.
Maybe. People are still divided as ever, though. Rejecting religion should have united humanity, so why do environmentalist atheists still seek to vandalize and destroy property of military computer science atheists?
Crime happens, at least in theory, because of either scarcity (need) or dissatisfaction (perceived need). So to completely eliminate crime we either need to brainwash the populace, create infinite resources (and that arguably wouldn't stop some problems), or have instant-response police robots.
There are enough resources, at least, there is enough food and water, to feed every human on Earth. Scarcity is not a problem, but the legal conditions attached to owning material property and intellectual property might be problems if people are kept from eating and drinking as they must physiologically do.
Perceived need, which, imo, would be synonymous with "expectation," may cause crime, but it definitely causes the perception of crime, which can perpetuate conflict by itself. Individual liberty must be constantly egalitarian, in order to refine perceived need.
I'm not sure what you consider "crime" or not, but there's nothing "oppressive" about the government locking up a serial killer for life.
The oppression occurs when government creates a monopoly on expectations (perceived need), then exercises an egregious double standard which castrates sovereign individuals of liberty. For example, there are many serial killers in the U.S. military or clandestine mercenary groups, who are never prosecuted, because their crimes have been endorsed by the federal government.
And yet you assume that every non-child is a pathetic, bored idiot.
Ah, I think that every non-child does pathetic, boring, idiotic things, but these actions constitute neither behavioral patterns nor intentional dispositions for those individuals; rather, these actions exemplify the cultural programming at an individual level. Humanism judges the individual himself or herself, and ignores the context that contributed wholly to the actions, so it is naïve.
Er, well, putting it as bluntly as that, it's still true; illiteracy has no benefit at all, whereas literacy is strictly better in every way.
Simply because people are not aware of the trade-off of literacy and logical conceptualization, does not mean that it does not exist; indeed, knowledge has a profound cost.
You should think about mental processes more economically. There is a cost to identification; temporariness. The cost to similarity is orientation. Order has a cost, so does authority, and ability. I could go on and on. The mind is a zero-sum arena. There is no magic in mathematics that makes it work; novelty is lost, and convenience is gained.
The federal government, also, ain't scientific. And if you think there aren't elements of religious thinking in, say, Congress, then you don't pay attention to politics very much.
Haha, no, that's all for show. At present, some USA politicians may have delusions of grandeur, but spirituality is present in none or perhaps one of them at most. The corporations control the politicians through lobbying, and the corporations employ the most stringent, rigorous scientific analysts to frame the political debate at all times. Astute cognitive framing is a scientific endeavor.
If the government thought like scientists, we'd see a lot less rash decision making. It wouldn't be perfect, but (for example) there'd be no arguments about abortion, gay marriage, DADT, global warming, evolution, etc. And the arguments they did have would be based on fact and theory. Not on "gut feeling," "common sense," and the Bible.
I think their apparent convictions are such only to appease specific demographics that the think-tanks inform them are statistically significant for their election. Also, trivial debates like those help distract the public from seeing the real harm that corporatism is doing to the people of this world, so it's a win-win for the corporatists to have political candidates and representatives commit to some abstruse principal.
"I want peace in reality." What the hell does that mean? At least these "idealists" that you naysay had a platform for their ideals and a more concrete plan to achieve their ideal world. You say that they 'fix one problem and create another', but what is a 'problem'? Wanting a world without 'problems' is way more quixotic than the most 'idealistic' idealist you can think of.
Solving one problem and creating another:
Institute a minimum wage.
Relax illegal immigration enforcement so that USA's businesses can compete with foreign businesses who lack a minimum wage.
Overreact to illegal immigration through legislation of police-state "let me see your papers" laws.
Employ the commerce clause to absolve states of all police powers whatever.
Yet you've been arguing that you're afraid of a lack of individuality. You don't want any crime, you think that crime stems from conflicts of beliefs (I would argue that differing belief is a sign of individuality), and that the REASON BEHIND CRIME (which you posit as conflict of belief) should be prevented. It appears to me that you're arguing for exactly what you're detesting.
Yes, I agree that I am arguing for that which I detest; individuals ought to have the liberty to believe whatever they want to believe, but, at the same time, conflicts between individual beliefs create crime, which I want to reduce.
Still, I feel comfortable in arguing this position, even if it seems self-contradictory, because it is realistic; it really is the case that I want to reduce crime while preserving individual liberty, and it really is the case that conflicts between individual beliefs create crime. I like this position because, though it's odd, it minimizes acknowledgment of its own success; ideal forms of government, above all, consider themselves to be functional, and allow for one belief system to dominate others, sacrificing individual liberty while maximizing the criminal, tyrannical measures that it institutionalizes as necessary.
We're all under some form of government at this moment, and yet, we're exhibiting individualism in beliefs. There is not homogeneity but heterogeneity in our thoughts, ideals, beliefs, etc. If that was not the case, there would be no debate forum because everyone would agree.
Or, it could be that our thoughts have been so effectively homogenized that we cannot even recognize that they have been so. Maybe the "marketplace of ideas" and "multicultural diversity" are deception... oh wait, that's just more paranoid banter, because it does not conform to what the prophesiers --ahem, professors-- at the university's political science department said in caste --ahem, class-- every day this semester.
Kids want to have fun. They want to interact. They want to move around. They have a short attention span. Making education fun to children will encourage them to have more enthusiasm for education later on.
This is behaviorism, the belief that children are blank slates, cardboard cut-outs with no individual purposes or personalities.
Yes, individual personalities do collide and can conflict, but this is natural and important in life, as it adheres society to the present, and keeps us from committing rigidly to sentimentality or idealism. The proper role of government should be to ensure that conflicts between individuals are resolved peacefully when they do arise. Not to prevent conflict altogether. A little fear is healthy.
Letting private companies host these shows is ridiculous. If you want propaganda, then that would be the way to brainwash children. Let's have private interests control these shows, so that they can embed their products inside of the show and break up the show with overt advertisements (commercials).
Children are not forced to watch television, and the difference between government and big corporations is in appearance alone. Acculturated youth become the most reliable consumers.
It is not socially justified to brainwash children into learning the alphabet or anything else. Research may have shown that outcomes of brainwashing have been "good," but moral judgment is the jurisdiction solely of the sovereign individual, not government.
Trolling infraction.
I REALLY hope you're trolling, because this is some of the most ridiculous stuff I have EVER heard. Education is a 0-sum system? What?
Your proposal of letting the kids learn their stuff their own way allows for ridiculous abuse-corporatist schools, abuse of our basic liberties, or worst of all-complete loss of education, and the fall of our race from a highly scientific, smart group into a neanderthal group of brutes whose entire educational knowledge has gone to waste!
Hey kids! Don't like rules? Tired of having your lulz censored by terrible, terrible people called "moderators"? Big fan of metal? Check out Metaln☺☺☺☺! This is probably the worst possible forum to advertise it on!
Added bonus: we're holding a songwriting contest in march with a registry drive going on right now! Check it out, plus the opportunity to earn $50!
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
The government ought to do this because it is in the public interest to have a well-educated populace that enables a larger and more productive economy of skilled labor. Doctors and engineers are taught, not born.
Obviously, here as everywhere that the public interest is invoked, there is a balance to be stuck between this interest and the rights of the individual. But we as a society have overwhelmingly supported public education in various forms for centuries. Since the government (i.e. society's decisionmaking apparatus) has the lawful authority, there is no reason the will of the people should not be followed.
Honestly, the biggest problem I have with this requirement is the trash that the networks sometimes try to sell as "educational". The Flintstones is probably the most infamous example of this.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
For this to be true, it would have to be shown that "educational television" succeeds in its mission of promoting education in children.
My personal opinion is that "educational TV" does not, in fact, promote the kinds of skills that I think are desirable in school, work, or play. TV is inherently a passive medium. A child who is watching, say, Bill Nye the Science Guy, may be learning something about science, which is good. But what they are learning about education is pretty bad. Educational TV tells kids, "Everything you need to know will be shown to you. You will never need to learn how to do something yourself." As a result, kids are growing up expecting knowledge to just be handed to them, rather than trying to learn on their own through being hands-on.
If an "educational show" is just a bare recitation of facts, this might happen. And I'm certainly not suggesting that a show of any format can substitute for immersive and interactive educational programs (i.e. school). But a well-crafted show that gets kids excited about the whole process of discovery can be a valuable supplement to their regular education. In my own primary school class, I can remember dramatic differences in enthusiasm between the children who watched Bill Nye and Wishbone and those who didn't. (Of course, it's possible the causation runs the other way, and the kids with more innate curiosity were more attracted to these shows. In fact, I suspect the causation probably goes both ways. But whether innate or learned, encouraging this curiosity is still to be desired.)
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Depends, some of it's quite good and acceptable like Sesame Street where the kid actually memorizes stuff and interacts to a degree. There are more aspects to passivity such as trying to learn a new language, although this is better done through watching a full movie or something in the language than watching something like Dora the Explorer that keeps going between two languages. Since the person has to develop an entire new "thinking entity" inside of their head, rather than thinking in English and then trying to go to the other language.
The passivity is more or less parent's fault and the schools. If you hand a child movie instead of a book, then expect the child to watch more movies than read books. If the teacher isn't giving hands on work, and instead dislodges the math from the actual testing in science. You reach a deficit of skills.
That and parents also discourage children from playing outside, tearing objects a part, and so on. There's also a deficit where parents take the children and show them how to repair something simple like replacing an electrical outlet. Instead, today we hire people to fix such things.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
Forcing every station to do this just seems silly. There are some stations that kids have no business coming anywhere near (MTV or Comedy Central for example, or even worse, Faux news) and others where a kiddie show would merely water down the rest of the channel (most 24-hour-news channels).
Added bonus: we're holding a songwriting contest in march with a registry drive going on right now! Check it out, plus the opportunity to earn $50!
I think this only applies to broadcasters, like CBS, NBC, etc. Not to cable channels or satellite channels.
These were some of the greatest kids shows ever. Somehow a little dog acting out classic literature made me want to read it.
I know, right? Only looking back on it do I realize how sophisticated the books were. I mean, no way was I otherwise going to read Pride and Prejudice or Frankenstein or Don Quixote when I was, what, six or seven?
Also, Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey is a great game.
Very Well Then I Contradict Myself.
Well, those shows are good, however reading the actual books can and do also achieve the same result. There's more bedtime stories out there than just whats for "their reading level."
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Sesame Street has been around for what, decades? You'd think that they would have "nickel and dimed you into bondage by now"...
Dude, I'm a Libertarian, I'm just as frustrated by certain things right now as you are, but a small amount of government regulation where the benefit to the people greatly outweighs the cost to the people should be ok.
The broadcast stations are using a finite resource, it'd be nice if they didn't devolve into 24/7 Flavor of Love and The Hills channels...
Sesame Street:
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/14/1a/bf.pdf
Abstract:
You can read the study, but it's had a lot of good. There's other research that all says the same thing about Sesame Street. Gulags, indeed teaching children useful skills and having them want to learn.
If you were arguing iatrogenics, I could see your point. However, this presumption that edutainment is some propaganda machine to make kids more malleable to corrosive influences, is unjust. Children receive their early biases from parents, and the rest from their generation and lastly native culture. So while I agree that marketing is a big problem in our society, but so is making people immune to it.
Yes, it does. Control over children and property is ancient. The education of children in this country was established by the Puritans to be compulsory. Involvement in controlling a child's education environment dates back thousands of years. Society has been enculturated, seen the benefits, and has immensely advanced civilization by in part controlling a child's education to help create a literate framework. Even Jefferson was for socialist education by merit.
Most of the edutainment stuff that works is designed for 2-6 years old that is mandated. Beyond that most children will probably have switched over to action adventure stuff like Pokemon and more detailed edutainment stuff like the Discovery Channel.
So you're telling me Liberty Kids is going to turn our children into right wing goons? Where's your evidence? Where's your research? You can make a case for consumerism connected to any child's show, however education based stuff is the de facto norm. Baby Einstein, which does ☺☺☺☺ for really little kids that it targets, as well as issues with encouraging more ADHD behaviors from children that watch too much television.
However, I can singularly argue that any responsible parent does make sure to moderate exposure. As for consumerism, parents model consumer behavior for children that carries well into adulthood. So even inundated with all these advertisements to buy products and is reinforced with culture emphasizing material wealth, people still do indeed fight it. It's just as simple as telling your kid no, or my favorite to tell a toddler to get a job.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
Oh yeah, although I think Don Quixote would be a year's worth of bedtime stories, and as a six-year-old boy I considered Pride and Prejudice to be a "girly book." Anyhoo, you're definitely right in that reading ahead of a kid's grade level does wonders. I was just saying that the program made it a lot more interesting than if my grade-schooler self picked up the source material and tried to read it all the way through.
Legitimate issues that nonetheless can be corrected by responsible adults.
WUBRG's pet conspiracy theory. We're not in Cyberpunk world yet, dude.
Wait... huh?
QFT. Cable programming is mostly ☺☺☺☺e.
Very Well Then I Contradict Myself.
You really have to graduate the kid into them, and even then some aren't appropriate until they're older. Some kids only really resonate while they're young with certain books as well. Some authors like Jack London that are fairly recent, in literary terms, are good bridges. I'd argue even the Iliad, Odyssea, and Anneid are good. It's just really depends on the kids temperament.
Although, if you're trying to teach them a different language when they're really young. Then yea, read in both languages. It makes it more fun for the kid to learn the other language.
I agree, except Shnookie. She has helped to spawn a new meme:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=snookie
URL for that definition is NSFW.
Sadly the French totally owned us on this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRYZWlKFTwA&feature=related
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
"In a world where money talks, silence is horrifying."
Ashcoat Bear of Limited
Yea, this is part of social contract theory, however you haven't exactly defined anything nuanced about it.
Not always, as people seek to improve and explore the world around them. In particular with education, we've created a culture bent on acquisition of material goods, a warped system of finances, and a two income trap where families lack redundancy.
Those who choose to change things are faced with precedence, and much strong wind backlash. The old historical point about how institutions are shaped by their originators and later how institutions shape the people that grow up within that system. However, there's also a third and very engendering key to this in the effect that the first generation agrees with a system but the breakaway sects begin upon normally the third generation. So there are multiple macrosystems you're glossing over in politics.
So basically you're a libertarian as in socially liberal and what I can presume to be fiscally conservative by extension.
I'm just going to skip this.
Children mimic and take on the aspects of those around them to cobble together a personality through experimentation. Most of the education issues are not at the young child age, but rather during the teenage years. Looking at the research and talking to people for years about it, I find it to be a complicated affair that lays some where between the fault of bad leadership in administration, teachers not able to be fired, parents, and lack of agility to get kids into specific schools that are tailored for certain problems.
Yes, in some places they are indeed and are failing miserably like Baby Einstein and other products to turn normal kids into gifted children. "Gifted" have precious abilities, but it's more related to a certain type of temperament that has to be influenced. Wunderkids are especially rare, but the typical child that is raised in a high SES environment does outperform lower SES students because of economic and socio-cultural factors.
Businesses are in the ground to make money, however public broadcasting, a form of socialism, does provide great children's programming. Sesame Street has shown results by taking marketing strategies and aiming them at education to get children to want to mimic and get inspired to learn and explore their world more. Now, Nickelodeon does provide some good child's programming and so does a few other channels that are on cable.
People are moving away from cable to online formats and getting their local broadcasting through a special chip in their computers. Then some people still only use their basic television set ups. So that leaves fourchannels as ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and without government PBS. Out of the three main stations, ABC is the only one with Saturday morning cartoons which are of questionable educational value. There's some other channels, but the kids programming is sparse and normally airs early in the morning.
So for poorer children that are not in school, PBS is basically the poor man's Nickelodeon, Disney, or whatever praytell else is on cable these days. Since the research has shown that the "propaganda" has given good outcomes, it is socially justified to brainwash children into learning the alphabet and other such skills and values.
Yea, we've done it as a society for about 400 years because we need good citizens that know actually how to read and do math. We set a mandate and provide some social funding, and yet market forces produce some good stuff like Sesame Street and dare I say Dora the Explorer.
Television has moved toward instant made celebrities with cameras following around people with the "celebrities" like Snooki and her predecessor Paris Hilton. The trend in television these days is to have more channels and less variety in programming. This started with FX and moved to catch on with other channels that have huge libraries of old run shows. So therefore children's programming has been crowded out and been replaced with informercials on public stations and on the cable channels more blocks aimed at adults.
We don't need these sorts of inspired video games for people to play either:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy5U5E71Vs8
Classical liberalism and protestantism to be exact with education in general. Plato really got the whole ball rolling with the idea on public education, and then men like Comenius took it to a level, mused about by Jefferson and some other Founders, and then it was birthed in the states by Horace Mann and sold by folks like John Dewey. So in short, the pantheon of public education is very diverse. Humanism is just one of the structures that has nurtured public education, but it's more under classical liberalism.
Because society has deemed the responsibility to educate the youth through broad systems to be one part of government's responsibility to help create a citizen. Watching Sesame Street at a young age, getting a socialist public education, and going to a socialist library to read varied works ranging from John Dewey to Alisa Rosenbaum allows to create leaders for the future of this country.
By offering cheap education to the masses is one of the foundational responsibilities found in the works of our Founders like Franklin and Jefferson. An illiterate public is not a free society, and it weakens social mobility. There's also especially issues on women's rights as more conservative societies tend to not educate their women and regard them as chattle. So society has taken
to redistribution of the wealth in part to dedicate itself to combat creating a fundamentalist heaven through economic and social justice. It is all about connectivity, connectivity, connectivity.
Exposure to good material like Sesame Street doesn't kill individualism, it nurtures it. There is a direct correlation between education and financial success and connectivity. Granted it doesn't take much education to make money, but indeed being literate makes it a hell of a lot easier to accomplish connectivity, though.
You really have to go back to Rosseau and his advocacy for childhood exploration. By providing a good "garden" to explore, children are free to accumulate knowledge on their own. Once the child gets to a stage, if they choose to learn more about Hitler, for example, they're free in our society to read Meine Kumpf without social problems.
You mean like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQKo_uiZQdM&feature=related
Yea, we set minimum standards in society so we don't have children overly influenced by people like her. We allow her to have her time and place, but not to overrun the airwaves with lowbrow junk. Really, you're handing me nothing but the same philosophy with questions. No data, no research, no history, no projection about our whole socio-cultural framework at all.
You seriously must not have kids or watch early morning shows, because Fox in particular has recently gotten rid of their early morning cartoons in favor of infomercials. So, instead of cartoons based on heroes and some edutainment they instead show some nature show to hit the minimum standard and then place on real propaganda to sell products. Your market philosophy has yet to convince me that socialist PBS is inferior to what the market can offer outside of perhaps Nickelodeon and a handful of other channels on cable.
Illiteracy opens people up to be abused by people that are, as literate people generally are able to keep records and enforce governance more easily than other people that cannot. Connectivity is key, and even poor people in the middle of forsaken wastelands want their children education because they know that being educated means in part they can become a part of the power structure.
If you study how much actual education many WWII veterans had, it was rather low. Yet, they could read and write which allowed them to connect and defeat a large force that would have otherwise eventually disrupted their way of life through conquest.
Today, for example the same rate of education is in India. There was a project to put out computers to peasants to sell their goods. The peasant through his basic education found the website for the Chicago market that set the price of the goods he was selling. In a limited amount of time these peasants were able to time the market and sell their goods for higher prices and improve themselves through this connectivity. The computers lent out to these areas has improved the lives of these people, but their basic education from socialist sources enabled them to improve their livelihood through self determination.
Nope, but the 400 years precedence certainly makes it one hell of an argument to continue meddling in the affairs of people that don't teach their children to read.
Your implying something without being very specific on what evidence you have used to reach such a conclusion.
Yea, this is part of social contract theory, however you haven't exactly defined anything nuanced about it.
Not always, as people seek to improve and explore the world around them. In particular with education, we've created a culture bent on acquisition of material goods, a warped system of finances, and a two income trap where families lack redundancy.
Those who choose to change things are faced with precedence, and much strong wind backlash. The old historical point about how institutions are shaped by their originators and later how institutions shape the people that grow up within that system. However, there's also a third and very engendering key to this in the effect that the first generation agrees with a system but the breakaway sects begin upon normally the third generation. So there are multiple macrosystems you're glossing over in politics.
So basically you're a libertarian as in socially liberal and what I can presume to be fiscally conservative by extension.
I'm just going to skip this.
You don't have children yet, do you? They mimic and take on the aspects of those around them to cobble together a personality through experimentation. Most of the education issues are not at the young child age, but rather during the teenage years. Looking at the research and talking to people for years about it, I find it to be a complicated affair that lays some where between the fault of bad leadership in administration, teachers not able to be fired, parents, and lack of agility to get kids into specific schools that are tailored for certain problems.
Yes, in some places they are indeed and are failing miserably like Baby Einstein and other products to turn normal kids into gifted children. "Gifted" have precious abilities, but it's more related to a certain type of temperament that has to be influenced. Wunderkids are especially rare, but the typical child that is raised in a high SES environment does outperform lower SES students because of economic and socio-cultural factors.
Businesses are in the ground to make money, however public broadcasting, a form of socialism, does provide great children's programming. Sesame Street has shown results by taking marketing strategies and aiming them at education to get children to want to mimic and get inspired to learn and explore their world more. Now, Nickelodeon does provide some good child's programming and so does a few other channels that are on cable.
People are moving away from cable to online formats and getting their local broadcasting through a special chip in their computers. Then some people still only use their basic television set ups. So that leaves fourchannels as ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and without government PBS. Out of the three main stations, ABC is the only one with Saturday morning cartoons which are of questionable educational value. There's some other channels, but the kids programming is sparse and normally airs early in the morning.
So for poorer children that are not in school, PBS is basically the poor man's Nickelodeon, Disney, or whatever praytell else is on cable these days. Since the research has shown that the "propaganda" has given good outcomes, it is socially justified to brainwash children into learning the alphabet and other such skills and values.
Yea, we've done it as a society for about 400 years because we need good citizens that know actually how to read and do math. We set a mandate and provide some social funding, and yet market forces produce some good stuff like Sesame Street and dare I say Dora the Explorer.
Television has moved toward instant made celebrities with cameras following around people with the "celebrities" like Snooki and her predecessor Paris Hilton. The trend in television these days is to have more channels and less variety in programming. This started with FX and moved to catch on with other channels that have huge libraries of old run shows. So therefore children's programming has been crowded out and been replaced with informercials on public stations and on the cable channels more blocks aimed at adults.
We don't need these sorts of inspired video games for people to play either:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy5U5E71Vs8
Classical liberalism and protestantism to be exact with education in general. Plato really got the whole ball rolling with the idea on public education, and then men like Comenius took it to a level, mused about by Jefferson and some other Founders, and then it was birthed in the states by Horace Mann and sold by folks like John Dewey. So in short, the pantheon of public education is very diverse. Humanism is just one of the structures that has nurtured public education, but it's more under classical liberalism.
Because society has deemed the responsibility to educate the youth through broad systems to be one part of government's responsibility to help create a citizen. Watching Sesame Street at a young age, getting a socialist public education, and going to a socialist library to read varied works ranging from John Dewey to Alisa Rosenbaum allows to create leaders for the future of this country.
By offering cheap education to the masses is one of the foundational responsibilities found in the works of our Founders like Franklin and Jefferson. An illiterate public is not a free society, and it weakens social mobility. There's also especially issues on women's rights as more conservative societies tend to not educate their women and regard them as chattle. So society has taken
to redistribution of the wealth in part to dedicate itself to combat creating a fundamentalist heaven through economic and social justice. It is all about connectivity, connectivity, connectivity.
Exposure to good material like Sesame Street doesn't kill individualism, it nurtures it. There is a direct correlation between education and financial success and connectivity. Granted it doesn't take much education to make money, but indeed being literate makes it a hell of a lot easier to accomplish connectivity, though.
You really have to go back to Rosseau and his advocacy for childhood exploration. By providing a good "garden" to explore, children are free to accumulate knowledge on their own. Once the child gets to a stage, if they choose to learn more about Hitler, for example, they're free in our society to read Meine Kumpf without social problems.
You mean like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQKo_uiZQdM&feature=related
Yea, we set minimum standards in society so we don't have children overly influenced by people like her. We allow her to have her time and place, but not to overrun the airwaves with lowbrow junk. Really, you're handing me nothing but the same philosophy with questions. No data, no research, no history, no projection about our whole socio-cultural framework at all.
You seriously must not have kids or watch early morning shows, because Fox in particular has recently gotten rid of their early morning cartoons in favor of infomercials. So, instead of cartoons based on heroes and some edutainment they instead show some nature show to hit the minimum standard and then place on real propaganda to sell products. Your market philosophy has yet to convince me that socialist PBS is inferior to what the market can offer outside of perhaps Nickelodeon and a handful of other channels on cable.
Illiteracy opens people up to be abused by people that are, as literate people generally are able to keep records and enforce governance more easily than other people that cannot. Connectivity is key, and even poor people in the middle of forsaken wastelands want their children education because they know that being educated means in part they can become a part of the power structure.
If you study how much actual education many WWII veterans had, it was rather low. Yet, they could read and write which allowed them to connect and defeat a large force that would have otherwise eventually disrupted their way of life through conquest.
Today, for example the same rate of education is in India. There was a project to put out computers to peasants to sell their goods. The peasant through his basic education found the website for the Chicago market that set the price of the goods he was selling. In a limited amount of time these peasants were able to time the market and sell their goods for higher prices and improve themselves through this connectivity. The computers lent out to these areas has improved the lives of these people, but their basic education from socialist sources enabled them to improve their livelihood through self determination.
Part of what philosophers, historians, social commentators, social scientists, lawyers, and even hard scientists try to do is provide a context for policy and decisions. Looking at where an idea came from and how it spread is one way to argue for and against a particular cultural aspect/social construct like public education.
Massachusetts was the place where the Common School Movement was birthed by people like Horace Mann, which had a long tradition of public education going back to the Puritans. The Puritans can be stretched back to the influence of Comenius, and Comenius can be stretched back farther to the ancients which in turn influenced men like Jefferson that also adored public education.
See, this is why a good philosopher needs a robust knowledge on the history for the subject at hand. It gives context to a discussion by which to take something deeper. Although, I should have been more clearer on to infer the power of precedence and socio-cultural impulses.
Puritans put in compulsory education and publicly mandated funded education, because parents weren't educating their children to read and write. Basically, parents work all day and don't have the time to educate their own children, so we outsourced it.
Appearances and preconceptions do not tell you anything, especially gussied up in polemicism to try and make the point sound empirical and profound. This is nothing more than a proclamation of your own belief that furthermore undermines your market argument and does not make much for a cohesive narrative in and of itself.
So in a more direct argument, let us compare British elections to American elections. If the people are to be sovereign, then they must have connectivity to their electorate. However, connectivity often comes at a price with television advertisement in the states. The British do not allow political advertisements on television, and therefore have lower entry costs to go into campaigns. This democratizes power by restricting freedom of expression where a negative marketing influence places greater financial strain on candidates. Hillary Clinton still has a $750,000 outstanding campaign debt that she cannot raise money herself for as she is Secretary of State, and therefore must use her husband and other beneficiaries to raise money to pay off that debt.
Furthermore, some forms of socialism do indeed spread more democracy around and increase competition that have positive effects on choice.
Where do you get this stuff at, Popper? The sense I get from your writings is that you bootstrap together a macrotheory from various philosophical works and then try to jackboot that macrotheory into arguments. The "jackboot effect" is achieved through a lack of robustness and conciseness in your arguments.
"Scientific disposition," I'd argue against that as most politicians are either businessmen or lawyers. Therefore, it is an economics and precedences based institution with a lot of it built more off of philosophy than science. One of the major arguments about US leadership is that advisors cannot talk numbers to them, however with Chinese leaders, who are mostly engineers, advisors can speak numbers and technical specifics with them. It's not really a proposal to be more like the Chinese, but rather we need a more robust leadership where money is not the primary factor for political outcomes. Therefore, we lack a scientific disposition and more of a reactionary based precedence approach to dealing with problems.
The bigger issue is that we have to whip ourselves into a frenzy as a culture to do anything about large problems. We declare "war" on damn near everything, throw money and force at the issue, and often a quick and simple solution that in the long term does not pay off.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
"Humanists" (no matter what you mean by that term) do not take children for pathetic, bored idiots. Realists, however, do recognize that a child's natural curiosity can either be nurtured or stifled, and that an enriching environment that includes shows like Sesame Street is good for nurturing it, while leaving children to their own devices in a boring adult-oriented world tends to stifle it.
Private entrepreneurs are not in business to benefit "the people", and though letting them do their thing often works out to the people's benefit anyway, it is not always the case. Entrepreneurship is great in a market where costs and benefits are obvious and payoffs immediate. But for massive, long-term projects that require the coordinated expenditure of a society's resources in vast amounts, endeavors like waging a war, landing on the moon, or educating the next generation, the society needs a government. Government may not be a very good way of doing these things, but there is no better.
Absolutely. And I submit that the electorate (to which the government answers) is perfectly correct to mistrust.
The only thing you can mean by "humanism" here is a dedication to thinking critically and thereby avoid buying into false ideas. This is not "humanism" as it is normally defined, and your sneering attempts to discredit it are completely empty of persuasive force. You yourself are right now wielding the skepticism that is the beating heart of the scientific method - wielding it spectacularly poorly, but wielding it nonetheless.
No it doesn't.
And yet you still say that we should trust everyone to act in children's best interests?
And with the element of truth. The difference between the "cognitive systems" of science and religion is that science produces observably - indeed, dramatically - beneficial results. Science education teaches people how to discover the truth about the world around them. It does so with but a single commandment: "Good ideas are those that are not contradicted by the observable facts." From this commandment, plus a dedication to reverifying and promulgating the good ideas, science has paid dividends far greater than anything any religion has ever been able to deliver.
Now, it's understandable that you'd be hostile to the scientific method, since your ideas are contradicted by the observable facts (and, indeed, each other). But it's a a bit of a stretch to expect us to throw down our belief in science on your mere say-so.
Here, how about a reading assignment: The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan. You can probably skim the first half or so, since it deals primarily with debunking UFOlogy, and to the best of my knowledge that is one delusion from which you do not suffer (though your repeated citations of David Icke's website are worrisome). The book's relevance to this discussion really begins around the chapter called "The Baloney-Detection Kit".
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Yea, but this falls under pragmatism in general by which Dewey in particular was a big advocate of for arguing educating the youth. Although, I wonder if Sagan was influenced by Dewey in part, or whether it was science that singularly influenced him.
However, there's issues with a hubris that comes through "predictability" of "scientific tests" like IQ tests, SAT tests, tracking, and a plethora of other soft science devices that have been held out as a singular measuring device for success in academia. So this emphasis on "prediction" with the ultimate power of knowledge under the standards movement has been deleterious to children.
I'll go back to my point on Fox only showing some old wilderness documentaries in the mornings and then going straight to informercials. The ideal of channels showing a minimal amount of edutainment has created that egregious response to meet minimum standards to more grabs like some of the stuff they used to do in the 70's and 80's when the conservatives starting to do more content control. The content in specific children's shows had where certain shows "encouraged groups" but the characters engaged in group-think. For example, in a specific point of the literature goes on with about how one character wanted pizza and the others wanted ice cream. So instead of the one character getting ice cream and meeting up with the others, the one character just "went along with the crowd." It was just really bad writing and meddling.
So science and specific bad studies have been abused to try and control media. While I'll expect the point about the full scientific process weeding out these inefficiencies, it just seems that funding good edutainment like Sesame Street set the best precedence to spread for more shows that spawned from it like Barney or Dora the Explorer. Anything beyond that like with censor meddling, tends to stifle creativity.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
Okay...
Crime happens, at least in theory, because of either scarcity (need) or dissatisfaction (perceived need). So to completely eliminate crime we either need to brainwash the populace, create infinite resources (and that arguably wouldn't stop some problems), or have instant-response police robots.
Yeah, no. I'm not sure what you consider "crime" or not, but there's nothing "oppressive" about the government locking up a serial killer for life.
And yet you assume that every non-child is a pathetic, bored idiot.
Er, well, putting it as bluntly as that, it's still true; illiteracy has no benefit at all, whereas literacy is strictly better in every way. Like, if illiteracy is this, literacy is this.
Okay, that's just a little bizarre. How in the world could you possibly "fix" that?
That's quite a logical leap. Just because the Puritans were strictly religious and had religious motive for promoting universal education, that doesn't mean that the concept of universal education is a bad one.
Um, dude, this is balls-out crazy talk. I applaud your conviction, but, er...
In no way does scientific thinking even approach religious thinking.
The federal government, also, ain't scientific. And if you think there aren't elements of religious thinking in, say, Congress, then you don't pay attention to politics very much.
If the government thought like scientists, we'd see a lot less rash decision making. It wouldn't be perfect, but (for example) there'd be no arguments about abortion, gay marriage, DADT, global warming, evolution, etc. And the arguments they did have would be based on fact and theory. Not on "gut feeling," "common sense," and the Bible.
@Captain_Morgan: I don't know what happened, but you doubled your post somehow. Just fyi.
On the flip side, the British electoral system is not proportional (or as proportional) to population, so some people are concerned that minority parties are underrepresented.
I'd also like to point out that the Green Party and the Conservative Party (that's what, leftist and center-right?) actually agreed to a coalition government. Le gasp! If only it could happen here, even for six months (the projected lifespan of said coalition government)!
I'd argue that they don't even know basic economics, or willfully ignore economic theory if their lobbyist handlers say no.
Oh, and @Blinking_Spirit: I enjoyed reading that post. Just sayin'.
Very Well Then I Contradict Myself.
I watched a very good debate between all the little parties from 2004, it was very eye opening on the issues they face to try and go mainstream. There were the Socialists, Libertarians, Constitutional Party, Green Party, and I think one more for the presidential debate at a specific college. They had some very interesting ideas from being on the outside looking in.
Economics was probably the wrong choice, "business" would have been a better choice then as the presumption is that a "businessman" can use management skills to bear on government for "fiscal discipline." Frankly, it'd be nice to see more hard scientists like medical doctors or engineers with some more social scientists like economists.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
Spam infraction.
"I want peace in reality." What the hell does that mean? At least these "idealists" that you naysay had a platform for their ideals and a more concrete plan to achieve their ideal world. You say that they 'fix one problem and create another', but what is a 'problem'? Wanting a world without 'problems' is way more quixotic than the most 'idealistic' idealist you can think of.
Yet you've been arguing that you're afraid of a lack of individuality. You don't want any crime, you think that crime stems from conflicts of beliefs (I would argue that differing belief is a sign of individuality), and that the REASON BEHIND CRIME (which you posit as conflict of belief) should be prevented. It appears to me that you're arguing for exactly what you're detesting.
We're all under some form of government at this moment, and yet, we're exhibiting individualism in beliefs. There is not homogeneity but heterogeneity in our thoughts, ideals, beliefs, etc. If that was not the case, there would be no debate forum because everyone would agree.
As for edutainment, the education is not as pure as going directly to the source. Yes, reading the thick classic book has more educational value than the tv show that tells the story or reenacts it somehow. But guess what? Kids want to have fun. They want to interact. They want to move around. They have a short attention span. Making education fun to children will encourage them to have more enthusiasm for education later on.
Letting private companies host these shows is ridiculous. If you want propaganda, then that would be the way to brainwash children. Let's have private interests control these shows, so that they can embed their products inside of the show and break up the show with overt advertisements (commercials).
"The social contract" exists to maximally preserve existing individual liberty, rather than redistribute it evenly among all people according to a select group's ideal. If that theory begins to be used to attack its members, rather than defend them, it is being misapplied.
When innocent people start getting bossed around by government, because government insists that's in the best interest of society at large, even though no transgression of the peace has occurred, the government becomes in violation of "the social contract."
Any belief system burdens society if it becomes too tenuous. When children are taught forcefully that the universe operates according to natural laws which are always fair and just, and that evolution began randomly, the connotation in those messages is that it's the child's own fault if he or she offends someone.
Basic mechanical education is fine, but education in the USA has gone beyond that now.
Children are being put on a massive guilt trip that leads directly to rampant consumerism, drug addiction, etc. It is demoralizing to hear day in and day out for sixteen years that one's life is based in accident and one's negative emotions do not belong in a societal structure that is the lesser of two foreign, imagined evils.
Since this demoralization is implemented not at the individual level, but at the structural level, by schools boards, city councils, textbook-publishing companies, and market research agencies, I call it "structural demoralization."
Do I want the USA federal and state governments to try to enslave every subsequent generation through debt obligations? No; not because that would be "socially unjust," but because I understand that, just as past generations have sought to escape enslavement, so shall future ones, and I want peace, rather than conflict.
Can we please resolve conflicts, instead revolve around conflicts? Revolutions don't work the way people have been led to believe they do.
That's because education exists not for the benefit of the child, but for the benefit of the culture. The children themselves are incidental to the grand cultural system of Corporatism.
I think that most children are gifted, and proper education is simply a matter of guiding the child's interests to express his or her giftedness maximally, without fear or doubt. Does educational programming follow this respectful, customized approach? No; it fits everyone into the same curriculum, because what matters to the FCC is the curriculum (the culture), not the child.
Inspiration of children is their parents' role.
By subversion of the parents' role, corporatism has undermined the importance of familial relationships. This further allows children to be structurally demoralized & spiritually exploited, so the process reinforces itself in a positive feedback loop; the children grow up to be more aloof parents, and the corporatists justify further encroachment into the family and community as standard practice.
It is not socially justified to brainwash children into learning the alphabet or anything else. Research may have shown that outcomes of brainwashing have been "good," but moral judgment is the jurisdiction solely of the sovereign individual, not government.
Education does not reduce crime; education merely repackages crime. Sure, people can learn that getting caught breaking the law will result in punishment; this simply effects greater deliberation in their crimes. Let me cite some examples of this... oil spill; bailout #1, bailout #2, bailout #3; military action in Iraq; Enron; Watergate; Bernard Madoff's ponzi scheme, the federal government's ponzi scheme.
How are those things relevant to the alphabet? Manipulation of symbols and meaning; flags and corporate logos are the higher version of Alphabet of which adults learn to rationalize ignorance.
To teach children to learn a formal alphabet with no intuitive meaning beneath it, is to prepare them to separate symbols' conceptualization from what the symbol is supposed to represent. Sure, that makes them literate, but it also makes them take things out of context.
Education is a zero-sum endeavor; higher thought is a trade-off, not a net gain. Simply because government misunderstands this fact, does not mean that it gets to impose its ignorance on the rest of the people.
At what cost? Literacy and logic may serve to compensate for some of the unhealthy interpersonal interactions that come along with structural demoralization, but not entirely, nor even largely. Isn't society at large still quite dissatisfied with the lack of integrity and sincerity in the public sphere, despite professionals' proficiency in the humanities?
Let's return to individual liberty.
If children want to learn, there are other options than watching educational programming, foremost among them being a trip to the elders' homes. Even if the children do not realize the academic detail of lessons, they can still harness moral instruction and basic mechanical technique. From where comes this coldness towards children, that they exist somehow separately from the rest of our society?
I gathered that public education is seen as liberation from the flawed methodology of traditional religion, by Western civilization. For this reason, much of the youth has become enamored with television quiz shows rather than with real history and spirituality.
The term "classical liberalism" may be accurate, but it references an older environment. Now that the West has endured industrialization for so long, generations have gotten used to mass production, the theory of general relativity, and social darwinism; hence, interpretation of that from which we must emerge, has shifted. No longer must the shrewd ego rebel against simply religion, but also it must rebel against the secular establishment. That's why "humanism" is the term I prefer to describe the rejection of both religion and nationalism, in favor of corporatism; it sees any overt assertion of authority as suspect-- we are all "but human."
Where in the U.S. constitution is there deemed to government responsibility to create a citizen through broad educational systems?
I suppose that a leader is someone who listens to the ordained authority figures' appeals to reason, and obeys every petty rule whether or not she understands its full context?
Is jealousy freedom?
Is fear freedom?
I guess you can say that, but none of that is in the U.S. constitution, nor in Common Law, because such would make the law indubitably biased. Government infringes on personal sovereignty when it mandates education or acculturation, just as I would infringe on personal sovereignty if I declared, "Attest to the fact that The Beatles are the greatest band of all time, or I'll throw you in prison."
Besides, too much of science is incorrect, anyway, and the scientific method only reinforces the idea that the only essential elements to truth are empirical evidence and immunity to reasonable criticism, throwing aside important aspects of experience such as intuition and organic, holistic inference.
Even the theory of general relativity has led to misunderstanding of dark energy:
http://www.dark-energy.org/2201.html
Why do you keep referring to Sesame Street as "good?" It's a show about monsters living in the street, being treated normally by humans-- perversion, imo.
How should our subjective judgments factor into federal policy-making? I think God is good, and better than Sesame Street. Let's force children to worship God. There is a direct correlation between reverence and spiritual success.
Where in the Bill of Rights or the U.S. constitution does it mention a right to "connectivity?"
Perhaps, but the problem is that knowledge can be a detriment if applied carelessly. Even with a grand garden of knowledge, children can still become prejudiced if not given guidance and nurturing and respect. I could even correlate a wider knowledge base to a greater propensity to take for granted that educated youth can forgo nurturing, and therefore become more prejudiced.
That's because there is simply no historical precedence for the level of corruption in our society, and the degradation is so pervasive that none care to research it, as everyone considers it normal and a part of the human condition (hence, brainwashed).
Captain Morgan, I recall that you like to use the metaphor of the carrot and the stick; sometimes, incentives serve to persuade people to cooperate or compete, and, sometimes, punishments serve to dissuade people from going to the extreme in cooperation or competition.
The caveat that must be added to the carrot-and-stick idea, is that human judgment uses cost-benefit analysis, so people may tolerate some punishments as acceptable risks to achieve their own goals, derived from their frame of reference.
As long as the media portrays a figure, such as Paris Hilton, as the epitome of decadence, the debate can be framed in people's minds such that, as long as people feel they're "above" Paris Hilton morally, they deserve some degree of dignity, so they are easier to manipulate than in the absence of such comparison.
When people boycott television broadcasters in lieu of edutainment, the market should respond, if it's capitalist. No such boycott has happened yet, has it?
The U.S. constitution and Common Law hold that the power structure is the sovereign state and individual (Chisholm v. Georgia).
Trade does not improve people's lives.
Where are the results? The USA and Europe are bankrupt and their manufacturing bases have been outsourced to Brazil, Russia, India, and China. If anything, the self-indulgence accompanying formal mandatory education has allowed the West to be taken advantage of, economically and politically, by more cunning societies.
Children are led to believe that positions of authority automatically make people act responsibly, when, in reality, positions of authority merely allow people to act more corruptly, if not carefully scrutinized by the public.
Education can cross the line between honing skills and indoctrination, and it has. Where is the evidence? Look around; does it seem like skilled craftspeople are repairing things that break and preparing for future bumps in the road?
Or does it seem like self-indulgent narcissists in universities are rationalizing away crisis after crisis because of humanism?
"Oh, it's just human nature, that nobody really knows anything about the president's past, or cares about the Gulf coast, or remembers that the Symmington Amendment outlaws U.S. economic aid to nations, such as Israel, who have undeclared atomic weapons, like those Israel recently tried to sell to South Africa."
Isn't that fond of them?
Another way is to meditate and pray about what is best to do.
What am I supposed to take from that context that is deeper? That Jefferson and Comenius were influenced by the ancients, so they must have been right, if their influence lasted thousands of years?
Outsourcing is a notoriously abominable practice.
If parents weren't teaching their children to read and write, that was their prerogative. Maybe they didn't want to pay the mental costs of literacy.
Campaign ads and speeches are planned using scientific data from market research and polling. Politics is a science, beyond even what is taught as political science; there are organizations which literally study how to manipulate demographic behavior through financial and cultural incentivization, which the lobbyists for corporations, who control politicians, have at their disposal.
That's because our society has been structurally demoralized.
A child's curiosity is the body's physiological inclination to explore the physical and emotional limitations of the relationship between the child's body and its environment, so that the child's body establishes intimate familiarity with the environment's timescales, materials, and energies.
Nurturing a child's curiosity properly, requires physical activity and emotional interpersonal interaction, that registers with each of the child's cells, so that the events are experienced holistically and directly, as each cell is designed to receive and evaluate.
Stifling this curiosity is what televised edutainment does, since it does not register holistically with the child's cells on an active, physical plane; it is done through pixels on a screen with sounds from an amplifier. This confuses the child's body, and presents a profoundly different source of engagement than the child's cells are naturally prepared for.
The adult-oriented world is such because adults are so lost in their own bodies and physical environments. Children should be nurtured directly into the adult-oriented world without hesitation, so that their bodies and minds are not deceived and shocked later on during teen age.
The people are customers to entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs sell their goods and services to people, and it is up to people to shop according to priorities that serve their own long-term interests. Well, there is a point here; now that the USA is fascist, entrepreneurs really only service the government and its short-term interests.
Still, if our society had not been brainwashed so thoroughly by educational programming and a humanist educational system, I trust that people, acting as customers of private entrepreneurs, would be diligent enough to consider the interests of their children and communities when shopping.
Government is certainly not going to protect the environment. Realists admit that individual cooperation and non-cooperation is the only filter through which economic actions occur. From there, the organic structure of an economy is clear; however, this depends on law enforcement and sound means of exchange, too. And, that's precisely why individuals should have to provide those, as well.
War and moon-landing do require immense coordination among people, which, I agree, the vehicle of private entrepreneurship cannot expend alone. So, war and moon-landing should not be done.
Educating the next generation would also be a massive undertaking, were it necessarily coordinated. However, one child can be educated at a time; this can be done gradually by a couple of people. Then, the organic result may be an educated generation, and, even better, each child's education is customized to his or her own disposition and purpose. Instructors won't talk to him in metric while he only cares for Imperial Measurements.
I wonder, if there is no better way to educate children than through government and its educational programming, how did humanity manage to survive prior to the existence of government / edutainment?
Brutishly?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyX5FZ0z7Q8
I think that may be because, sometimes, you attach individuals to their respective decisions, without looking at the broader context that weaves them and makes them inescapable.
http://www.cmch.tv/mentors/fullRecord.asp?id=927
According to the article, Sesame Street's representation of diverse racial groups provides for learning about social practices different from one's own. It concludes that the episodes could serve as an example through which educators could breach the topic of multiculturalism.
Let's not rationalize a reverse in cause and effect. It is the placement of trust, for raising children, in government instead of family, which has enabled the degradation of society. Look beyond the individual, and see the long-term cultural trend; a man runs away from his son's mother, and she goes onto welfare. Her son grows up without a father, and has a son of his own, from whom he then runs away.
Now, in our society of consumerist drug-addicts, can people raise children sufficiently well? No, perhaps not. But the alternative of impersonal government raising children to worship science, industry, ability, and corporatism has led us to the point where the USA has a debt to GDP ratio of 90% on balance sheet and Congress is still passing spending bills to "save jobs."
Let's stop rationalizing, and admit that any course of action is going to be painful, no matter what. The question is, do we want to violate our own expectations and ambitions, or do we want to violate people's lives? I want peace in reality.
So, now, Sesame Street is the truth?
Which is that, if someone takes offense in your presence, it must be because of something you personally decided to do, with the intent to offend him or her, because the universe has been proven to be completely fair and just in its every event.
The only injustice in the world comes from human beings, claims science education; every natural event has a cause and effect; every natural event has a purpose and a reason. If you don't understand, well, hey, that is your fault, not the universe's. Maybe the truth is that you just don't belong here.
Hence, the Georgia Guidestones and the eugenics programs of the corporatists, tearing humanity apart any way possible.
Or, "Good ideas are those that are not contradicted by the Narrative in the media and the peer-reviewed literature in the universities."
Maybe. People are still divided as ever, though. Rejecting religion should have united humanity, so why do environmentalist atheists still seek to vandalize and destroy property of military computer science atheists?
What belief in science?
Ok.
What I meant to do was concisely state that I want peace, rather than conflict, in reality, rather than in fantasy.
I don't want to live in a fantasy-world, even if it seems peaceful.
I don't want to live in endless conflict, even if there is some occasional conflict in reality.
There are enough resources, at least, there is enough food and water, to feed every human on Earth. Scarcity is not a problem, but the legal conditions attached to owning material property and intellectual property might be problems if people are kept from eating and drinking as they must physiologically do.
Perceived need, which, imo, would be synonymous with "expectation," may cause crime, but it definitely causes the perception of crime, which can perpetuate conflict by itself. Individual liberty must be constantly egalitarian, in order to refine perceived need.
The oppression occurs when government creates a monopoly on expectations (perceived need), then exercises an egregious double standard which castrates sovereign individuals of liberty. For example, there are many serial killers in the U.S. military or clandestine mercenary groups, who are never prosecuted, because their crimes have been endorsed by the federal government.
Ah, I think that every non-child does pathetic, boring, idiotic things, but these actions constitute neither behavioral patterns nor intentional dispositions for those individuals; rather, these actions exemplify the cultural programming at an individual level. Humanism judges the individual himself or herself, and ignores the context that contributed wholly to the actions, so it is naïve.
Simply because people are not aware of the trade-off of literacy and logical conceptualization, does not mean that it does not exist; indeed, knowledge has a profound cost.
You should think about mental processes more economically. There is a cost to identification; temporariness. The cost to similarity is orientation. Order has a cost, so does authority, and ability. I could go on and on. The mind is a zero-sum arena. There is no magic in mathematics that makes it work; novelty is lost, and convenience is gained.
By ignoring ethnicity altogether.
They both seek truth.
Haha, no, that's all for show. At present, some USA politicians may have delusions of grandeur, but spirituality is present in none or perhaps one of them at most. The corporations control the politicians through lobbying, and the corporations employ the most stringent, rigorous scientific analysts to frame the political debate at all times. Astute cognitive framing is a scientific endeavor.
I think their apparent convictions are such only to appease specific demographics that the think-tanks inform them are statistically significant for their election. Also, trivial debates like those help distract the public from seeing the real harm that corporatism is doing to the people of this world, so it's a win-win for the corporatists to have political candidates and representatives commit to some abstruse principal.
Solving one problem and creating another:
Yes, I agree that I am arguing for that which I detest; individuals ought to have the liberty to believe whatever they want to believe, but, at the same time, conflicts between individual beliefs create crime, which I want to reduce.
Still, I feel comfortable in arguing this position, even if it seems self-contradictory, because it is realistic; it really is the case that I want to reduce crime while preserving individual liberty, and it really is the case that conflicts between individual beliefs create crime. I like this position because, though it's odd, it minimizes acknowledgment of its own success; ideal forms of government, above all, consider themselves to be functional, and allow for one belief system to dominate others, sacrificing individual liberty while maximizing the criminal, tyrannical measures that it institutionalizes as necessary.
What more real position is there?
Or, it could be that our thoughts have been so effectively homogenized that we cannot even recognize that they have been so. Maybe the "marketplace of ideas" and "multicultural diversity" are deception... oh wait, that's just more paranoid banter, because it does not conform to what the prophesiers --ahem, professors-- at the university's political science department said in caste --ahem, class-- every day this semester.
This is behaviorism, the belief that children are blank slates, cardboard cut-outs with no individual purposes or personalities.
Yes, individual personalities do collide and can conflict, but this is natural and important in life, as it adheres society to the present, and keeps us from committing rigidly to sentimentality or idealism. The proper role of government should be to ensure that conflicts between individuals are resolved peacefully when they do arise. Not to prevent conflict altogether. A little fear is healthy.
Children are not forced to watch television, and the difference between government and big corporations is in appearance alone. Acculturated youth become the most reliable consumers.
Trolling infraction.
I REALLY hope you're trolling, because this is some of the most ridiculous stuff I have EVER heard. Education is a 0-sum system? What?
Your proposal of letting the kids learn their stuff their own way allows for ridiculous abuse-corporatist schools, abuse of our basic liberties, or worst of all-complete loss of education, and the fall of our race from a highly scientific, smart group into a neanderthal group of brutes whose entire educational knowledge has gone to waste!
Do not feed the troll.
Added bonus: we're holding a songwriting contest in march with a registry drive going on right now! Check it out, plus the opportunity to earn $50!