Does Compulsory Schooling Serve to Liberate Children?
Reproduction of a discussion tree between Dennis Hackethal and Roswitha Kant from the old Veritula website. The creation dates of the ideas were not retained but newly set. The discussion originally took place in German between August and October 2023 and can be viewed in full here.
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Freedom is achieved when the mind reaches a certain level of intellectual maturity: when it thinks for itself.
This is the purpose of compulsory education: to liberate children.
(Kant)
Children are constantly being bossed around at school. So they can't become independent at school.
It's one thing if you don't share my idea of freedom. But the contradiction above should be enough to dissuade you from your original position: if your goal is for the child to think independently, but it chronically fails to do so at school, then school is no good even by your own logic.
That is not what freedom means.
Freedom does not consist in the guarantee of certain thoughts or scope for action.
Roughly speaking, freedom is when you are left alone by others when you want to be left alone.
If you are sent to school against your will, you are not free. School is forced.
We need to distinguish between freedom of choice and freedom of thought.
School serves to educate students to have freedom of thought. This is achieved by restricting freedom of choice.
(Kant)
If freedom of choice is sufficiently restricted, freedom of thought is also restricted.
Anyone who is forced to spend hours every day dealing with topics they would otherwise not deal with has neither freedom of choice nor freedom of thought.
Forcing someone to think is impossible. The student remains free in his thoughts.
(Kant)
Expecting a child to keep his freedom of thought in the face of all that pressure is not realistic.
So children already have freedom of thought? You originally said (#34) that children only have freedom of thought when their minds have reached a certain level of maturity; that this was the purpose of school in the first place. That doesn't fit together.
Although you can't force someone to think, you can create the conditions for them to force themselves to think.
That's exactly what school does.
Freedom of choice is not restricted at school. For example, students can choose between different languages. They can choose their exams and what to read, etc.
(Kant)
That's not a real choice. For example, I had to choose between French and Latin, but I didn't have the choice to do neither and create a new alternative.
Compulsory schooling itself violates freedom of choice, as the student does not have the choice to stay at home and do something else with his time instead.
Exams are not an example of freedom of choice. On the contrary: they are an instrument of oppression.
It was only in the 2000s that school became a compulsory program, as the teaching of skills was geared to the needs of the market rather than to enlightenment values and independent thinking.
(Kant)
Whether school is compulsory does not depend on whether you as a teacher dislike the curriculum, but on whether the student is forced to go to school.
School violates several enlightenment values, including freedom of association and the right to bodily autonomy.
Advocating compulsory schooling for the sake of enlightenment makes no sense.
Here you are suddenly using a different criterion for coercion.
Compulsion could lie either in the raising a child to become a consumer or in the lack of intellectual maturity, but presumably not in both. (It actually lies in forcing anything onto the child, be that becoming a consumer or something else.)
You are referring to ideas by David Deutsch. He is a physicist; he deals with inorganic matter. His ideas on educating children are therefore irrelevant.
(Kant)
It doesn't matter that he is a physicist, because his thoughts on the subject are of a philosophical/epistemological nature.
A multidisciplinary project involving programming, mathematics, philosophy and biology should be made possible for all young people - shouldn't it? - and would promote future skills for the digital age: expertise, critically constructive and independent thinking, skills to act and judge, epistemology, ethics and anthropology, and ecology. That would emancipate children in the enlightenment sense.
(Kant)
Speaking of 'enabling' here makes no sense when young people are actually forced to do what you describe.
Maybe a given young person has no interest in the digital age. Maybe he is more interested in castles and outer space. But teachers prevent him from learning more about those by forcing him to learn "programming, mathematics, philosophy and biology" or whatever else instead.
And the fact remains that it's impossible to teach independent or critical thinking by paternalizing someone for years and telling them what they can do and think, when they may use the bathroom, when they may eat, etc. How could this possibly "emancipate children in the enlightenment sense"? How absurd!
The freedom of one person, including a child's, ends where the freedom of another begins.
(Kant)
That's right, which is why the teacher's freedom ends where the child's freedom begins.