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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.
It doesn't matter that he is a physicist, because his thoughts on the subject are of a philosophical/epistemological nature.
Requiring one government per physical territory is an anachronism that Rand retains. Seems unnecessary – see criticisms to #2.
Building on #17 and #22, imagine a world with multiple objectivist countries. Say the US is purely objectivist, and so is England.
Presumably, Rand would see no problem with multiple objectivist countries coexisting. She would consider this state of affairs not only possible but desirable.
Yet how is that state different from the problem she describes in #14? Objectivist countries would be voluntarily financed by voluntary taxation; private arbitration services would be voluntarily financed through voluntary payments as well.
Isn’t this an instance of a stolen concept?
The “stolen concept” fallacy, first identified by Ayn Rand, is the fallacy of using a concept while denying the validity of its genetic roots, i.e., of an earlier concept(s) on which it logically depends.
Rand is using a concept – objectivism, which logically depends on peaceful coexistence of voluntarily financed groups of people – to argue against the possibility of the peaceful coexistence of voluntarily financed groups of people!
This is an example of version control for ideas. As I revise this idea, new versions are created and automatically diffed. Click the arrows below to cycle through the version history. You can also click on ‘versions’ to see the entire version history plus diffing.
This is an example of version control for ideas. As I revise this idea, new versions are created and automatically diffed. Click the arrows below to cycle through the version history.
I fixed the typo that was here previously!
This is a comment on version 4, but it applies to subsequent versions as well.
This is a comment on version 4, but it applies to version 5 as well.
This is an example of version control for ideas. As I revise this idea, new versions are created and automatically diffed. Click the arrows below to cycle through the version history.
This is an example of version control for ideas. As I revise this idea, new versions are created and automatically diffed.
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's right, which is why the teacher's freedom ends where the child's freedom begins.
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!
You are a chemist. Doesn't the same criticism apply to you?
We should judge ideas by their content, not by their source.
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.)
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.
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.
Exams are not an example of freedom of choice. On the contrary: they are an instrument of oppression.
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.
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.