Education Leaving Age
Existentialism, Politics November 6th, 2007In a recent announcement, the UK government are to increase the compulsory school leaving age to 18. This is another example of the state saying “we know best”. If it really was a good idea, people would want to do it without compulsion! (This is my new principle of light government.)
A while back, you asked:
“Do not all schools (as they are) represent a value system? This is what I had argued before. Whether that value system is expressed in a faith ethos, in its uniform rules, rules of discipline, are they not then defending a system of values?”
“In essence as all schools and indeed all institutions are arbiters and promoters and defenders of peculiar social values why dont we just do away with the lot of them?”
Yes education has an implied value system – one that is not wholly indoctrination and not wholly development of the individual – but something in between.
The possibility of abolishing universal education is an interesting one. It is one of my only concerns of libertarianism. If home or community funded and administered education could function, it would be an option to universal education. I would be interested in a massively decentralized but state funded education system – could it work?
I also have been thinking about existentialism and the state. Are they compatible or necessarily incompatible? Is it some version of libertarianism? A future project would be to list the requirements of an existential compatible government and then check if the requirements are not contradictory.
Anti Citizen One
On that note: there are already enough weird laws on the books!
November 6th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
I read this article with interest, and considered posting, but anticipated you might post on it as well.
I have yet to make up my mind on this legislation, obviously as you pointed out this is education by compulsion, and furthermore as it is being done to reduce the unemployment statistics and to ease the ‘burden’ of the welfare state, it is not being done for what I would consider the ‘right reasons’, namely to encourage personal development.
To legislate like this is as you argued undesireable and rather belies the quaint notion we have that this society is in any sense of the word ‘free’.
However I do have one partial sympathy for the project, namely that it is a varied compulsion, it is not wrong, indeed it is desireable that an education system should be able to offer through vocational training etc, avenues of oppurtunity that are (a) not exclusively academic and therefore are accessible to the non-acadmically gifted student and (b) provide skills that may be useful to the individual and to society as a whole.
(Although I believe (b) is a positive argument I do accept as your much earlier post on education stated that the purpose of school is not simply to equip people for the work place, and indeed the purpose of life for which a ‘school’ ideally should prepare the student is not simply work-orientated).
Clearly the element of compulsion is a sticking point, and as a libertarian and irrealist I consider it (despite the inherent virtues) unnacceptable. And yet it may be moderately more desireable than the system we currently have.
“I would be interested in a massively decentralized but state funded education system – could it work?”
A good question. And an ideal that I would support. The answer ‘who knows’ for we tread on unsullied territory here. A decentralized education system that encouraged a diversity of choice and implied values must nonetheless be a competent education system. It is one thing teaching the existence or non-existence of a transcendent being such as God, it is wholly another to teach ‘might is right’ or the complete rejection of science and so on.
And to your final point (something I agree we ought to consider more indepth) is the state acceptable to the existentialist?
My own opinion is no it is not. The state as we understand it is about compulsion and the imposition of limitations of personal freedoms. Freedoms that we have not neccessarily agreed to surrender.
As I noted in a previous comment I have a tendency towards a microsocial model.
Such a model I concede would entail mass migration as people settle into the society that best suits them (and migration does not suit everybody).
The obvious example that comes to mind is the city-state, and I would promote the idea had I not read an article in National Geographic today about the collapse of Mayan society (which was a loose confederation of independent city states)… I may post on that someday.
My own utopian model has focused on microsocieties such as villages, which begs the further question, not only are states incompatble with existentialism but does such a society entail the death of the metropolis and the urban community altogether?