(Sub): “As for your risk management argument… what’s the risk of non-compulsory school attendance with respect to our nation’s economy and scientific advancement?”

Zero. Thomas Edison was homeschooled, and went to work at 13. Hiram Maxim left school at 13 and apprenticed. The Wright brothers didn’t finish high school. Cyrus McCormick was homeschooled. Gandhi opposed compulsory attendance at school. Albert Einstein opposed compulsory attendance. Taxpayers get nothing from compulsory attedance, compulsory financing of schools, and policies which restrict parents’ options for the use of the taxpayers’ K-12 education subsidy to schools operated by dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel that they wouldn’t get from a voucher-subsidized market in education services, or from an unsubsidized, uncoerced market except violence, vandalism., and drug abuse.

You’re throwing the baby out with the bath water with your ’some students are corrupted as a result of going to school so let’s stop mandatory schooling’ argument. Instead, why don’t we find those corrupting influences and effectively prevent them from corrupting the general populace, so the the general populace can still retain the benefits of mandatory schooling?

It’s not bath water, it’s sewage. The corrupting influence is compulsion.

As for your risk management argument… what’s the risk of non-compulsory school attendance with respect to our nation’s economy and scientific advancement?
You’re throwing the baby out with the bath water with your ‘some students are corrupted as a result of going to school so let’s stop mandatory schooling’ argument. Instead, why don’t we find those corrupting influences and effectively prevent them from corrupting the general populace, so the the general populace can still retain the benefits of mandatory schooling?

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life.

The old Cherokee replied, “The one you feed.”

I loved your paragraph about the need for some benign coercion of kids. Great, quickening writing.

I don’t share your anger at unions, however. The unions, it seems to me, aren’t a problem AS unions; to the extent they’re a problem, it’s because they’re filled with teachers whose heads have been filled with bad ideas –and that’s the fault of the misguided, wrong-headed “progressive” education establishment. The American Federation of Teachers has actually been a beacon of good sense –Randi Weingarten, its president, and Albert Shanker, her predecessors, are smart, no-nonsense intellectuals who argue for sensible policies.

And I don’t share your cynicism about Obama. Did you read David Brooks’ column a few days ago in the New York Times? It tells how Obama’s mom got him up at 4:30 every morning so that she could give him extra tutoring. The guy knows what a solid education looks like; I don’t think he’s likely to be hoodwinked by fads and charlatans.

Badabing,

Are you saying that when seriously mentally-ill people behave badly, it’s because they’re evil, not because they’re ill?

The nature/nurture dichotomy is sterile. Think in terms of risk factors. School is a significant risk factor. School policy is a policy lever (something policymakers can manipulate). Genetics is not a polcy lever, so there’s no point in distracting attention from school policy to genetics.

(Eagleson): “Until (children) have become acquainted with the realities of existence, they are unequipped to make sensible decisions about the large issues of their lives. They can, obviously, achieve such a state, but it takes time and adult supervision ready and willing to prevent them haring off in stupid or dangerous directions in the meantime. This is where parents and schools are supposed to come in. That fewer and fewer of either seem either inclined or equipped to do their jobs in this regard is, indeed, a modern tragedy.”

Before 1900 or so, chicken was more expensive than beef. “You men eat your dinner, eat your pork and beans. I eat more chicken any man ever seen” (Back Door Man). Ranchers knew how to raise cattle cheaply; they just branded calves and turned them loose, and rounded them up in the fall. Farmers could not raise chickens by this strategy, and confining flocks in close quarters led to mass mortality from epidemic disease, so chicken was the Sunday dinner treat. Around 1920, people learned how to vaccinate against Newcastles disease and other contagious diseases of chickens. Today, farmers raise chickens in factory farms. Eggs roll from under hens into trays. Farmers collect eggs and incubate the next generation. Computers weigh the market price of fryers, the growth curve of chickens, and the price of feed, and compute the optimal date of slaughter. It’s automated. In the last 80 years we have bred the instinct to brood eggs out of some breeds. These breeds, like modern maize, will not survive without human help.

We have had compulsory attendance statutes on the books in some US States since the founding of the US.

You are absolutely correct. I did intend “conscience-less-ness” rather than consciouslessness. Mea culpa. Magid and McKelvey discuss the relationship between infant bonding and development of conscience in “High Risk: Children without a Conscience.” In my opinion they take their legitimate findings, from examination of the research, way too far in suggesting that infants in child care face a risk equivalent to that of children who are severely neglected/abused. Nonetheless, they provide a very readable summary of the research connecting healthy bonding with the development of knowledge of right and wrong—and the ability to act on this.

With regard to the rest of your rant—left-wing knee jerk and all that—I suspect that you are reading in things that I did not say, as well as overlooking some that I did. All research into school shootings is based on a very small sampling of such crimes—making most conclusions somewhat speculative. Among factors that may or may not have any causality or correlation are the fact that all in the US since the 1970s (possibly before—I just wasn’t looking at studies that went back that far) have been male. They were more likely in southeast and western states. Some suggest that violence in general is more prevalent in these states and may have an impact. According to some sources, bullying has been reported as an experience of 22% of the shooters.

While I have not yet had the opportunity to read Langdon’s book, I do note that some reviews mention that he also presents the case that many factors (including those within the school environment) must be considered in order to arrive at an understanding. As I suggested—and apparently you missed—even if a pure mental health issue is suggested, kids who bear the label of ED (Emotionally Disturbed) are about three times more likely to have been victimized by bullies in school. It would be irresponsible to overlook the results of social ostracism that accompany mental illness in either children or adults. One should also remember that even the term “insane,” is one that has legal, not clinical, meaning.

To suggest that there is a single “box” into which school shooters can fit is to oversimplify, as well as to run the risk of over-identification of certain populations as being “dangerous.”

They do, indeed. My point, however, is that they are, in the main, born and not made. Thus, the occasional grim emergence of yet another homicidal sociopath of middle or high school age is guaranteed to continue until the shallow end of the human gene pool is purged of its atavistic toxic sludge. This will happen – in my estimation within another generation or so – when the state of biological knowledge advances to the point that human genetics becomes amenable to routine modification on an engineering basis and ceases to be the exclusively Darwinian casino game it has been since time immemorial. Compulsory attendance laws, alas, may be supported or damned for many reasons but a putative role in the creation of mass murderers is not among them.

For what it’s worth, it is my opinion that a certain amount of coercion is inevitable and necessary in the course of seeing to the education of children. The extreme libertarian/objectivist view of children as miniature adults, and its leftist cognate in the widely held liberal views that children should be indulged in their whims so long as some pretense of “creativity” is observed, are IMHO self-evidently barking moonbat nuts. Children are born with fully functioning Rand-level egos, to be sure, but without wisdom or perspective. Until they have become acquainted with the realities of existence, they are unequipped to make sensible decisions about the large issues of their lives.

They can, obviously, achieve such a state, but it takes time and adult supervision ready and willing to prevent them haring off in stupid or dangerous directions in the meantime. This is where parents and schools are supposed to come in. That fewer and fewer of either seem either inclined or equipped to do their jobs in this regard is, indeed, a modern tragedy. The wretched state of so many schools – particularly the pedagogical Superfund site that is the LAUSD here in California – may be properly understood only as representing a grievous lack of certain essential forms of prophylactic and tonic coercion and their replacement (nature abhors a vacuum) with a combination of politically correct indoctrinations and a tolerated regime of Lord-of-the-Flies-style peer gangsterism.

As for Mike in Texas, the point of your allegedly heavy sarcasm escapes me; indeed, strikes me as industrial-strength cluelessness instead. Surely you are aware that somewhere between 1 and 2 million U.S. children are now homeschooled by parents who are, indeed, loving supportive and nurturing and who have elected to do so, in almost all cases, without any monetary assistance from Big Daddy State. Your fellow hacks in the teacher unions are certainly thus aware, even if the news has somehow failed to reach you personally. The vitriol directed at homeschooling parents by educrat establishment types is second only to that lavished on nascent voucher programs, charter schools and other manifestations of widespread quiet revolt by long-abused “clients” of failed big-city monopoly school systems. A day of reckoning is coming for the takers, wasters and abusers. Obama cannot save you!

A more likely scenario is that the rise in violence and crime during the school year is due to the socialization of the overall student population with a small but inflential population of malcontents. During summer months the juvenile criminal population is less concentrated. This also explains the differences between homeschooled and public school popultions – Little Johnny is learning as much from f-bomb dropping Kurt as his teacher. Young children are highly impressionable and will adopt most any social behavior that they are exposed to – so if you expose them to misbehaving children without proper supervision, they will adopt the same misbehaviors.

If anything, the data supports the idea of removing most non-compliant students from regular classrooms and putting them in a separate setting, a big no-no in today’s world of heterogenous grouping and political correctness.