A critical look at our education system

Ives Parr

Writes Parrhesia · Subscribe

17 hr ago

Editor’s note: Ives Parr and I have been going back and forth about the value of formal schooling over text lately, and decided it would be fun to bring our debate into the blogosphere! I hope you enjoy his provocative insights as much as I did.

Make sure to check out his newsletter on the intersection of genetics, philosophy, and culture and let us know in the comments where you agree or disagree as I will be writing my response to Parr next week. -Infovores

I. Ethical Double Standards

In the United States, there is a widely held belief that people should face equal legal treatment regardless of race, sex, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation. This is especially the case among contemporary progressives, who have made it their raison d’être to eliminate the social and political inequalities experienced by marginalized groups. Despite the ever-growing concern for discrimination along different dimensions of personal identity, many do not recognize that they have inconsistent attitudes about the treatment of the young.

Most would rightfully abhor restricting women’s ability to pursue a career merely because she is female. Also, abhorrent would be coercing minority races into narrow career pathways, even if it was supposedly for their benefit. However, many find it not only acceptable but morally obligatory to restrict children’s ability to work. Moreover, they advocate for universal compulsory schooling regardless of individual students’ circumstances and psychological characteristics.

Perhaps this incongruity in progressive thinking is downstream of the egalitarian fallacy, wherein people’s moral commitment to equal treatment leads them to believe that people possess equal amounts of the traits that give them moral standing. Since children and adolescents lack various qualities that give them equal moral standing, they should be treated differently. For example, children and adolescents have lower average cognitive ability and practical knowledge. While this is undoubtedly true on average, there are overlapping distributions. Moreover, hardly any progressive would be consistent in advocating the restriction of the rights of an ethnic group provided they had a lower average level of cognitive ability.

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