Comment by 20after4

Comment by 20after4 4 days ago

In Missouri, high-school buildings use the same blueprints as state prisons. Why bother designing something custom? They serve the same purpose. They literally are prisons.

If a teenager fails to show up for school, a police officer will eventually show up to arrest their parents and place the teenager in the custody of a "foster family." Now both parent and teenager are imprisoned. And we are told this is freedom.

To make matters much much worse, children in state custody with the foster system are routinely exposed to all kinds of abuse. Many foster families operate like a profitable business where costs are minimized and care is entirely absent.

tigeba 4 days ago

I feel I must point out that education buildings in Missouri do not share designs with prisons as a norm. Maybe this is true somewhere in the state but not here.

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20after4 4 days ago

Yeah I didn't mean all of them. A couple of examples that I am aware of are Ozark High School and Waynesville High School.

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- WillPostForFood 4 days ago
  
  There is no way this is true.
  People look at ugly schools, and they look like prisons, and the kids are captive in the ugly buildings, so it invites the prison metaphor. But makes no sense. Schools are a series of classrooms, prisons are a series of small cells. The designs would not be reusable at a fundamental level, or any practical level.
  
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  treis 3 days ago
  
  I can't believe people think this is true. There are no school room sized cells in any prison. At least not in this country.
  
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lyu07282 4 days ago

> And we are told this is freedom.

I think we pretty much universally agree that mandatory schooling is preferable to the alternative, do you really think an illiterate populous is preferable? So yes actually that is freedom. Society guarantees that you will not be illiterate just because your parents were crack addicts, I think that's a good thing.

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greentxt 4 days ago

I don't think an illiterate populous is the alternative unless you think most people lack intrinsic motivation and also have families that don't value education. Seems extremely unlikely. Maybe you wouldn't have gone to school if you had a choice but most people would, if nothing else for free childcare.

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- lyu07282 4 days ago
  
  > most people would
  You are missing the point, "most" is not all, I don't think most people/families are like this at all, we don't do this for most people. I think you would be surprised about the number of low-income children in the US who will never see a classroom if we abandoned compulsory education. It is also an effective measure to increase equality and class mobility.
  14 million children in the US are food insecure. 43 million people live in poverty, 12.9% [1]
  You know how many people in the US are illiterate? 21% [2]
  Do you think that number will increase or decrease if we got rid of compulsory education?
  [1] https://www.nokidhungry.org/who-we-are/hunger-facts [2] https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-s...
  
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  9rx 4 days ago
  
  > You know how many people in the US are illiterate? 21% [2] Do you think that number will increase or decrease if we got rid of compulsory education?
  Just 20% in 1875[1], despite the primitive education system of the time. Is the answer no change, it being limited by the innate capabilities of the people, not limited by what they do?
  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
  
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  Miraste 3 days ago
  
  The source above yours and the one on Wikipedia are using different metrics for literacy. These are generally not comparable. Measuring literacy in a useful way, especially over historic timescales, is harder than it sounds.
  
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