Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Nadaka]

Why is everybody assuming the kids volunteering to clean school facilities will be poor?

What's wrong with paying volunteers to do labor?

Or say it isn't voluntary and every student is required to clean facilities for say the last 30 minutes of the school day?

Since when do rich kids go to public school anyways?

What the hell sort of liberalism are the teaching these days anyways? Voluntary labor for the benefit of the community is supposed to be a virtue, not some sort of victimization or maryterdom. What the fuck guys?

You are missing the part where it is not voluntary. And where the kids don't get paid. And that it is part of the complete reversal of the labor laws explicitly designed to prevent children from being exploited.

[Luke_Prowler]

Why is everybody assuming the kids volunteering to clean school facilities will be poor?

Since when do rich kids go to public school anyways?

You answered your own question

[Montague]

Why is everybody assuming the kids volunteering to clean school facilities will be poor?

What's wrong with paying volunteers to do labor?

Or say it isn't voluntary and every student is required to clean facilities for say the last 30 minutes of the school day?

Since when do rich kids go to public school anyways?

What the hell sort of liberalism are the teaching these days anyways? Voluntary labor for the benefit of the community is supposed to be a virtue, not some sort of victimization or maryterdom. What the fuck guys?

You are missing the part where it is not voluntary. And where the kids don't get paid. And that it is part of the complete reversal of the labor laws explicitly designed to prevent children from being exploited.

Compulsory education, sending kids to school at 7am sharp for 8 hours is basically work anyways. Pushing a broom in a facility students use is not quite like sending them to work in the acid mines for similar shift. Helping to maintain the facilities they use is not an unreasonable idea. It's being to sound like poor kids are going to be deprived of an education to scrub toliets 8 hours a day and this is certainly not how it would be implimented.

Why is everybody assuming the kids volunteering to clean school facilities will be poor?

Since when do rich kids go to public school anyways?

You answered your own question

There are other social-economic classes besides poor and rich.

[scriver]

Compulsory education, sending kids to school at 7am sharp for 8 hours is basically work anyways. Pushing a broom in a facility students use is not quite like sending them to work in the acid mines for similar shift. Helping to maintain the facilities they use is not an unreasonable idea. It's being to sound like poor kids are going to be deprived of an education to scrub toliets 8 hours a day and this is certainly not how it would be implimented.

Yeah, going to school is practically a job, and kids shouldn't be forced to do more than that. After school is for homework and having fun, not being forced to clean toilets without pay.

Tell me, Montague, would you take a job where besides working for eight hours, you also had to clean your work place without extra pay? On your own time?

[Flying Dice]

Why is everybody assuming the kids volunteering to clean school facilities will be poor?

What's wrong with paying volunteers to do labor?

Or say it isn't voluntary and every student is required to clean facilities for say the last 30 minutes of the school day?

Since when do rich kids go to public school anyways?

What the hell sort of liberalism are the teaching these days anyways? Voluntary labor for the benefit of the community is supposed to be a virtue, not some sort of victimization or maryterdom. What the fuck guys?

You are missing the part where it is not voluntary. And where the kids don't get paid. And that it is part of the complete reversal of the labor laws explicitly designed to prevent children from being exploited.

Compulsory education, sending kids to school at 7am sharp for 8 hours is basically work anyways. Pushing a broom in a facility students use is not quite like sending them to work in the acid mines for similar shift. Helping to maintain the facilities they use is not an unreasonable idea. It's being to sound like poor kids are going to be deprived of an education to scrub toliets 8 hours a day and this is certainly not how it would be implimented.

Public school has very little in common with working. I rarely, if ever, saw anyone from the worst dropout-to-be to the best honor student put as much effort into a full day of school as someone would into half an hour of work. Sitting around in mildly uncomfortable chairs pretending to pay attention while writing/reading/texting/playing hearts in a classroom where the worst that can happen if you screw up is being sent to a room where (joy!) you get to sleep for the rest of the school day? I'll take that any day even over a relatively simple job (apart from the whole "not getting paid for doing a job to allow me to continue going to school" thing). This is a direct attempt to circumvent laws that protect against child labor, and it is anything but voluntary. Just because they're doing janitorial work instead of working around limb-mangling machinery doesn't make it right.

[Montague]

Compulsory education, sending kids to school at 7am sharp for 8 hours is basically work anyways. Pushing a broom in a facility students use is not quite like sending them to work in the acid mines for similar shift. Helping to maintain the facilities they use is not an unreasonable idea. It's being to sound like poor kids are going to be deprived of an education to scrub toliets 8 hours a day and this is certainly not how it would be implimented.

Yeah, going to school is practically a job, and kids shouldn't be forced to do more than that. After school is for homework and having fun, not being forced to clean toilets without pay.

Tell me, Montague, would you take a job where besides working for eight hours, you also had to clean your work place without extra pay? On your own time?

If I was paid sufficiently, why not? If it was a condition of employment, or in this case, a condition required to recieve education at no personal expensive, pushing a broom for a half hour a day to help maintain that institution does not sound unreasonable to me. That is civic virtue. Giving to your community.

[Flying Dice]

Compulsory education, sending kids to school at 7am sharp for 8 hours is basically work anyways. Pushing a broom in a facility students use is not quite like sending them to work in the acid mines for similar shift. Helping to maintain the facilities they use is not an unreasonable idea. It's being to sound like poor kids are going to be deprived of an education to scrub toliets 8 hours a day and this is certainly not how it would be implimented.

Yeah, going to school is practically a job, and kids shouldn't be forced to do more than that. After school is for homework and having fun, not being forced to clean toilets without pay.

Tell me, Montague, would you take a job where besides working for eight hours, you also had to clean your work place without extra pay? On your own time?

If I was paid sufficiently, why not? If it was a condition of employment, or in this case, a condition required to recieve education at no personal expensive, pushing a broom for a half hour a day to help maintain that institution does not sound unreasonable to me. That is civic virtue. Giving to your community.

They aren't being paid. They aren't doing it voluntarily (well, they're doing it "voluntarily"). Handing someone a mop and saying to them, "Go clean that hallway if you want to keep going to school" isn't someone choosing to give back to their community.

[Aqizzar]

If I was paid sufficiently, why not? If it was a condition of employment, or in this case, a condition required to recieve education at no personal expensive, pushing a broom for a half hour a day to help maintain that institution does not sound unreasonable to me. That is civic virtue. Giving to your community.

You keep changing the parameters of the proposition.  There would be no pay.  It would not be voluntary.  Those there the conditions Newt Gingrich laid out when he made the half-assed speech in the first place, that's being argued about.

It's not like it was a serious proposition anyway, it was just a speech to make the people he was talking to feel good about themselves by crapping on poor people.

[Montague]

If I was paid sufficiently, why not? If it was a condition of employment, or in this case, a condition required to recieve education at no personal expensive, pushing a broom for a half hour a day to help maintain that institution does not sound unreasonable to me. That is civic virtue. Giving to your community.

You keep changing the parameters of the proposition.  There would be no pay.  It would not be voluntary.  Those there the conditions Newt Gingrich laid out when he made the half-assed speech in the first place, that's being argued about.

It's not like it was a serious proposition anyway, it was just a speech to make the people he was talking to feel good about themselves by crapping on poor people.

I'm not really even arguing the actual implimentation of the law, because like you said, it's not a serious proposition and I know it'll never actually happen in my lifetime.

It's the principle of the idea. What it means to partake in a 'free' education. What civic responsibility might mean. What are people, kids even, expected to do to maintain the institutions they benefit from?

I don't think Ol' Newt was trying to suggest poor people scrub shitters for 8 hours a day and rich kids can enjoy public schooling with pristine toliets to poop in. I think he was trying to bring up a point that public institutions are not 'free' they are bought and paid for by somebody. To make people more involved in the maintaince of these institutions as a condition of using them is not so different from collecting taxes from everyone and then spending it on providing these things. It's basically the same philosophical idea. Everybody pays it for it, everybody can use them. Everybody uses it, everyone must pay for it.

This is basically civil virtue. It's a left-wing concept that is distinct from right-wing ideals of individualism and responsibility. It is a public facility that is maintained by the public. How that is done is a matter of policy, not ideology.

[Aqizzar]

This is basically civil virtue. It's a left-wing concept that is distinct from right-wing ideals of individualism and responsibility. It is a public facility that is maintained by the public. How that is done is a matter of policy, not ideology.

Hey, I have a problem with the ideology itself.  Namely in your case, the ideology that anyone under at least age fifteen compulsorily owes something to society.

Likewise, I don't believe children are to blame for their conditions.  A policy like the one Gingrich suggested, requiring poor children to maintain a facility for the privilege of using it, a privilege their wealthier counterparts would continue to enjoy for free, reflects an ideology that I want kept out of my policies entirely.  I don't know what ideology it is exactly, but if that's the kind of practical conclusion that he could reach by it, I know I don't like it.

[Montague]

This is basically civil virtue. It's a left-wing concept that is distinct from right-wing ideals of individualism and responsibility. It is a public facility that is maintained by the public. How that is done is a matter of policy, not ideology.

Hey, I have a problem with the ideology itself.  Namely in your case, the ideology that anyone under at least age fifteen compulsorily owes something to society.

Likewise, I don't believe children are to blame for their conditions.  A policy like the one Gingrich suggested, requiring poor children to maintain a facility for the privilege of using it, a privilege their wealthier counterparts would continue to enjoy for free, reflects an ideology that I want kept out of my policies entirely.  I don't know what ideology it is exactly, but if that's the kind of practical conclusion that he could reach by it, I know I don't like it.

Why would it just be poor kids again? Anybody using that public school would be required to help maintain it. Or it would at least request volunteers. Are poors kids more likely to volunteer for work then rich kids? Does individual merit have anything to do with it? If more poor kids volunteer to sweep floors does that make them victims somehow?

You don't believe people owe something to the society they benefit from being a part of?

[Aqizzar]

At that age?  No, I do not.  I do not believe children owe anything to anyone except respect.  Which to an extent, is already reflected in school policy, since I've never seen an elementary school where the students were not, all of them, semi-responsible for keeping the classrooms in order.  That is, orderly enough, before the actual janitors come in.  Extending that upwards, say requiring high schoolers to do some (small, and pre-arranged) amount of community service or something, is likewise practiced in some areas, and I don't deny the principles behind it.

The difference is, once again because you keep trying to change it, is that it is not divided along any kind of lines among the students in question.  Which is exactly what Gingrich's original proposal was, when he quite specifically said that children of poor people (and yes, he said poor people) don't grow up with any notion of work ethic, and should have it instilled in them by being required to maintain their public schools.  That is exactly what was on the table.  And you keep ignoring that, because you want to have some completely different argument.

[Nadaka]

You have it backwards Montague. Society owes children the education, not the other way around.

[darkflagrance]

It might be a good idea to make all children clean up their waste in toilets somehow. Can't tell you how many times I walked in and saw someone's business in the sinks, on the floor, or in a urinal. When children are confronted the costs of clean-up, it might greatly increase social pressure on these offenders.

[Montague]

At that age?  No, I do not.  I do not believe children owe anything to anyone except respect.  Which to an extent, is already reflected in school policy, since I've never seen an elementary school where the students were not, all of them, semi-responsible for keeping the classrooms in order.  That is, orderly enough, before the actual janitors come in.  Extending that upwards, say requiring high schoolers to do some (small, and pre-arranged) amount of community service or something, is likewise practiced in some areas, and I don't deny the principles behind it.

The difference is, once again because you keep trying to change it, is that it is not divided along any kind of lines among the students in question.  Which is exactly what Gingrich's original proposal was, when he quite specifically said that children of poor people (and yes, he said poor people) don't grow up with any notion of work ethic, and should have it instilled in them by being required to maintain their public schools.  That is exactly what was on the table.  And you keep ignoring that, because you want to have some completely different argument.

Like I said, I am not defending Newt Gringrich beyond the fuzziest of concepts he might have spouted. Sorry if I am not really arguing from Newt's point of view, because I am not Newt Gringrich. The disscussion inspired me to dicuss exploring the idea of civic merit and how kids taking over the role of janitors in the public schools and how society and themselves might benefit from and how that idea, in itself, may be worth merit. I have to assume, from what everybody is saying that Newt Gringrich explictly said "Poor kids should clean up the public schools but not anybody else" which is an idea I do not hold myself.

So besides that, you say, kids attending public school do have some measure of responsibility inheriant in attending the schools, say they cannot completely trash the classroom or clog the bathroom toliets day after day. How does that fundamentally differ from mandating their behavior to the effect that they have to clean the facilities they dirty or maintain the public property they benefit from?