Dennis Hackethal
Member since June 2024
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#51 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoYou are referring to ideas by David Deutsch. He is a physicist; he deals with inorganic matter. His ideas on educating children are therefore irrelevant.
(Kant)
You are a chemist. Doesn't the same criticism apply to you?
#51 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoYou are referring to ideas by David Deutsch. He is a physicist; he deals with inorganic matter. His ideas on educating children are therefore irrelevant.
(Kant)
We should judge ideas by their content, not by their source.
#51 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoYou are referring to ideas by David Deutsch. He is a physicist; he deals with inorganic matter. His ideas on educating children are therefore irrelevant.
(Kant)
It doesn't matter that he is a physicist, because his thoughts on the subject are of a philosophical/ epistemological nature.
#35 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoThat is not what freedom means.
Freedom does not consist in the guarantee of certain thoughts or scope for action.
Roughly speaking, freedom is when you are left alone by others when you want to be left alone.
If you are sent to school against your will, you are not free. School is a forced program.
Forcing children to be free is a contradiction in terms.
You are referring to ideas by David Deutsch. He is a physicist; he deals with inorganic matter. His ideas on educating children are therefore irrelevant.
(Kant)
#47 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoIt was only in the 2000s that school became a compulsory program, as the teaching of skills was geared to the needs of the market rather than to enlightenment values and independent thinking.
(Kant)
Here you are suddenly using a different criterion for coercion.
Compulsion could lie either in the raising a child to become a consumer or in the lack of intellectual maturity, but presumably not in both. (It actually lies in forcing anything onto the child, be that becoming a consumer or something else.)
#47 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoIt was only in the 2000s that school became a compulsory program, as the teaching of skills was geared to the needs of the market rather than to enlightenment values and independent thinking.
(Kant)
School violates several enlightenment values, including freedom of association and the right to bodily autonomy.
Advocating compulsory schooling for the sake of enlightenment makes no sense.
#47 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoIt was only in the 2000s that school became a compulsory program, as the teaching of skills was geared to the needs of the market rather than to enlightenment values and independent thinking.
(Kant)
Whether school is compulsory does not depend on whether you as a teacher dislike the curriculum, but on whether the student is forced to go to school.
#35 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoThat is not what freedom means.
Freedom does not consist in the guarantee of certain thoughts or scope for action.
Roughly speaking, freedom is when you are left alone by others when you want to be left alone.
If you are sent to school against your will, you are not free. School is a forced program.
Forcing children to be free is a contradiction in terms.
It was only in the 2000s that school became a compulsory program, as the teaching of skills was geared to the needs of the market rather than to enlightenment values and independent thinking.
(Kant)
#44 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoFreedom of choice is not restricted at school. For example, students can choose between different languages. They can choose their exams and what to read, etc.
(Kant)
Exams are not an example of freedom of choice. On the contrary: they are an instrument of oppression.
#44 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoFreedom of choice is not restricted at school. For example, students can choose between different languages. They can choose their exams and what to read, etc.
(Kant)
That's not a real choice. For example, I had to choose between French and Latin, but I didn't have the choice to do neither and create a new alternative.
Compulsory schooling itself violates freedom of choice, as the student does not have the choice to stay at home and do something else with his time instead.
#37 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoIf freedom of choice is sufficiently restricted, freedom of thought is also restricted.
Anyone who is forced to spend hours every day dealing with topics they would otherwise not deal with has neither freedom of choice nor freedom of thought.
Freedom of choice is not restricted at school. For example, students can choose between different languages. They can choose their exams and what to read, etc.
(Kant)
#38 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoForcing someone to think is impossible. The student remains free in his thoughts.
(Kant)
Although you can't force someone to think, you can create the conditions for them to force themselves to think.
That's exactly what school does.
Link to referenced idea
So children already have freedom of thought? You originally said (#34) that children only have freedom of thought when their minds have reached a certain level of maturity; that this was the purpose of school in the first place. That doesn't fit together.
#38 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoForcing someone to think is impossible. The student remains free in his thoughts.
(Kant)
Expecting a child to keep his freedom of thought in the face of all that pressure is not realistic.
#38 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoForcing someone to think is impossible. The student remains free in his thoughts.
(Kant)
So children already have freedom of thought? You originally said that children only have freedom of thought when their minds have reached a certain level of maturity; that this was the purpose of school in the first place. That doesn't fit together.
#37 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoIf freedom of choice is sufficiently restricted, freedom of thought is also restricted.
Anyone who is forced to spend hours every day dealing with topics they would otherwise not deal with has neither freedom of choice nor freedom of thought.
Forcing someone to think is impossible. The student remains free in his thoughts.
(Kant)
#36 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoWe need to distinguish between freedom of choice and freedom of thought.
School serves to educate students to have freedom of thought. This is achieved by restricting freedom of choice.
(Kant)
If freedom of choice is sufficiently restricted, freedom of thought is also restricted.
Anyone who is forced to spend hours every day dealing with topics they would otherwise not deal with has neither freedom of choice nor freedom of thought.
#35 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoThat is not what freedom means.
Freedom does not consist in the guarantee of certain thoughts or scope for action.
Roughly speaking, freedom is when you are left alone by others when you want to be left alone.
If you are sent to school against your will, you are not free. School is a forced program.
Forcing children to be free is a contradiction in terms.
We need to distinguish between freedom of choice and freedom of thought.
School serves to educate students to have freedom of thought. This is achieved by restricting freedom of choice.
(Kant)
#34 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoFreedom is achieved when the mind reaches a certain level of intellectual maturity: when it thinks for itself.
This is the purpose of compulsory education: to liberate children.
(Kant)
That is not what freedom means.
Freedom does not consist in the guarantee of certain thoughts or scope for action.
Roughly speaking, freedom is when you are left alone by others when you want to be left alone.
If you are sent to school against your will, you are not free. School is a forced program.
Forcing children to be free is a contradiction in terms.
Archive of a discussion tree between Dennis Hackethal and Roswitha Kant from the old Veritula website. The creation dates of the ideas were not retained but newly set. The discussion originally took place in German between August and October 2023 and can be viewed in full here.
Freedom is achieved when the mind reaches a certain level of intellectual maturity: when it thinks for itself.
This is the purpose of compulsory education: to liberate children.
(Kant)
#25 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoDispute resolution, lawmaking, and personal defense are only proper in the hands of government.
In order for a military and police to be valid, it would need the consent of the governed […], but a hidden qualification is MOST of the governed, which is an exception to individual right of association.
And:
[Rand’s] conclusion, in essence, is that an individuals [sic] right to choose who defends them should be ignored for the sake of a collective good, which seems to me an exception to one of our shared principles.
#1 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoThe anarcho-capitalist stance: competing governments in a single territory would not only work but be superior to having a single government, a monopoly on violence.
Dispute resolution, lawmaking, and personal defense are only proper in the hands of government.
#23 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoGovernment creates consent. Without government, there is no consent.
It doesn’t. Not any more than it creates man’s rights. Whether an interaction is consensual is derived from the nature of the interaction itself.
#1 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoThe anarcho-capitalist stance: competing governments in a single territory would not only work but be superior to having a single government, a monopoly on violence.
Government creates consent. Without government, there is no consent.
#14 · Dennis HackethalOP, about 1 year agoOne illustration will be sufficient [to show that a society made of competing governments cannot work]: suppose Mr. Smith, a customer of [arbitration service] A, suspects that his next-door neighbor, Mr. Jones, a customer of [arbitration service] B, has robbed him; a squad of Police A proceeds to Mr. Jones’ house and is met at the door by a squad of Police B, who declare that they do not accept the validity of Mr. Smith’s complaint and do not recognize the authority of [arbitration service] A. What happens then? You take it from there.
As I have written before, Rand “implies that they could never resolve their conflict – or worse, that they would be in a perpetual state of war – because they don’t have a shared jurisdiction, an underlying legal framework.”
Taken to its logical conclusion, Rand’s argument necessitates a single world government, which doesn’t fit with the objectivist notion that government should be limited.