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Further
Reading ...
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Are You Responsible For The Appliances in Your New Apartment?
So you're moving into a new apartment? The list of things you should check on before signing that lease seems never-ending. You have to worry about location, environment, convenience, cost, aesthetic appeal, etc. But wait... there's more! One more...
My Kids are Driving Me Crazy!
When you conduct parent workshops, you start to see the same issues coming up over and over for parents. The names and faces are different, but the issues are the same. And the truth is that parents are often responsible for many of these problems. ...
A Visit from "The Ghost of Drugstore Trips Past"
As a work at home mom who spends most of her day online I find at least 30 minutes a day is devoted to online browsing. My obsession–beauty products. Everything from wrinkle cream to hair volumizers I have probably researched every one...
Change Your Child's Behavior With Positive Reinforcement
Think about your interactions with your children today. How many things did you notice they did wrong? What did you do or say to them because of their wrong doings? Have they engaged in the same kind of behavior before? What did you do or say the...
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Most Parents Are Not Idiots Or Negligent — So Why Do We Need Compulsory-Attendance Laws?
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Written By:
Joel Turtel
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Why do we need compulsory-attendance laws? Why compel parents to send their children to public schools? Wouldn’t parents naturally educate their children without compulsion? Human nature and history prove this to be the case. All over the world, parents push to educate their children, with or without public schools.
In Japan, school is compulsory only up to the equivalent of junior high school (ninth-grade level). High schools in Japan, like colleges in America, are privately owned and charge tuition. Middle-school students compete fiercely for a place in high schools even though their parents must pay to get them in. Yet most Japanese parents push their kids to apply for high school and scrape up the money for tuition, without the Japanese government’s pressuring them to do so.
In America, millions of parents voluntarily pay thousands of dollars a year in tuition to send their young children to private kindergartens, and their older children to a private college. Obviously, most parents think that educating their children is very important. So why do we need compulsory attendance laws for first through twelfth-grade education?
Compulsory-attendance laws imply that government has to force parents to educate their children. Common sense and history prove this notion false. Up to the 1850s, before we had public schools in America, the literacy rate was over 90 percent. Yet most parents taught their children to read at home. They did not need town - continued below ...
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continued ...
officials to force them to educate their children. All over the world, most parents’ want to give their children a good education so they can have a secure future.
Compulsory-attendance laws also imply that some parents are too ignorant or indifferent to their children’s welfare to educate their kids. If this was not the case, then why compel parents at all? Local governments therefore believe they have to force these “bad” parents to deposit their kids in public schools, for the alleged good of the children.
In effect, local governments and public-school authorities don’t trust average parents to have the decency and common sense to educate their kids, unless public-school authorities force them to. That notion is as absurd as claiming that parents would not feed their children unless government authorities forced them to.
There is a saying that if you want to know the real purpose of a law or social system, follow the money. Who benefits the most from our public schools? Certainly not our kids. I submit that the real purpose of compulsory-attendance laws is to enforce a public-school system that benefits public-school employees.
Article Copyrighted © 2005 by Joel Turtel.
About the Author
Joel Turtel is the author of “Public Schools, Public Menace: How Public Schools Lie To Parents and Betray Our Children." Website: http://www.mykidsdeservebetter.com, Email: lbooksusa@aol.com, Phone: 718-447-7348.
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More water, not less, will help end bedwetting
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1. Vist the public library...
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