This is a pretty standard solution by people working from abstractions that aren't checked against the realities of people.
It’s also a stunningly bad idea that tends not to survive past very initial steps toward implementation (on a general societal level; it has often been implemented in a more limited way targeted at disfavored minorities where it is a component of genocide by destroying the people as a people) in real societies, even when there is a powerful governing group devoted religiously to an ideology which embraces it.
It is a common meme in some circles that sending (problematic) kids to boarding or military school will "set them straight". To me, it's basically just hope that a bit more violence will work.
Also, after 6 years spent in an environment where you are told what to do every minutes, where rules are clear and mostly non-negotiable, bed and meal times always the same... what happens when you are put back in the regular world ? I exaggerate things to make a point, it's not black and white but still.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55238090
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_children_by_Nazi...
Extensive supervision and scrutiny? I mean, are we not doing some of this with public schools now? And if not, why not?
And seriously, we (in the US) allow lots of options for troubled kids without supervision ("work the bad out of you), we've allowed conversion therapy for LGBT+ children, have little oversight on for-profit schools and we allow folks to force their religion on their children, even if the 16- or 17-year-old doesn't believe.
I highly doubt there would be oversight.
I'd also like to point out that the Canadian schools were really, really recent, and I don't think much has changed since.
They thought that the parents were (for whatever reason) incapable of raising their children appropriately and that the best way to properly raise the children was away from their homes, their cultures and their problems. They may even have thought their goals were noble and justified - as most folks tend to.
I cannot see a meaningful difference between taking kids away from their parents for racial reasons, for class reasons or really any other reason.
The issue isn't necessarily why they saw them as inferior, it's that they saw them as inferior.
> For example, teenagers routinely join the army, and spend time learning and training at what is essentially a boarding school.
This choice is made by the family and the individual. This is not the same thing. A meaningful harm vector is the removal of autonomy.
The people sending the Indians away to religious schools in the 1910s said the same damn thing about prior attempts to do the same damn thing.
I could always tell in college, which people had not lived on their own before. They were a mess.
That school in my country has not been trivial to get accepted. He aimed for good grades at high school and participated in sports teams.
https://news.softpedia.com/news/Microsoft-039-School-of-the-...
I’m surprised it didn’t catch on more. Maybe others on here were involved and can shed some light on why this initiative stalled?
Your article cites no actual results.
In reality, the problems it seems to have had is that the basic idea just doesn't work: the first years were plain rocky. [0] When it dealt with some of the early problems, it got good results, to the extent it did (and certainly some measures were quite good), largely by costing more, even though the fundamental concept was to prove a scalable, efficient model by requiring no additional funding (so it had to try to close the gap by aggressive outside fundraising to meet the additional costs.) [1] When the baseline funding for public schools dropped, the extra cost of SoF’s original model became even less sustainable. [2]
The school still exists, but I can't find anything after 2014 even treating it as a particularly interesting thing.
[0] https://www.eschoolnews.com/2009/06/01/school-of-the-future-...
[1] https://technical.ly/philly/2012/11/12/high-school-of-the-fu...
[2] https://www.phillytrib.com/news/past-problems-saddle-school-...
Of course, this could be construed as "discrimination" against the better off, since they have to go through what seems like a tough time "just because of the poor people".
In my country the middle class guards their children from the deplorables. Education is no longer equal for all.
I really recommend watching the film "The Killing Fields", in order to see this in action.
Both the USSR and China ended up abandoning these efforts and now acknowledge them as terrible failures. The Khmer Rouge had to be forced out via military invasion.
Always the justification is the fact that smarter parents tend to have smarter kids, patient parents tend to have patient kids, etc. E.g. most things in life are at least half heritable, and so you will see both competency and dysfunction cluster in families. This offended the levelers greatly and so they decided that families need to be broken up and the kids randomized in order to achieve a Great Leveling.
The result has always been catastrophic, not to mention a gross human rights violation.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2021/sep/06...
If anything the mentality has more similarities to race relations today - “the White Man’s burden” of helping these cultures “bring themselves up”. Back then they took kids from parents and gave them a European education, and told them their current culture should be forgotten.
Today we just get rid of failing grades, calculus in high school, and standardized testing and implement racial quotas. In the end it’s the same - assuming we know best for other groups even if in the end it harms them.