Every single time someone's uttered those words they were eventually proven wrong
Not that I think we should be banning speech, mind you. Just figured a reminder on that tiny bit was warranted. Assuming people aren't morons is the doom of many endeavours
I know silver bullets don't exist, but educating just doesn't seem to get the societal positive attention it so thoroughly needs and deserves.
Where the silver bullet fails is the "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it realise its thirsty" analogy.
School and education have been conflated in a detrimental way, and the reputation of schooling needs urgent repair. During Covid it seemed as if teaching was on the brink of earning more respect, but it was very quickly forgotten and probably only got the attention for reasons of childcare as opposed to education.
All implications of the above are a sad indictment of where society has found itself.
Additionally, if we follow the path of assuming everyone is a moron, we very quickly reach The Nanny State. This is the current pendulum swing.
The caveat, somewhat, is that good teachers (true scotsmen) can be closer to a parental and positive influence on a child than a stupid or abusive parent almost exclusively because the (good) teacher is not stupid and abusive.
There's a glaring "no true scotsman" fallacy in my logic above, but my point is that stupid and abusive creates its own opportunity for improvement. My vicarious and anecdotal experience seems to bear this out (but having said that, my vicarious and anecdotal experience comes through teachers who are dedicated, experienced, and committed to the outcomes of the children, which is rarer than it should be).
There's no escaping the trauma of bad parents, but the ability to present the opportunity for a brighter future can help immeasurably. Hope. It can be better than it is.
And it's a pretty terrible bureaucracy no matter what your perspective may be. It's rife with failure in the noteworthy aspects where it is overly-rigid, and equally so in the areas where no rules or regulations exist. Large parts of it are given to Goodhart's Law, so the results aren't actually as one would hope for them to be, erstwhile it alienates many children in various ways, pressing them into a perpetual ennui, anxieties fit only for consenting adults, social isolation, undesired social exposure, and at the end of it all it's quite probable due to many factors, they will walk away just as vacuous as they would have been if they were pressed through some much more comfortable alternative.
The glum reality of it all is, is that it is little more than the facade, and mostly it serves the purpose of childcare these days.
But more importantly your insipid comment that, God forbid, someone actually give the child some basis for moral structure is itself precisely what I mean to communicate when I speak of the deference - throughout my attainment I was never once given any meaningful education on ethics, or civics, on value or right and wrong. It was rule and law, but never the Rule of Law. And that does not make an upright person. And science does little to inform morality, and droll literature did little to inform us of the myriad moral conundrums inexorably a part of real life. Just because you disagree with it does not make it wrong, that is arrogance.
I would say that I was fortunate to have an upstanding parental figure who fought against all odds to raise me singlehandedly and did so with the most couth methods imaginable - hard and ceaseless labor - but unfortunately I'm in an arena where civility we're so won't to brag about exists only as shibboleth, and I and my like have to dance with backbiting vipers who are more than willing to use uncouth methods to gate or otherwise swallow whole anyone who has some sense of dignity, fairness, accountability, or empathy. And they do so from the bastions of these monolithic bureaucracies hidden behind gilded titles and moats of texts and rules and laws - fictions. But by God maybe if we had teachers willing to step out of the relativistic framework, institutions that respected thousand-year old proven frameworks, even just a human ecology class - by God maybe there wouldn't be so many snakes in the system. And it's not some isolated incident, I can point to highly visible instances like the GFC or the recent congressional insider trading debacle or the countless instances of corporate misbehavior... Because nobody "indoctrinated" the shitheels at the helm of these catastrophic fuckups.
If anything, peers have been shown to be more influential on beliefs than parents.
Because of such crystallization, in America, critical thinking has become fairly close to heresy, and any tid bit of questioning of your own group's inflexible logic must be couched in "please don't hate me, I'm on your side" first. Those of us that enjoy being contrarian to our friends are getting less and less boost in social media, and most political messaging now contains a bite of "the other side, your fellow Americans, are corrupt/evil/incompetent." I just don't know how we can shake this situation but I think free speech isn't the problem at all, it's the incentives around our speech.
cough Vocational education and training centers cough [0]
My definition is along the lines of independent thought, critical thinking, alternative perspectives, the scientific method, (stretching here: mathematics as a language of observed behaviour). Teaching them to fish rather than giving them a fish. Anything other than blind acceptance, or at least providing a sense of judgement to know when blind acceptance may be justified.
And none of this is easy because 1) once a child is of school age they've already got a firm base of blind acceptances that, basically, work against their own education, and 2) independent thought and critical thinking means a lot of asking "why?" and lots of asking of "why?" takes up precious[1] curriculum teaching time.
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps
[1]:Precious to school and education board/department management KPIs that have no provable basis in positive real-world outcomes for either society or the individual
Something like 25% of the population has an IQ <90. Education cannot take such people very far. I support almost absolute free speech nonetheless.
What if everyone actually was a moron? In that hypothetical, would we just pretend it's not the case to not get the nanny state?
By definition, half of people are worse (however you define worse) than average. The world is truly held up by the inertia of the achievements of our betters spanning generations. I praise myself lucky every day to live in a stable western country with a heritage of centuries of liberality and thousands of models of civic courage and leadership.
If the edifice we're standing on is stable, and let's hope so, it's despite the frothing masses of idiots and vengeful iconoclasts. Yes, always a good chance I myself am one of these idiots, but nonetheless, it doesn't make the overall assessment any less true.
The inability or unwillingness to point out right from wrong is either due to a lack of courage or an absence of hubris. Both sides of the same coin. That judgement, who to entrust with the levers of society, needs to happen.
It's worse than that when you're trying to make decisions on behalf of everyone. It's perfectly possible for the decision that's right for you to be wrong for well more than half of the population for diverse individual reasons that they each understand and you don't.
Which is why in cases like that you defer to the individual to make their own decision, and if you think your choice is better, convince them rather than force them.
Individual choices always have some blast radius. Some small (what movie I'll watch), some large (what chemical to kill my weeds with), some of unknown magnitude (whether to lock up my gun in a safe or not).
That's where the trap comes in. Somebody needs to meddle at some point. Who's going to define what that point is? Who's going to define the course of action that's both virtuous for the community and for the individual. I certainly hope it's not going to be the crazies.
No, it's true in the real world. That's the issue. Nobody is smarter than everybody. The consequence is that you should never prohibit someone from making a choice "for their own good" because the chances are better that they understand and act in their own best interest than you do.
Where you need some kind of government action is for externalities. Dumping industrial waste in the river might be rational from the perspective of the factory, because they don't live down river, so you need a law to protect the people who do from the factory acting in their own self-interest. You can't convince them to stop doing it with argument because safely handling the waste is more expensive for them in actual fact. You have to change the math by prohibiting the bad act.
That's still subject to the same problem. You can enact highly inefficient and ineffective environmental regulations by being lazy or uninformed or corrupt. But for that we don't have any alternative than to do the best we can.
For getting people to make better choices or hold better ideas, we do. We try to convince them. If we fail, it's more likely to be because we're wrong than they are. Forcing them should not even be attempted.
Say that to all the OSHA regulations that were written in blood with a straight face
I would also bet that those who are the most interested in imposing their preferences on others probably are way less likely to listen to or attempt to understand different perspectives, leading to not even understand the views and practices they seek to ban.
It's not what I said at all.
It's inevitable that the levers of power are held by some. We've been lucky in the west, all things considered. So going forward, who's it going to be? The crazies? Hope not!
I'm not sure if it's really inevitable, but if it is, I think tolerance should be their most important virtue. I think that's also what sets western rulers apart as generally higher quality. They are usually more tolerant of dissent and individual differences, compared to their counterparts in other parts of the world.
Certainly. Hard to put in practice too.
If you can lose your job and thus your ability to provide food and shelter for yourself and your family for daring to speak up against the prevailing group think, is that much different from being sent to jail for saying the same?
Political correctnes people and "minority" interest groups have turned into the biggest bullies, it's so darned scary - I for one fear this slippery slope to a very totalitarian society.
Use your imagination.
It really is about whether people can tolerate hearing things - or even knowing they speak about them - that they don't agree with, without turning into (in the worst cases) a savage frenzy of bullies. The ability to discern nuance seems to be getting lost.
But if you publicly said "my name is Joe and XYZ racist thing", people have the right to cancel you.
Historically this public/private distinction has been violated lots of times in the U.S., e.g., WWI, McCarthy. I don't think it's totalitarian; it's usually relatively limited. Most of the time, for most topics, the government leaves you alone and you can say what you damn well please.
At the end of the day, autonomy to be dumb morons, and the autonomy to not be, is what people deserve.
[citation needed]