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Dan Shaw's avatar

As you have pointed out before, Mill’s argument in On Liberty, that the state can intervene to prevent harm to a third party, is the trapdoor to the hell we find ourselves in. It is such a brilliant argument for its plasticity; in the case you cite, ‘harm’ to Our NHS allows the state to further marginalise parents in favour of itself.

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Asa Boxer's avatar

Another brilliant analysis, David. Particularly fond of the poetics here. I think it's worth pointing out how key the role of education is here. And this presents us with a problem: national ministries of education, which any true teacher knows is the nub of all our social and cultural trouble as well as an impediment to actual education. It's probably worth a consideration of the history of education to attempt parsing where education has gone right and where wrong and how and why. Establishing national, basic educational goals seems obvious, but what are they? or rather what ought they to be? If universal education began in Europe with Charlemagne, we're talking about a form of nation-forming and essentially brainwashing. When education was the purview of the elites, it was something else entirely: providing the tools for leadership and cultural points of reference in class systems. At present education is an industrial processing plant meant to churn out processed raw materials to fill the workforce and civil service with right-thinking cogs. Any psychological trouble emanating from this can be corrected with pharmaceuticals or a prescription for assisted suicide, since there are too many cogs anyhow. In short, what should education look like to avoid these pitfalls? This also gets to the crux of what I keep harping on: we're living wrong. How ought we to live? And perhaps take it from there. . . keeping in mind the pitfalls of Plato's damned republic.

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