To perceive the value that society and people in general place on certain classes, we just need to look at their quantitative analysis.
From one looking in, who may not share the same quantitative values, it can feel icky to delve into these depths. It can feel gross. It can feel slimy and wrong. However, these feelings don’t need to have such power over our perceptive abilities that it prevents us from examining that perspective. Certainly, I don’t. It would be a sad acquiescence to these bold and callous decisions if empathetic people refused to direct their attention to unsavory institutions.
The facts are, that children are not people in the eyes of society.
We cry and wail and even become enraged with a blind fury at the very mention that our children are less than people. “I’d do anything for my child! I’d die for my child!” as they wail in anger and defensive wrath.
Well. We’ll see.
If children are people in society, and therefore have exactly the same value as any other class of people, then their resources would be treated as equal. Their resources would be respected at least as much as the adult’s, if not more, since the child holds a potential that the adult has already expended.
But, as we already know, society is not about universal morals; it merely lies and creates dazzling illusions surrounding how children are treated by it’s own principles. For of course, the potential of children is infinitely valuable; it’s just that society has a deeply vested interest in claiming it and owning it for itself.
Examining the simplistic and easily quantifiable measurement of time as value; using very conservative numbers, well within the realm of reality and inarguable on any ground of exaggeration. The main lesson for 20 first graders in public or private school with one teacher takes 3 hours. If children are indeed people, that makes 21 people, for a total of 3780 minutes.
That exact same lesson for a first grader in home education takes 20 minutes. Now, to make this more comprehensible, we will add in that for each of the 20 home educated first graders, one parent is required for every student. The total for home education is 800 minutes.
Taking all this into account, we can easily and uncontrovertibly calculate that public and private schools are overwhelmingly a net loss of human resources.
Except that society doesn’t consider children among people. In society, children are merely products that must be managed in the most efficient manner possible. That means that, not only do children’s’ resources have no value, but it has negative value. When home educated, society contends, too much of the parent educator’s time is spent with the child instead of in the workforce, where every dollar is taxed and taxed and taxed again. And so, not only are children not people in society; they are in fact a product to be managed in order to free up the parents to spend more time in the workforce. Children’s time is a liability that should be eaten up through ineffective, boring, inefficient, compulsory schooling paid for by society because the net gain of the parent’s time is more valuable.
The longer that children are handed over to public or private schooling, the less efficient that schooling becomes. To illustrate, lets compare a home educated first grader to one who, in addition to public or private school, attends after care as well. The additional hours this child spends his valuable time in a public (or private) institution with exactly zero gain in personal value for it. The child’s learning potential was already capped that day; his ability to cope with being in a sterile and uncomforting institution for many more hours a day has a negative affect on his ability to retain his lessons. He is further set back- or having his resources stolen or mismanaged- in preparation for the next day when the time he should have spent recovering in the comfort of his family and being supported and held empathically in a safe loving home was reduced or withheld entirely. He is merely being babysat for the benefit of his income-generating parent; or rather, the society which receives the benefit of the parent’s increased income generated.
The home educated child experiences no such mismanagement or theft of his resources. And, neither does the parent! Because only adults have free volition to choose how they manage their children’s precious resources; choosing to manage their child’s resources wisely and in alignment with the well-being of the child is in no way a loss or sacrifice of the parent’s resources. Rather, it is an intentional and chosen use of those resources.
To be sure, when a parent is choosing to enter the workforce and earn an income- that parent is also making an intentional chosen use of their resources. However, if that parents is also choosing to mismanage their child’s resources- that child is being held in lower regard and has essentially been de-personed; he is not regarded as having equal and in all ways interchangeable value as the parent. It’s not a benefit to the child. It’s not even typically a benefit to the parent. It is only a benefit to society.
Because society has such little regard for children, even as conscious beings if not people, there is no consideration in society of what might be good or ill for those children. Spending many hours a day away from their family, away from comfort and often sleep-deprived, under-nourished, over stimulated, children are expected to sit and learn regardless of any facts of their predispositions or needs for security, warmth, nourishment, rest, sufficient energy, or ability to absorb the lessons. Children are simply treated as products which need to be handled in a sterile bureaucratic and repeatable manner. Even recess and time outdoors to run and play seem to be stingily withheld or dealt out as reward or punishment for how accurately the child reflects his sterile conformist environment to society. Because this sterile treatment with conformist punishments freely and unashamedly dealt to children for 12 years of their lives for many hours a day, children become conformist. The potential so vibrantly and exuberantly shining in the young child is dimmed through systematic withholding of meeting his legitimate needs, restrained through the surreptitious punishments dealt for failure to conform and reflect to society what it expects, and finally extinguished when the child absorbs into himself the frantic need to strive to please that cold and unyielding institution.
“Train up a child in the way he should go, Even when he is old he turns not away from it.” Proverbs 22: 6 The Scriptures
We as the people of society are so blind as to hand our precious children to institutions to be trained in the ways that they will live out for their entire lives, and bemoan that our children have been indoctrinated. We intend to give up the privilege and duty of training our children, but to retain the value of having done so ourselves. We expect that by overlooking the mismanagement of our children’s precious resources, that they will not overlook ours.
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