Is it a good idea for parents to send their children to school at the kindergarten and preschool levels?

The advent of industrial education in the last century has brought about a severe change in family dynamics as compared to a few decades ago and even more when compared to a few centuries ago. As the years have gone on, attending school is expected of more and more people and the number of years in school has increased. Fifty or more years ago, it wasn't unreasonable for a child to stop going to school at age twelve or thirteen and then start helping out with the family business. Now, however, people must complete at least high school in order to have most jobs available to them and must complete an undergraduate degree to be competitive in the job market. In addition, because they don't have time to both continue their career and stay home with their children, parents will send their children to day care, preschool, and kindergarten before they even reach primary school age. As a result, children are increasingly being raised by teachers rather than parents and their learning is happening almost exclusively in the industrial education environment designed to create identical, productive members of society. This recent emphasis on having all learning happen in schools is not conducive to helping children grow up or be connected to their families for a variety of reasons.

First of all, when children spend their formative years with their community and their family, they have one-on-one interaction available to them all the time and can learn anything that they're interested in relatively quickly. In a classroom environment, one teacher is handling upwards of twenty kids and so each child is receiving substantially less attention. If a kid doesn't want to be learning about something, they can easily tune out as the teacher focuses on the kids who are already engaged. This kind of disconnection from learning breeds a kind of apathy in most students today. By the time many students reach high school they've gained a "why does this matter?" outlook on education, an outlook that I've seen in many of my peers including myself. If, however, kids are taught by their parents, they have the opportunity to learn whatever they want. Learning can happen constantly every day rather than in the strict context of classrooms and tests. This kind of environment and attention generally breeds an excitement for learning rather than disillusionment.

Another problem is that because students are learning alongside twenty kids of various skill levels, they learn much slower than they could in better circumstances. I remember learning about American history practically every year through grade school, but I remember precious little from all of those lessons. It's the same with math, by the end of elementary school I could do the kind of basic arithmetic that would've taken maybe a year to learn had I been given the attention and resources to really learn it. If I hadn't been sitting in distracting and inefficient classrooms and instead had been learning addition, multiplication, and other basic math from my parents or even my older brother I probably could have caught on very quickly at a much younger age and then had the room to move forward into more interesting topics. The basic concepts of Biology (e.g. living things are made up of cells) are not beyond the grasp of your average elementary school student, but those kinds of ideas aren't even addressed until middle school. If we lived in a society where kids weren't shipped off to the local education factory at age three and were instead allowed to roam free, enjoy their home life, get to know their parents, and learn from the world and from their parents I think there would be much more exuberance towards learning and kids would learn faster.

An obvious restriction to the concept of learning at home is the knowledge of the parents and the time that parents have available. Adults need to invest a certain number of hours each week in their work so that there can be food on their child's plate every day and this is harder for some parents than it is for others. Families with single parents or who have low income just don't have the time to commit to educating their children. Also, I don't expect every parent to explain to their kids how Chemistry works, but a kid should at least be able to read a book and multiply two digit numbers by the time they start school, at the very least. Both of these problems, though, point to greater societal problems that are generally ignored by the general population. Humans have evolved to live in a community larger than their direct family and so they thrive when interacting with close neighbors. However, families are left to survive on their own in this competitive, selfish world. This leads to the problem of income. Poverty-stricken families are left to survive on their own because our culture simply believes that if you can't pull your weight, regardless of the environment you live in, you don't deserve your meal. This obviously isn't universally true with institutions like soup kitchens and homeless shelters, but there are still politicians and celebrities sitting on their fat yachts eating sirloin steaks as the masses starve to death worldwide.

Overall, sending children to school at an increasingly young age is stunting their learning, destroying their motivation, and eliminating any kind of family dynamic that the world once had. This culture has lost the importance of family. Parents need to work more and more hours each week to earn the money to buy all of their trinkets and children are left to sit in classrooms for year after year learning less than they could be and losing their passion. That is if they're in the lucky group of people getting nice meals on their plate three times a day. Parents shouldn't be sending their children to preschool and kindergarten; they should be getting to know their children, helping them learn, and helping them discover what they love.

Is torture ever necessary? Is it ever considered justified?

Historically, torture has been used as a way to punish perceived wrongdoers or to extract information from an enemy. This act is generally considered cruel and unusual by the common person, but throughout centuries of multiple cultures and civilizations it has remained an acceptable tactic even in today's world of supposedly "civilized" society. In order to answer the question of "Is torture justified?" we have to define what "justified" means and to whom it is justified. As history tends to be written by the victor, and the torturer must on some level believe he or she is justified, we might say that torture is always justified if carried out by the writers of history and never justified if carried out by their opponents. This, however, doesn't really answer the question of, "Was torture necessary?" for the victor might have won without torture. The Oxford Dictionary defines justified as: 1. Having, done for, or marked by a good or legitimate reason; 2. Theology declared or made righteous in the sight of God.

The first definition requires a subjective view of what is "good" to appraise whether something is justified. Torturing one enemy combatant and extracting the information that they might have could stop an attack. In such a scenario, the lives of many civilians or allied troops could be saved, which would in the eyes of most allies be a good thing. However, what if the prisoner doesn't actually have any information? In either case you're causing great pain to the prisoner's family and potentially recruiting them for the enemy's cause. The U.S. government captures and tortures an increasing number of supposed enemy combatants around the world, but most notably in the Middle East. The primary goals for this activity are to find supposed "terrorists" and to prevent future attacks against Americans. While at face value this seems like a noble cause - protecting American lives - there's no way of knowing beforehand if the person being tortured knows anything. Torture is notorious for providing bad intelligence, because a person who is being physically and psychologically damaged over a long period of time will say anything to make it stop. On top of that, if a military force starts plucking innocent civilians of foreign countries off the street and torturing them for the information they don't have, that military is essentially recruiting soldiers against their cause. While torturing an enemy could provide positive intelligence to save lives in an attack, it could also just be riling the nest for future conflict.

The second definition presupposes a belief in a specific religion. Many wars have been justified on theological grounds. The crusades are a prime example of leaders gathering their citizens to fight in the name of God. If this is a legitimate definition of justified torture then we would have to assume that everyone follows the same belief system. The fact is, many cultures worship different Gods and thus have substantially different beliefs whereas some cultures don't even believe in a God and thus they would say this definition doesn't apply. If torture is ever to be "justified" in this way it can only be justified in the eyes of the believers. Most everyone else would consider them wrong.

Can torture be justified? History always describes things in the eyes of the beholder. If the writer says it's so, then that is how it will be remembered. In the context of deciding whether modern torture is acceptable, we have to take in the reasons for and results of torture. Protecting lives is certainly a noble cause, but if it is at the price of destroying someone else's freedom is it worth it? Is one person's freedom worth more than another's? In addition, if the result of torture isn't saving lives but is instead enraging the enemy to further harm our allies it is hardly a just cause. On top of that, torture frequently provides incorrect information and is not the ideal tactic for gathering information. In terms of religion, if we don't all believe in the same theological doctrine we can't use religious beliefs as a way of defining what is just and what is not. Overall, the uncertainty and sheer inhumanity of torture is not conducive to any just cause.

Are Professional Athletes Overpaid?

Our society applies immense prestige to people with a lot of wealth. People who inherit money, who create immense businesses, or who become celebrities are respected and idolized regardless of the positive or negative impact that they're lifestyle has on the world. Due to our culture's obsession with this prestige, we have a strong drive developed over centuries to work hard and earn a lot of money. Contrary to the idealism of the American Dream, though, not everyone can achieve that level of wealth and most don't even come close. Some people can work behind a cash register their whole life surviving off of minimum wage and even if they volunteer, make meals for the homeless, and share their roof with those that have none, society won't lift them up. Meanwhile, an athlete can play a game for a few decades and not benefit humanity much at all, but comes out the end as a celebrity and a millionaire. To me, being "overpaid" means making a disproportionate amount of money compared to the amount that you help your neighbor.

If you make millions of dollars annually throwing a ball down a football field and then spend the off season floating on your yacht, you're not really helping anyone and I don't see why you should have all that money in your pocket. We live in a world where some people can fly private jets to distant corners of the earth and consume great feasts while other people wake up on an average morning and know they might not eat that day. The dichotomy between the wealthy and the poverty-stricken is absurd and I think it's inhumane that our nation puts on expensive events like the Super Bowl while countless people are dropping dead in far off lands from preventable causes. A monetary system is inherently unsupportive of these people, because despite our faith in the goodness of humanity, there's not really a way out for the starving masses in this country or in others. The wealth of nations and corporations shouldn't be spent continuing a facade of harmony by making millionaires out of athletes while the most basic needs of life are overlooked in the squalor of the poor.