Originally posted by Tarale

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Blah. We need to invent a way of hitting people over the head with things via the internet. Seeing as nobody actually reads anything...

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Originally posted by Silvershield

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Originally posted by Dracoon

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So, you think that the parents should have the ultimate choice in what the kid learns then?

That's kind of short sighted. You might be helping the parent, but you could be destroying the child.If a parent is racist and doesn't allow for their kid to be taught anything that expresses that racism is bad, you just allowed a racist child to grow up without anything to tell them that's wrong.

It's the same thing here.

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And who's to decide whether a particular parent's values are good enough to be passed on to his children? Should he only be allowed to teach his child morality that you find tasteful, or that adheres to your sense of right and wrong?

We both lose out here, Dracoon. I'd love it if every parent brought his child up with a strong basis in Christian-inspired values - not necessarily in the Christian religion, mind you, but with a sense of what is ultimately Good according to a Judeo-Christian sensibility. You'd prefer that every child is brought up according to your hippy liberal agenda. (I'm being sarcastic, so don't jump down my throat.) Just as it is both impossible and simply wrong for me to make the call concerning what a proper education would entail, so is it wrong for anyone left of center to make that same decision. The best we can do is leave the school as a place of purely objective learning, and hope that a child grows up with enough sense to see past any racist or otherwise irrational beliefs that might have been instilling in him by his parents.

You honestly can't contend that certain values - the nature of human life, for example, as it relates to abortion, or the idea of abstinence from pre-marital sex - are necessarily wrong, but that they are simply different from your own opinion. And I don't suppose it's really fair that your stance on abortion, or your stance on pre-marital sex, should be taught to my children.

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