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Thats like saying that breathing is mandatory. If you toss a child into a body of water, the child continuing to breathe is definitely optional. ——— If someon

Thats like saying that breathing is mandatory. If you toss a child into a body of water, the child continuing to breathe is definitely optional. ——— If someone starts beating you with a rubber hose until you recite Jabberwocky, that doesn’t actually cause you to recite jabberwocky unless you have some means of finding the words to that poem that you can see. The last part, access to how to do the action, is crucial to doing the action. ——— For another example: suppose a 5-year-old child is crying and his grandfather pinches him and tells him to stop crying. But the 5-year-old has not yet learned the emotional self-regulation skills to stop himself from crying. So while the grandfather is forcing compliance, he won’t actually achieve compliance. He’ll just inflict pain. Likewise, if you have an engineering student drowning under a firehose of work and trying to learn time management. The poorly-managed pile of work is forcing him to learn good time management and punishing him for not learning it. But unless he has access to a known source of guidence on time-management, he’ll continue to suffer. Not only that, but sleep deprivation, as makes this harder.

atq2119 7y ago
Sure. Forcing people to do something rarely leads to good results, that's not in dispute here. In fact, that's the whole point of the criticism against schools here. But the reason why forcing doesn't lead to good result is largely because it involves an imposition of suffering, which you yourself reiterate. Maybe a better way to put it is to say is that schools tend to be bad at encouraging kids to learn, so they try (unsuccessfully) to make up for it by forcing instead.
- afarrell 7y ago
  No, thats not my point. I updated my response, but the key is you need both - motivation (or discipline) - means And forcing only tries to apply motivation without thinking about means. “How?” Is a question that needs an answer from somewhere.
  - atq2119 7y ago
    We agree on that. My point is that "forcing" is "attempting to instill motivation by some form of threat". If there's no implied threat, then it's not really forcing.

atq2119 7y ago

Sure. Forcing people to do something rarely leads to good results, that's not in dispute here. In fact, that's the whole point of the criticism against schools here. But the reason why forcing doesn't lead to good result is largely because it involves an imposition of suffering, which you yourself reiterate. Maybe a better way to put it is to say is that schools tend to be bad at encouraging kids to learn, so they try (unsuccessfully) to make up for it by forcing instead.

afarrell 7y ago
No, thats not my point. I updated my response, but the key is you need both - motivation (or discipline) - means And forcing only tries to apply motivation without thinking about means. “How?” Is a question that needs an answer from somewhere.
- atq2119 7y ago
  We agree on that. My point is that "forcing" is "attempting to instill motivation by some form of threat". If there's no implied threat, then it's not really forcing.