I would like to comment on the possible arguments that would arise if teachers are allowed to be in charge of their own curriculum.
Teachers are also political. Putting aside the questions of whether a teacher has the moral integrity to separate their own partiality from their content (or whether, in fact, they would deem in necessary to do so), it's a thoroughly rolled trope that teachers as a whole tend toward the left of the political spectrum. Can you imagine the uproar if each teacher was responsible for curating their own curriculum? Whether they were "communist" or not, such a move would certainly stir up controversy.
I guess one could argue that if parents were not satisfied with the content, they could enroll their students in another school, and the partisan teachers could potentially be "out-competed", but that just kicks the football to the economic realm in a sense.
Perhaps this supports your earlier question about the role of the state in schooling in general? However, if the state was not responsible for providing schooling for all children we would risk massive inequality as a society.
Unfortunately, the questions you raise do not exist in a vacuum. To create a brand new educational paradigm from scratch would probably be easier than the transition from the current one to whatever seems more appropriate.
Thanks so much for your question. I can imagine the uproar :) at least pretty well.
If we gave teachers freedom, then we'd have to give parents freedom as well. In which case, I think you're right, the teachers that no one agrees with would be "out-competed." But that doesn't necessarily push the activity into the economic realm. There's competition in culture - not every aspiring musician is good enough to teach or perform, just as not every aspiring physicist can work in a lab. There are limited positions for all these things.
I think it becomes more specifically economic, at least in today's terms, when it takes on a for-profit model (as it does with some charter schools, though from I understand even the nonprofit ones have found ways to scam the system). But on principle, schools would stay strictly cultural if their actual mission was just educating children, and the economic questions were secondary concerns (every teacher does have to eat after all). But the same issue comes up with journalists, scientists, artists, and doctors - are they trying to break real news the public needs, pursue pure science, make the art they're to make, and heal people? Or are they just trying to make money from these things, and they'll change whatever they're doing on a dime if they can find a new way of doing it more profitably.
I appreciate the vacuum comment too, but unfortunately we'll never be able to start from scratch (and if somehow we did, it's not like like we have a reserve of good ideas that we'd be ready to implement... we'd probably just create the same institutions). So we do need to see everything all together, not in silos, which is quite a task. On this specific issue, if the government simply assured every child a high-quality education, but didn't provide it (like they assure a minimum wage but don't actually pay everyone), it would have to really assure and enforce it in order to make sure it didn't lead to massive inequality. I imagine we'd need all sorts of additional supports to help parents find the right schools and teachers. It wouldn't just happen overnight.
For anyone further interested, I thought this new Banished podcast on CRT raised some good points (I also just think that Amna Khalid chooses some really interesting subjects to discuss). Unfortunately, she doesn't see the need for the teacher's freedom, but nonetheless, her framing of the whole discussion can't help but bring such questions up (at least to me :)
Hey Mart - thanks for writing. The crucial difference isn't whether a teacher's views align with a political ideology or not, but whether they're teaching them out of themselves - out of their own inspiration. They're just radically different scenarios. As a teacher working out of myself I would ask "what do my students need to know about American history (or any topic) - what would wake them up and inspire them and what do I find inspiring about this topic that I want to convey?" In the second scenario I don't have to ask any of those questions, and they're actually kind of a waste of time, instead I just have to say "here's the textbook that I have to teach out of in order to prepare them for the test. We've just the first chapter, now let's turn to the second."
Here's a way of thinking about it: forget a history teacher describing American history to their students and think instead about a historian writing about it. It's not that different - one is speaking and the other is writing. A teacher at a public school (really a government school) has to be approved by the government and then has to convey certain topics and (in the case of CRT at least) not others in the classroom. If this was the case with historians writing on American history, then it would be like they first had to be approved by the government to write, and then they were given an outline of what they could and couldn't write about.
Do you think that's a fair comparison?
You said in your other comment (on the Gandhi article) that most teachers don't seem that qualified to you... perhaps that's the case. So how will they become qualified? Should the government tell them how to teach. What if our historians weren't very qualified? Should the government tell them what to write?
Hope that all makes sense. Would be interested in your thoughts on it. All the best - Seth
Hey Mart - I'm really sorry to hear about your paralysis and definitely no worries about your spelling, it's great that you're reaching out.
It's an interesting question whether teachers at a Christian home school are actually teachers or politicians. And what about the teachers teaching a more "African centered" education as you described having? And what about Hasidic Jews or Amish or Native American or any other cultural group that wants to teach its own values and traditions? I definitely wouldn't call them "politicians" (I'd use a much more strict definition of that word, otherwise it can mean anything), but are they being "political"? Well, everything seems political when our main (only?) lens is the political lens... I imagine if you had a school board of all Republicans or a school board of all Democrats and they could express their opinions about what should be taught in each subject, then they'd have pretty different opinions. Does that make math or Spanish or history or shop class political?
I'd say the problem is that these things have become political because politicians weigh in on them. They wouldn't weigh in on them if society was clear that it's an infringement on individual freedom to do so. We know it's an infringement if they tell a journalist what to write, but what's the difference between that and telling a teacher what to teach? Why do we need consensus in the one area and not the other? If we want a unified country and we think we can actually get there by making everyone think the same thing, then one could argue that it would be better to give adults the same news and who cares what you teach the kids, they'll just forget it anyways :)
And does anyone really think government being in charge of education improves anything? I recently posed a question on twitter that I think gets to the heart of this:
The ideal in a university is clear: we want inspiring teachers doing original research teaching bright young minds. Why isn't that also the ideal in high school? Because we can't find great teachers? Do we really think they'll become great by forcing them to teach to the test?
I think if people agree with the first part of that - the ideal university education - then they should ask themselves: is that what I'd like to see in high school (and middle and lower school) as well? And if so, how can I imagine that taking place? How do we get inspiring teachers? The main answer to that question that I see is "give them more money," which isn't the most inspired answer...
Certainly the government can do what it wants with the things it funds (though of course, it's we who fund the government and so we can recall politicians who fund things we don't want and don't fund things we do - I would imagine there'd be a bit of an uproar if the government started banning books from public libraries or became even more involved in what scientific research sees the light of day).
The question isn't whether it has that capacity but whether it should have that capacity, whether that's how we want to organize society. We have given it those powers over time, and of course, if we have different ideas and can convince people of them, we could give it different powers. But first we have to have different ideas and they need to be inspired and understandable. So: what ideas make the most sense?
If government decides every child has the right to an education, should it also determine the form of the education? If it decides every person has the right to health care, should it also decide the form of the medicine? Or if it decides everyone should have access to the news, should it run the news stations, decide what's information and what's disinformation?
The difference in those three examples is that the government doesn't fund the last one (at least not in the US, besides Voice of America and a little money for NPR). But the funding for journalism is pretty shaky these days... local news stations are almost extinct. Should we have a right to a diverse news landscape? What happens if it becomes entirely corporate-run? Would it be better to have it be entirely government-run? Should the government step in? These aren't arbitrary questions, we already lean towards one or the other of them now (obviously corporations already play a huge role in funding the news and obviously the government has a significant influence on what journalists report). So what would be healthiest?
The media scholar Robert McChesney once proposed that every citizen should get a $200 voucher to donate to the news organization of their choosing. That would obviously create a much more diverse, grass-roots media environment, which would also align more with the ideal of a free press. Is that something we should strive towards, or are there even better ideas out there? Or does it not matter - we can just let it go any old way. Ce'st la vie.
I'd say there are major differences between these approaches and they will lead us to very different places (world war, civil war, revolution?). I would also say that the issue of how we fund the media isn't isolated - it has certain principles behind it that are the same when it comes to education and healthcare. They all have to do with the human being being free to pursue their own path in life, or not.
And the other examples you mentioned are really interesting, I'll have to give them more thought. If the local government decides that everyone should have access to parks, should they also decide where they are and how they're designed, or is there someone else whose better suited for that job? My point is that government bureaucrats don't usually know anything about education, medicine, or park design, that's not part of their job description - teachers, doctors, and park designers do. So why shouldn't they be the ones to decide. Wouldn't that be healthier?
As I think you can see, this is not a libertarian perspective. It's a little more complicated then "shrink the government and privatize everything." In this view, as a community we can decide what we want - what are our rights - but that doesn't mean the government has to provide them. We could still provide them and we could choose what kind of education we want for our children or medicine for our bodies. And if we did so then we'll have real diversity in education, science, medicine, research. Imagine the new approaches people could take to these things if people only followed their inspiration and not government pressure or dictates.
----
And I would definitely recommend looking into what's out there for alternative approaches to medicine and health. There are a number of practitioners who are working with a holistic "Goethean" approach to health, and if you reach out to them you might find ways of working that don't only treat the body as a broken machine, but connect with a fuller picture of human experience. Wishing you all the best on that path.
I definitely agree that most people aren't too interested, but of course they also have no opportunity to be interested. What is there to be interested in? The horse race? Sure, it can get you hooked on the rage machine, but it's not actually that interesting. Who really has any hope that their side is going to win? Where do people think it will end, all this demonizing of the other? Is the other side really wrong on every single issue? Every issue? Every one? And are they really as heartless and hypocritical as we think they are? And is our side really not? It's all really genuine on our side? But this wild little fiction is the only game in town. Who would possibly think - like the US founding fathers for instance - that there's a way of understanding society and structuring it intelligently to bring it forward, to usher in a new age? For us, everything's been done...
But do you really think it's just making an arbitrary decision on abortion and there are no principles to grasp? How about the other issues, are they also as murky? What about a free press? We can see vibrant periods when people really brought forward their own ideas in freedom, wrote pamphlets and books and papers and the like and the whole culture was shifted.... and we can see periods when the government abolished the free press and made everything dependent on the government. Is it arbitrary which we choose? Of course, we'll get some disinformation mixed in with all the free speech, but does that mean we should have "supervised speech" instead, active government censorship? Has there ever been a healthy, vibrant culture with supervised speech?
While it's a little hard to parse, and it gets pretty messy when you get down into the minutiae, there are actually dynamics at work, there is actually a lawfulness to human flourishing. We have to figure out how that lawfulness can best be expressed for our time, our place. It's not arbitrary whether people are enslaved or not. It's not arbitrary whether people participate in decision-making processes. It's not arbitrary whether a huge corporation produces something or a small business or a worker-owned cooperative. They all have different ways of being, they all create different dynamics that either feed our souls or stifle and poison our souls.
And yes, everything has a political, economic, and cultural component - from your relationship to one other person to the whole of society. So what are those components? How do we understand them? How do we balance them?
Hey Mart - Steiner was an anarchist, though he rarely (and only tentatively) described himself that way. But he saw that the progress of humanity is towards increased individualism - that we are becoming more and more ourselves - but, of course, this is a double-edged sword. On the one hand we could just become greater and greater egoists, locked away in our own world and unable to connect with others. Or we can overcome ourselves, learn to open ourselves to others, to bring another being - a person, a plant, anything - into ourselves through our interest and love for it. The first path is a false path. We really just fall prey to certain voices in ourselves that say we need to satisfy this or that desire, but we're not free - we're enslaved by everything that's got a grip on us. The other path is to see those things that are gripping us and so strengthen ourselves that we can become consciously free of them. Then when we act it's no longer because we're driven to act (I want more money, more prestige, more comfort, whatever) but because we love the deed itself - we want to act for the sake of acting and for no other reason - and so our action is a free one. We're only free when we act out of love for the deed itself.
That's Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom in a nutshell and it's powerful stuff. And it is pure anarchism in a sense. Our path on earth is to become free and only we can walk it - no other voice can tell us what steps to take.
But in a larger, social sense, Steiner differs from traditional anarchists in that the path of individual freedom is really meant to be our experience in the cultural realm. It is in the realm of education (and art, and science, and all the rest) where we cultivate our own development, where we follow our own mind wherever it may lead. But the government (state) and economy have different guiding lights. Governance or politics is the realm of equality, not freedom. It's where the community comes together and makes agreements on what kind of life it wants to live together. Everyone's voice counts. It's possible that some day we will evolve beyond the need to make explicit laws and agreements in this way, but we're not there now. We haven't taken ourselves in hand.
So, if all of a sudden tomorrow I found myself stranded on an island with 100 other people I might say, "Hey, let's try to live as anarchists without any laws or government." Great, but then when someone steals something or harms someone else, as will inevitably happen, I will quickly gather with everyone else and say "We need to make an agreement (law) that violence is off the table, we'll talk out our differences and if people turn to violence we'll banish them to the other side of the island."
The day will hopefully come when people have so developed themselves that this is no longer necessary, but that day isn't today. We're not there yet. We haven't taken hold of our inner lives and formed the connections to other people that are necessary.
Sorry to hear about your travails in the hospital. I hope your situation can move and resolve itself soon. All the best - Seth
Universal School vouchers / free school-choice would solve this problem, Politics and Government have no place in education, we need a separation of school and state!
Interesting article, thanks for writing it.
I would like to comment on the possible arguments that would arise if teachers are allowed to be in charge of their own curriculum.
Teachers are also political. Putting aside the questions of whether a teacher has the moral integrity to separate their own partiality from their content (or whether, in fact, they would deem in necessary to do so), it's a thoroughly rolled trope that teachers as a whole tend toward the left of the political spectrum. Can you imagine the uproar if each teacher was responsible for curating their own curriculum? Whether they were "communist" or not, such a move would certainly stir up controversy.
I guess one could argue that if parents were not satisfied with the content, they could enroll their students in another school, and the partisan teachers could potentially be "out-competed", but that just kicks the football to the economic realm in a sense.
Perhaps this supports your earlier question about the role of the state in schooling in general? However, if the state was not responsible for providing schooling for all children we would risk massive inequality as a society.
Unfortunately, the questions you raise do not exist in a vacuum. To create a brand new educational paradigm from scratch would probably be easier than the transition from the current one to whatever seems more appropriate.
Hey Joe,
Thanks so much for your question. I can imagine the uproar :) at least pretty well.
If we gave teachers freedom, then we'd have to give parents freedom as well. In which case, I think you're right, the teachers that no one agrees with would be "out-competed." But that doesn't necessarily push the activity into the economic realm. There's competition in culture - not every aspiring musician is good enough to teach or perform, just as not every aspiring physicist can work in a lab. There are limited positions for all these things.
I think it becomes more specifically economic, at least in today's terms, when it takes on a for-profit model (as it does with some charter schools, though from I understand even the nonprofit ones have found ways to scam the system). But on principle, schools would stay strictly cultural if their actual mission was just educating children, and the economic questions were secondary concerns (every teacher does have to eat after all). But the same issue comes up with journalists, scientists, artists, and doctors - are they trying to break real news the public needs, pursue pure science, make the art they're to make, and heal people? Or are they just trying to make money from these things, and they'll change whatever they're doing on a dime if they can find a new way of doing it more profitably.
I appreciate the vacuum comment too, but unfortunately we'll never be able to start from scratch (and if somehow we did, it's not like like we have a reserve of good ideas that we'd be ready to implement... we'd probably just create the same institutions). So we do need to see everything all together, not in silos, which is quite a task. On this specific issue, if the government simply assured every child a high-quality education, but didn't provide it (like they assure a minimum wage but don't actually pay everyone), it would have to really assure and enforce it in order to make sure it didn't lead to massive inequality. I imagine we'd need all sorts of additional supports to help parents find the right schools and teachers. It wouldn't just happen overnight.
Thanks for the thoughts. All the best,
Seth
For anyone further interested, I thought this new Banished podcast on CRT raised some good points (I also just think that Amna Khalid chooses some really interesting subjects to discuss). Unfortunately, she doesn't see the need for the teacher's freedom, but nonetheless, her framing of the whole discussion can't help but bring such questions up (at least to me :)
https://www.booksmartstudios.org/p/the-critical-race-theory-hysteria
(I also added a comment in her comment section - it's maybe an interesting place to discuss these things further.)
Hey Mart - thanks for writing. The crucial difference isn't whether a teacher's views align with a political ideology or not, but whether they're teaching them out of themselves - out of their own inspiration. They're just radically different scenarios. As a teacher working out of myself I would ask "what do my students need to know about American history (or any topic) - what would wake them up and inspire them and what do I find inspiring about this topic that I want to convey?" In the second scenario I don't have to ask any of those questions, and they're actually kind of a waste of time, instead I just have to say "here's the textbook that I have to teach out of in order to prepare them for the test. We've just the first chapter, now let's turn to the second."
Here's a way of thinking about it: forget a history teacher describing American history to their students and think instead about a historian writing about it. It's not that different - one is speaking and the other is writing. A teacher at a public school (really a government school) has to be approved by the government and then has to convey certain topics and (in the case of CRT at least) not others in the classroom. If this was the case with historians writing on American history, then it would be like they first had to be approved by the government to write, and then they were given an outline of what they could and couldn't write about.
Do you think that's a fair comparison?
You said in your other comment (on the Gandhi article) that most teachers don't seem that qualified to you... perhaps that's the case. So how will they become qualified? Should the government tell them how to teach. What if our historians weren't very qualified? Should the government tell them what to write?
Hope that all makes sense. Would be interested in your thoughts on it. All the best - Seth
Hey Mart - I'm really sorry to hear about your paralysis and definitely no worries about your spelling, it's great that you're reaching out.
It's an interesting question whether teachers at a Christian home school are actually teachers or politicians. And what about the teachers teaching a more "African centered" education as you described having? And what about Hasidic Jews or Amish or Native American or any other cultural group that wants to teach its own values and traditions? I definitely wouldn't call them "politicians" (I'd use a much more strict definition of that word, otherwise it can mean anything), but are they being "political"? Well, everything seems political when our main (only?) lens is the political lens... I imagine if you had a school board of all Republicans or a school board of all Democrats and they could express their opinions about what should be taught in each subject, then they'd have pretty different opinions. Does that make math or Spanish or history or shop class political?
I'd say the problem is that these things have become political because politicians weigh in on them. They wouldn't weigh in on them if society was clear that it's an infringement on individual freedom to do so. We know it's an infringement if they tell a journalist what to write, but what's the difference between that and telling a teacher what to teach? Why do we need consensus in the one area and not the other? If we want a unified country and we think we can actually get there by making everyone think the same thing, then one could argue that it would be better to give adults the same news and who cares what you teach the kids, they'll just forget it anyways :)
And does anyone really think government being in charge of education improves anything? I recently posed a question on twitter that I think gets to the heart of this:
The ideal in a university is clear: we want inspiring teachers doing original research teaching bright young minds. Why isn't that also the ideal in high school? Because we can't find great teachers? Do we really think they'll become great by forcing them to teach to the test?
I think if people agree with the first part of that - the ideal university education - then they should ask themselves: is that what I'd like to see in high school (and middle and lower school) as well? And if so, how can I imagine that taking place? How do we get inspiring teachers? The main answer to that question that I see is "give them more money," which isn't the most inspired answer...
Hey Mart,
Certainly the government can do what it wants with the things it funds (though of course, it's we who fund the government and so we can recall politicians who fund things we don't want and don't fund things we do - I would imagine there'd be a bit of an uproar if the government started banning books from public libraries or became even more involved in what scientific research sees the light of day).
The question isn't whether it has that capacity but whether it should have that capacity, whether that's how we want to organize society. We have given it those powers over time, and of course, if we have different ideas and can convince people of them, we could give it different powers. But first we have to have different ideas and they need to be inspired and understandable. So: what ideas make the most sense?
If government decides every child has the right to an education, should it also determine the form of the education? If it decides every person has the right to health care, should it also decide the form of the medicine? Or if it decides everyone should have access to the news, should it run the news stations, decide what's information and what's disinformation?
The difference in those three examples is that the government doesn't fund the last one (at least not in the US, besides Voice of America and a little money for NPR). But the funding for journalism is pretty shaky these days... local news stations are almost extinct. Should we have a right to a diverse news landscape? What happens if it becomes entirely corporate-run? Would it be better to have it be entirely government-run? Should the government step in? These aren't arbitrary questions, we already lean towards one or the other of them now (obviously corporations already play a huge role in funding the news and obviously the government has a significant influence on what journalists report). So what would be healthiest?
The media scholar Robert McChesney once proposed that every citizen should get a $200 voucher to donate to the news organization of their choosing. That would obviously create a much more diverse, grass-roots media environment, which would also align more with the ideal of a free press. Is that something we should strive towards, or are there even better ideas out there? Or does it not matter - we can just let it go any old way. Ce'st la vie.
I'd say there are major differences between these approaches and they will lead us to very different places (world war, civil war, revolution?). I would also say that the issue of how we fund the media isn't isolated - it has certain principles behind it that are the same when it comes to education and healthcare. They all have to do with the human being being free to pursue their own path in life, or not.
And the other examples you mentioned are really interesting, I'll have to give them more thought. If the local government decides that everyone should have access to parks, should they also decide where they are and how they're designed, or is there someone else whose better suited for that job? My point is that government bureaucrats don't usually know anything about education, medicine, or park design, that's not part of their job description - teachers, doctors, and park designers do. So why shouldn't they be the ones to decide. Wouldn't that be healthier?
As I think you can see, this is not a libertarian perspective. It's a little more complicated then "shrink the government and privatize everything." In this view, as a community we can decide what we want - what are our rights - but that doesn't mean the government has to provide them. We could still provide them and we could choose what kind of education we want for our children or medicine for our bodies. And if we did so then we'll have real diversity in education, science, medicine, research. Imagine the new approaches people could take to these things if people only followed their inspiration and not government pressure or dictates.
----
And I would definitely recommend looking into what's out there for alternative approaches to medicine and health. There are a number of practitioners who are working with a holistic "Goethean" approach to health, and if you reach out to them you might find ways of working that don't only treat the body as a broken machine, but connect with a fuller picture of human experience. Wishing you all the best on that path.
I definitely agree that most people aren't too interested, but of course they also have no opportunity to be interested. What is there to be interested in? The horse race? Sure, it can get you hooked on the rage machine, but it's not actually that interesting. Who really has any hope that their side is going to win? Where do people think it will end, all this demonizing of the other? Is the other side really wrong on every single issue? Every issue? Every one? And are they really as heartless and hypocritical as we think they are? And is our side really not? It's all really genuine on our side? But this wild little fiction is the only game in town. Who would possibly think - like the US founding fathers for instance - that there's a way of understanding society and structuring it intelligently to bring it forward, to usher in a new age? For us, everything's been done...
But do you really think it's just making an arbitrary decision on abortion and there are no principles to grasp? How about the other issues, are they also as murky? What about a free press? We can see vibrant periods when people really brought forward their own ideas in freedom, wrote pamphlets and books and papers and the like and the whole culture was shifted.... and we can see periods when the government abolished the free press and made everything dependent on the government. Is it arbitrary which we choose? Of course, we'll get some disinformation mixed in with all the free speech, but does that mean we should have "supervised speech" instead, active government censorship? Has there ever been a healthy, vibrant culture with supervised speech?
While it's a little hard to parse, and it gets pretty messy when you get down into the minutiae, there are actually dynamics at work, there is actually a lawfulness to human flourishing. We have to figure out how that lawfulness can best be expressed for our time, our place. It's not arbitrary whether people are enslaved or not. It's not arbitrary whether people participate in decision-making processes. It's not arbitrary whether a huge corporation produces something or a small business or a worker-owned cooperative. They all have different ways of being, they all create different dynamics that either feed our souls or stifle and poison our souls.
And yes, everything has a political, economic, and cultural component - from your relationship to one other person to the whole of society. So what are those components? How do we understand them? How do we balance them?
Hey Mart - Steiner was an anarchist, though he rarely (and only tentatively) described himself that way. But he saw that the progress of humanity is towards increased individualism - that we are becoming more and more ourselves - but, of course, this is a double-edged sword. On the one hand we could just become greater and greater egoists, locked away in our own world and unable to connect with others. Or we can overcome ourselves, learn to open ourselves to others, to bring another being - a person, a plant, anything - into ourselves through our interest and love for it. The first path is a false path. We really just fall prey to certain voices in ourselves that say we need to satisfy this or that desire, but we're not free - we're enslaved by everything that's got a grip on us. The other path is to see those things that are gripping us and so strengthen ourselves that we can become consciously free of them. Then when we act it's no longer because we're driven to act (I want more money, more prestige, more comfort, whatever) but because we love the deed itself - we want to act for the sake of acting and for no other reason - and so our action is a free one. We're only free when we act out of love for the deed itself.
That's Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom in a nutshell and it's powerful stuff. And it is pure anarchism in a sense. Our path on earth is to become free and only we can walk it - no other voice can tell us what steps to take.
But in a larger, social sense, Steiner differs from traditional anarchists in that the path of individual freedom is really meant to be our experience in the cultural realm. It is in the realm of education (and art, and science, and all the rest) where we cultivate our own development, where we follow our own mind wherever it may lead. But the government (state) and economy have different guiding lights. Governance or politics is the realm of equality, not freedom. It's where the community comes together and makes agreements on what kind of life it wants to live together. Everyone's voice counts. It's possible that some day we will evolve beyond the need to make explicit laws and agreements in this way, but we're not there now. We haven't taken ourselves in hand.
So, if all of a sudden tomorrow I found myself stranded on an island with 100 other people I might say, "Hey, let's try to live as anarchists without any laws or government." Great, but then when someone steals something or harms someone else, as will inevitably happen, I will quickly gather with everyone else and say "We need to make an agreement (law) that violence is off the table, we'll talk out our differences and if people turn to violence we'll banish them to the other side of the island."
The day will hopefully come when people have so developed themselves that this is no longer necessary, but that day isn't today. We're not there yet. We haven't taken hold of our inner lives and formed the connections to other people that are necessary.
Sorry to hear about your travails in the hospital. I hope your situation can move and resolve itself soon. All the best - Seth
Universal School vouchers / free school-choice would solve this problem, Politics and Government have no place in education, we need a separation of school and state!