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James Meredith: Time for an American Child’s Bill of Rights

Meredith nails this, IMO.


Maybe then we'd all have a chance of getting children who "don't need" any "help" (to pass the increasingly prolific all-powerful "state tests")-- that is, OUR kids-- actually given some education for a change.

I'd like it if my tax dollars were used for Meredith's agenda. I'd like that very much.

I would rather that a lot LESS of my tax dollar were going to Pearson (and their ilk) for programs/"improvements" of dubious merit.

We already have an informal children's bill of rights in my house, so it's a natural next step to have an official one.

It's a shame this thing only focuses on education, though, because children's rights are regularly trampled on in other arenas.

It's such a fuzzy thing. So he has research and evidence based, but then includes specific elements like daily PE, disconnecting from TV and video games. I also have a hangup with general research because it is so rarely tuned to the differences at the ends of the curve and the dogma ends up wagging the tails.

But a Bill of Rights for kids in principle sounds awesome. And fully professionally respected, supported, and performing teachers sounds good.

A libertarian view of rights, held by the Founding Fathers, is that they are constraints on what the government can do *to* you (such as restricting your speech, worship, or ownership of firearms) and not mandates of what the government must do *for* you. The Bill of Rights in the U.S. constitution contains negative rights. I don't favor adding positive rights to U.S. constitution, including the rights advocated by James Meredith.

Many state constitutions have laws guaranteeing the right to a free public education. Even these can be problematic, because they have often been used by judges to strike down voucher programs and because some judges have used such rights to mandate spending levels, which is a political decision best left to elected legislators.

The idea that the Founding Fathers possessed a uniform, coherent philosophy is so common, yet so easily refuted by a casual glance at the evidence, that it probably deserves its own fallacy name by now, like the No True Scotsman.

An added bonus: it would be alliterative.

Anyway, there are several items in the Bill of Rights which require government action in order to protect those rights, thus making them positive rights, probably none more obvious than the sixth.

South Africa has a children's bill of rights. It's aligned very closely to the UN children's bill of rights.

Despite it stating that education is (loosely quoted) there to enable each child to develop all facets of self to the highest level they are capable of - no schools here actually go with this in principle.

I'm surprised the USA does NOT have a children's bill of rights though...

Our Bill of Rights covers all humankind.

If a separate Bill of Rights just for children were instituted, would they even know what it says?

Bill of Rights Quiz FAIL

Another "walking around" video http://news.yahoo.com/whats-the-capital-of-canada-harvard-video-140610532.html found that Harvard students (except for one Canadian) did not know what the capital of Canada was. If more of them guessed major Canadian cities, such as Toronto or Montreal, rather than provinces, the video would be less disturbing.

Producers of such videos don't say how many people they interviewed before finding the ignorant people. Unless they do, the videos should be considered entertainment rather than data.

Well, given that about 25% of the American population is apparently not entirely certain about heliocentrism, I don't know that it is necessarily inaccurate, either.

http://newsfeed.time.com/2014/02/16/1-in-4-americans-thinks-sun-orbits-earth/

I mean, sure... Americans aren't doing TOO badly on that quiz relative to other nationalities, but it makes me wonder something even more fundamental than relative placement-- why can't a basic education mitigate that kind of profound ignorance any better than this??