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One can argue it is unfair.
That is the parent's job. To give his child the best goddamn competitive advantage in the world.
Sucks to suck (whether intentional or not). Now does that mean it's impossible without bedtime stories? No, otherwise my dad would still be in the Ecuadorian slums.
-----MOS 19D = cavalry scout = best damn MOS there is
This is a really good idea, there should be regulations to prevent affluent parents from reading to their children or giving them extra books. We could tax them and make it mandatory to have a book pool where whenever they get a book to read they have a week and then it must be put into the community pool for more disadvantaged children to have access. Noncompliance would be met with stiff fines and jail time for repeat non poolers. To enforce compliance we could have RFID tags inserted into each children's book by taxing the upper income brackets and also pay for phones for poor parents to facilitate book pool information.
Technically speaking, yes, it is an unfair advantage. There is no fairness when it comes to what family you were born into.
But it would be idiotic to translate that into saying parents shouldn't read to their kids.
It also isn't fair that even the poorest children in the US have access to food when children in other countries do not. Does that mean we should starve our kids?
The writer of the article likely couched it this way to attract people to read the article, and not just the headline.
Some parents do try to keep their kids from being the front dog though. I know of people who have done it intentionally hoping to qualify their child for free preschool slots that are based on being slow for their age and I have heard parents express concern that if their child is too smart going into the school system, they will be bored and stop trying to learn because the teachers will be focused on teaching the dumber kids.
"Concerned with"? Of course we should. We should be concerned that we give our kids every single advantage possible to have the best life possible.
"Feel bad about"?? Only if we don't do it.
Lowering the bar helps NO ONE. We need to be raising expectations, expecting more and doing everything we possibly can to see the next generation rise to the level of it's best and brightest, not accepting that simply meeting level of it's worst is acceptable.
From article:
Professor Frank Oberklaid, from the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, told the newspaper he was “bewildered” by the idea of bedtime reading disadvantaging others.
“It’s one of the more bizarre things I’ve heard,” he said. “We should be bringing all kids up to the next level.”
Our nation has not always lived up to its ideals, yet those ideals have never ceased to guide us. They expose our flaws, and lead us to mend them. We are the beneficiaries of the work of the generations before us and it is each generation's responsibility to continue that work. - Laura Bush
In philosophy you can use your imagination!
Try John Rawl's veil of ignorance. Imagine before you're born you don't know anything about who you'll be, your abilities or your position. You are the human before the human being; and the world you're entering is one where you've got an 80% chance of ending up in a living condition where you're living on less than $10 a day. (That's a true statistic.)
The other side of this, is the 20% chance of ending up in a family that is not living in poverty; and probably a >1% roulette chance of ending up in even a middle class family.
It would therefore quite rational for this "human before the human being" to want not a world that's regulated by families, but a world where children are raised by the state. That's because the "human before the human being" has much better chance to live a happier, wealthier life in the care of many people pooling their resources and who are all looking out for him, instead of the >80% chance of ending up in the dirt-poor family of which there's no appeal against.
It's a very self-interested argument for the individual to want to be raised not by a family; and not just a "lowest common denominator."
Help fight Zika, TB, HIV/AIDs and water pollution by donating your CPU's excess processing time to scientific research.
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I always thought the term "unfair advantage" to be redundant, thats the nature of advantages they make things unfair.
Um, how about the people not reading to their kids step up instead of lowering the lives of all?
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura make much of me