There's a third alternative, which is obscured by asking the question that way.
"The purpose of tax-funded assistance for education should not be ‘to educate kids’. It should be to avoid having UNeducated kids loosed on the world as UNeducated adults."
Those are two very different things, that require very different approaches:
Also, it's not clear whether by 'we', you mean government, or society. Again, those are two very different things, which rely on very different mechanisms:
All of which is to say, my answer to your question is: Society, working voluntarily, should find ways to provide assistance to parents who, without such assistance, will release uneducated kids into the world.
But that doesn't really align with either of your multiple-choice answers, does it? :^D
As I say in the links I provided, society can express its intentionality regarding having an educated citizenry in the same way it expresses its intentionality regarding having an armed citizenry. Through individual action, voluntarily coordinated when necessary.
However, a community's collective intentionality is composed not only of the individual intentions of its current members but also of the community’s traditions and cultures.
Traditions and cultures rely on persuasion, while government relies on coercion. I'm all for the former, not so much for the latter.
But I also think it doesn't make sense to say that a community has 'a collective intentionality'. A community consists of smaller communities, which have different intentionalities -- for example, a town can have people who belong to different religions. Those smaller communities can be further sub-divided (it might have both an orthodox synagogue and a reform synagogue), until you get down to what we might call 'a community of one'.
This is true not just for religion, but for things like being armed, being educated, offering charity, getting married, raising children, and so on.
A lot of mischief arises when we start acting as if people who happen to live near each other must share a single intentionality regarding much of anything. That leads directly to the idea of majority rule, which is at heart a way of ignoring the need for consent, and the diversity among different sub-communities.
For me, the interesting question is always: What framework will let all those different sub-communities express their own intentionalities, instead of inviting some of them to try to use government to impose (through violence, if necessary) their own intentionalities on everyone else?
I think that framework is the one based as much as possible on consent, and rights, and as little as possible on majority rule, and government.
I read Jane Jacobs with great enthusiasm in the 70’s when i was an Urban pioneer on the edge of University of Pa’s gravitational field. Read the New York Review of Books which has a great article on Robert Moses from his early days of the TVA through to his building of the West side Highway! Time and tide didn’t wait for him! Ruthless and relentless!
> Shall we fund schools or educate students?
There's a third alternative, which is obscured by asking the question that way.
"The purpose of tax-funded assistance for education should not be ‘to educate kids’. It should be to avoid having UNeducated kids loosed on the world as UNeducated adults."
Those are two very different things, that require very different approaches:
https://granitegrok.com/national/2025/07/underwood-its-not-about-the-kids
Also, it's not clear whether by 'we', you mean government, or society. Again, those are two very different things, which rely on very different mechanisms:
https://granitegrok.com/national/2025/06/efas-and-gfas
All of which is to say, my answer to your question is: Society, working voluntarily, should find ways to provide assistance to parents who, without such assistance, will release uneducated kids into the world.
But that doesn't really align with either of your multiple-choice answers, does it? :^D
My question to your answer is, how does society express its intentionality?
As I say in the links I provided, society can express its intentionality regarding having an educated citizenry in the same way it expresses its intentionality regarding having an armed citizenry. Through individual action, voluntarily coordinated when necessary.
However, a community's collective intentionality is composed not only of the individual intentions of its current members but also of the community’s traditions and cultures.
Traditions and cultures rely on persuasion, while government relies on coercion. I'm all for the former, not so much for the latter.
But I also think it doesn't make sense to say that a community has 'a collective intentionality'. A community consists of smaller communities, which have different intentionalities -- for example, a town can have people who belong to different religions. Those smaller communities can be further sub-divided (it might have both an orthodox synagogue and a reform synagogue), until you get down to what we might call 'a community of one'.
This is true not just for religion, but for things like being armed, being educated, offering charity, getting married, raising children, and so on.
A lot of mischief arises when we start acting as if people who happen to live near each other must share a single intentionality regarding much of anything. That leads directly to the idea of majority rule, which is at heart a way of ignoring the need for consent, and the diversity among different sub-communities.
For me, the interesting question is always: What framework will let all those different sub-communities express their own intentionalities, instead of inviting some of them to try to use government to impose (through violence, if necessary) their own intentionalities on everyone else?
I think that framework is the one based as much as possible on consent, and rights, and as little as possible on majority rule, and government.
I read Jane Jacobs with great enthusiasm in the 70’s when i was an Urban pioneer on the edge of University of Pa’s gravitational field. Read the New York Review of Books which has a great article on Robert Moses from his early days of the TVA through to his building of the West side Highway! Time and tide didn’t wait for him! Ruthless and relentless!