- #1
Arpegius
Hi! This is my first time posting here, although I have been browsing several posts for some months now. I appreciate your community's approach to truth and its skepticism, and I thought perhaps you could help me analyze this issue more efficiently.
I live in Buenos Aires, Argentina (South America) and right now we argentines are slowly but steadily shifting in the direction of economical and political chaos, mostly due to the last 3 presidential mandates from the same party.
Teaching, to me one of the most vital professions in a democracy, has also been one of the most ignored in my country. Teachers are poorly payed (a truck or subway driver earns several times more than them, actually) while our government spends hundreds of millions on demagogical projects and corrupted political deals.
During the past month, salary negotiations failed and the state refused to grant a rise to them (despite the presently uncontrollable 20-30% annual rise in inflation). Partly because of that and partly because of some shameful remarks from our president herself, they have decided to go into a nationwide strike for (up to now) two days, a resort very common among all syndicates here.
My question, then, is as follows:
Is depriving all of the children of a country of their education worth it? In other words, I understand the other ways have been unsuccesful in getting them what's due, but is affecting the innocent justified because of that?
I've spent some hours debating this with some people on Facebook and all they could come up with (they all had a marxist background, btw) is that strikes have historically been the best resource available to the working class when the state remains unresponsive, and that teachers would give a "good example to the kids" because they would be fighting for their rights.
I replied asking them precisely and briefly about the real ethics behind a strike (not its historical background) and then asking them if denying the basic right of education for a rise in pay (be it justified or not) would actually be a good example to a kid. Of course, from then on their responses degenerated into strawmen and ad hominem fallacies or simply prejudice, internal contradictions and disguised hate. I would attach the whole conversation, but the language barrier would probably make you miss most of it.
Thank you guys in advance for taking the time to read all of this.
I live in Buenos Aires, Argentina (South America) and right now we argentines are slowly but steadily shifting in the direction of economical and political chaos, mostly due to the last 3 presidential mandates from the same party.
Teaching, to me one of the most vital professions in a democracy, has also been one of the most ignored in my country. Teachers are poorly payed (a truck or subway driver earns several times more than them, actually) while our government spends hundreds of millions on demagogical projects and corrupted political deals.
During the past month, salary negotiations failed and the state refused to grant a rise to them (despite the presently uncontrollable 20-30% annual rise in inflation). Partly because of that and partly because of some shameful remarks from our president herself, they have decided to go into a nationwide strike for (up to now) two days, a resort very common among all syndicates here.
My question, then, is as follows:
Is depriving all of the children of a country of their education worth it? In other words, I understand the other ways have been unsuccesful in getting them what's due, but is affecting the innocent justified because of that?
I've spent some hours debating this with some people on Facebook and all they could come up with (they all had a marxist background, btw) is that strikes have historically been the best resource available to the working class when the state remains unresponsive, and that teachers would give a "good example to the kids" because they would be fighting for their rights.
I replied asking them precisely and briefly about the real ethics behind a strike (not its historical background) and then asking them if denying the basic right of education for a rise in pay (be it justified or not) would actually be a good example to a kid. Of course, from then on their responses degenerated into strawmen and ad hominem fallacies or simply prejudice, internal contradictions and disguised hate. I would attach the whole conversation, but the language barrier would probably make you miss most of it.
Thank you guys in advance for taking the time to read all of this.