DHS Y4 Soc Sem Reading Government Control

|DUNMAN HIGH SCHOOLYear 4 English 2022Singapore Issues – Government Control SOCRATIC SEMINAR – GOVERNMENT CONTROLEssential Questions:What is government control?When should a government take any action?Who decides when a government should restrict what people do?How should government control be monitored and reviewed?Why is it important that government control be monitored and reviewed?With reference to the attached resource material, as well as your own research, construct a reasoned response on this issue, paying particular attention to the depth, breadth and fair-mindedness of your views.You are not limited to discussing the essential questions above. You may dig deeper into the issues by asking critical questions to your fellow panelists, or lead the discussion into a specific perspective or angle. …About this topicThe primary role of the government is to govern. To govern, the state is given the power to take actions on a wide range of matters. For instance, the state has the power to decide which businesses and investments are allowed, who goes to school, at what age, whether drugs, alcohol and cigarettes are contraband items, how employers treat their workers, whether parents have the right to punish their children, and so on. Some actions that the government takes are seen as necessary intervention and regulation. However, some actions are seen as controlling, an overreach or even repressive. When does a government action become excessive? On what basis is this decided, and by whom? How should government actions be monitored, reviewed and revoked, should there be a need to do so?These are issues to ponder when you examine this broad and wide-ranging topic.

Exhibit 1 - What are rules for?Underlying the discussion is the place of rules in society. This discussion is both philosophical and practical, and one might add, personal. Is having rules a matter of (ideological) preference?You may also wish to read up on rules-based society and the role of the government in terms of rules and regulations. Could we live in a world without rules?By Nick Chater | 22nd February 2020We might dream of a world where there are no rules, but how practical would it be?"I'm in my late 20s and I'm feeling more and more constrained by rules. From the endless signs that tell me to 'stand on the right' on escalators or 'skateboarding forbidden' in public places to all those unwritten societal rules such as the expectation that I should settle down, buy a house and have a family. Do we really need all these rules, why should I follow them and what would happen if we all ignored them?" Will, 28, LondonWe all feel the oppressive presence of rules, both written and unwritten – it's practically a rule of life. Public spaces, organisations, dinner parties, even relationships and casual conversations are rife with regulations and red tape that seemingly are there to dictate our every move. We rail against rules being an affront to our freedom, and argue that they're "there to be broken".But as a behavioural scientist I believe that it is not really rules, norms and customs in general that are the problem – but the unjustified ones. The tricky and important bit, perhaps, is establishing the difference between the two.A good place to start is to imagine life in a world without rules. Apart from our bodies following some very strict and complex biological laws, without which we'd all be doomed, the very words I’m writing now follow the rules of English. In Byronic moments of artistic individualism, I might dreamily think of liberating myself from them. But would this new linguistic freedom really do me any good or set my thoughts free?Some – Lewis Carroll in his poem Jabberwocky, for example – have made a success of a degree of literary anarchy. But on the whole, breaking away from the rules of my language makes me not so much unchained as incoherent. Byron was a notorious rule breaker in his personal life, but he was also a stickler for rhyme and metre. In his poem, When We Two Parted, for example, Byron writes about forbidden love, a love that broke the rules, but does do so by precisely following some well-established poetic laws. And many would argue it is all the more powerful for it:In secret we met In silence I grieve, That thy heart could forget, Thy spirit deceive. If I should meet thee

After long years, How should I greet thee?-- With silence and tears.Consider, too, how rules are the essence of sport, games and puzzles – even when their entire purpose is supposedly fun. The rules of chess, say, can trigger a tantrum if I want to "castle" to get out of check, but find that they say I can’t; or if I find your pawn getting to my side of the board and turning into a queen, rook, knight or bishop. Similarly, find me a football fan who hasn't at least once raged against the offside rule.But chess or football without rules wouldn’t be chess or football – they would be entirely formless and meaningless activities. Indeed, a game with no rules is no game at all.Lots of the norms of everyday life perform precisely the same function as the rules of games – telling us what "moves" we can, and can't, make. The conventions of "pleases" and "thank yous" that seem so irksome to young children are indeed arbitrary – but the fact that we have some such conventions, and perhaps critically that we agree what they are, is part of what makes our social interactions run smoothly.And rules about driving on the left or the right, stopping at red lights, queueing, not littering, picking up our dog's deposits and so on fall into the same category. They are the building blocks of a harmonious society.Of course, there has long been an appetite among some people for a less formalised society, a society without government, a world where individual freedom takes precedence: an anarchy. Rules often arise, unbidden, from the needs of mutually agreeable social and economic interactionsThe trouble with anarchy, though, is that it is inherently unstable – humans continually, and spontaneously, generate new rules governing behaviour, communication and economic exchange, and they do so as rapidly as old rules are dismantled.A few decades ago, the generic pronoun in written language was widely assumed to be male: he/him/his. That rule has, quite rightly, largely been overturned. Yet it has also been replaced – not by an absence of rules, but by a different and broader set of rules governing our use of pronouns.Or let's return to the case of sport. A game may start by kicking a pig's bladder from one end of a village to another, with ill-defined teams, and potentially riotous violence. But it ends up, after a few centuries, with a hugely complex rule book dictating every detail of the game. We even create international governing bodies to oversee them.Imagine how chaotic chess would be without its carefully defined rules (Credit: Getty Images)The political economist Elinor Ostrom (who shared the Noble Prize for economics in 2009) observed the same phenomenon of spontaneous rule construction when people had collectively to manage common resources such as common land, fisheries, or water for irrigation.She found that people collectively construct rules about, say, how many cattle a person can graze, where, and when; who gets how much water, and what should be done when the

resource is limited; who monitors whom, and which rules resolve disputes. These rules aren't just invented by rulers and imposed from the top down – instead, they often arise, unbidden, from the needs of mutually agreeable social and economic interactions. The urge to overturn stifling, unjust or simply downright pointless rules is entirely justified. But without some rules – and some tendency for us to stick to them – society would slide rapidly into pandemonium. Indeed, many social scientists would see our tendency to create, stick to, and enforce rules as the very foundation of social and economic life.Despite our protests