The creation of state run "orphanages" to house children of at risk families. Read opening argument

(Let me start by thanking you for your courtesy, and apologizing in advance if my argument gets a little heated, it's just the way I am.) The argument that these children are not leaders due to the fact that they come from at risk families, although logical at first glance, does not hold water. The reasoning is that because they come from lower classes, they can't be leaders. The real reason for that is because they generally don't have any real experiences to build their leadership abilities. They don't have access to Boy Scouts, National Honors Society, JROTC, etc. that give people the skills they need to lead their fellows. Well, they do have access to gangs, as you mentioned, which in a way proves my point. It is very difficult to lead a bunch of ne'er-do-wells at anything. Yet low level street gangs formed from the very individuals who would populate this institution manage on a regular basis to perform highly organized and effective drug smuggling, gun-running, protection rackets, and murders on a regular basis. The leadership ability is there, it just is not used for anything productive. I agree with you that not everyone at Boy's State enjoyed or even liked running for political office. Fortunately, they didn't have to. Much like a school's SCA (or even our actual governments) one does not HAVE to run for office, or even vote. And although some students may see these elections as a joke, there are plenty of adults in society who believe that elections are a joke anyways. Yet that doesn't manage to discredit the democratic process. The argument that they grew up in a life of crime and villainy is moot if you rescue them at a young enough age. I would strongly oppose placing individuals over the age of six or seven (perhaps younger, I am not a master of child psychiatry) into this institution, since it would be far too traumatic after that age to take them from their parents, unless the situation called for it, i.e. no other option. (Older children could possibly apply for emancipation and application to the institute if certain criteria were met). As to your final argument, I'll have to say that I can't give a 100% retort. I must concede that a child's parents play a very important role in the child's development. But I do have a remedy to the problem you've proposed, albeit not a perfect one. Each city (for the sake of this debate, we'll call each of the units that the kids are put in a city) would have several adults assigned to it. These adults jobs would be as mentors and guides for that particular city, and would stay with them all the way until they graduated from the institute. This way, they could have strong role models to look up to, and parental figures in their lives to go to when they needed guidance or the other help that parents would usually provide. Finally, I'll have to branch of into a short monologue on the nature of this debate: By placing these kids in the environment that I have outlined, we could, in a sense, turns the wolves into sheep dogs. Those who are natural born bullies would, instead, become the aggressive commonwealth attorneys (the institution would have its own "court system" for handling small offenses within the institution); those who are natural gossip hounds would become news writers for the institution's in house newspaper; those who would become the drug dealers would soon be peddling candy bars and pencils at the store to their fellow "citizens" and hawking pottery and other crafts to the high-minded and spend-thrift couples who attend those fund raisers that sell those hokey arts and crafts; those who would become the "street soldiers" of a local gang would become the sheriffs and deputies of the institution's citizen constabulary; and the liars, cheats, frauds, braggarts, and perverts would, naturally, become the politicians. That is the aim of this program: to bring out the traits and talents that these individuals would find out on there own, teach them how to use them, and show them how to use them responsibly. Go ahead and call it idealistic, 'cause that's all it is: an idea.