My brother skipped school and my parents found out.

Mom
worries and says, "He needs to learn that there are consequences
for his actions," which got me thinking, what are the
consequences? If he leaves school often enough, without doctor's
notes or explicit parental permission communicated to the proper
authority (the school), then the political system goes after him,
due to truancy laws. If he continues to abstain from the
sociopolitically-sanctioned schooling, then he won't obtain a high
school diploma, and the social system will view him as ineligible
for many an employment opportunity (or so we are told; I have not
actually researched this piece of 'common knowledge'). I'd say if
he really doesn't want to go to school and they're having a difficult
time of coercing him into doing so, let him test for his General
Equivalency Degree, and end the matter thusly. However, that is a
divergence from my point.
As any human being of average intelligence is aware of,
when one engages in an action, something is going to happen in
response to that action. If I punch a concrete wall, my knuckles
are going to hurt. If I spend time with my family and help them
with household tasks, they'll like me more, et cetera. My brother is
certainly aware of this fact, being that he has no cognitive
impairments that I or anyone else can speak of. He knows that
every 'action' has a 'consequence.' So, what does this have to do
with this situation? My mother and father want him to understand
(whether they realize it or not) that he has a responsibility, as a
member of our society, to maintain the 'status quo,' i.e. the
existing social order. This is clearly shown by their approach to his

whole existence. He does something they find undesirable, so

they punish him. He learns through conditioning, as so many
children do, that you shouldn't do certain things because the
family unit will cause some kind of harm to your physical person
or your personal liberty, such as being 'grounded,' being hit,
removal of 'privileges,' etc. This is not because our parents are
petty tyrants (though some others may be) but because they
experienced the same things as children, and believe that this is
the only effective form of 'child-rearing.' Ultimately, this
conditioning of children to associate some form of 'punishment' or
negative reinforcement with actions that aren't sanctioned by the
family unit, leads to the creation of adults who apply the same
mentality to actions that aren't socially sanctioned (or more
properly, those that have negative social sanctions, such as illegal
activity or activity that is socially unacceptable).
What this means, is that by choosing to spend his time on an
activity other than schooling via the socio-political system, he is
engaging in an activity with negative social sanctions, which does
not necessitate that the activity has negative consequences.
Rather, the supposed 'consequence' of the activity (skipping
school) is, in reality, just the backlash of the political and social
systems against him, as retribution for resisting their control. We
are punished with social ostracism, fines, and imprisonment (to
name a few) in order to deter us from doing that which defies the
current structure of our society and governmental systems. In
place for long enough, it becomes a cultural phenomenon, in
which it is taken for granted that you must obey the demands of
legislators and statutes, or obey the demands of your family and

the household rules, since bad things will happen to you

otherwise. It is so ingrained into our minds from Day One, and
has been for the last few millennia, that we actually believe that
this coercive, hierarchical structure is completely natural. Are we
not the masters of our own lives? What is liberty in a world such
as this? My brother is not a mental invalid, he's capable of making
choices all on his own. Why should the wishes and valuejudgements of others be imposed on his life? The same applies to
any individual. Punishment and negative reinforcement in the
family unit is the cornerstone of the un-free society.