12-year-old attempts suicide following secret school gender talks

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[–]FlippyKing 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

Schooling is fast becoming the worst thing we can do to kids, and by extension to society.

[–]soundsituation 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The more I learn about it the more horrified I am. I had imagined isolated, perfunctory, one-time conversations about pronouns, gender spectrums, privilege, etc, followed by a return to the regularly scheduled education, but the reality in many classrooms is much, much worse than that. Critical theory has saturated modern pedagogy to the point that it's there more often than it's not. It informs teachers' worldviews (which they never properly acknowledge as being one theoretical and politically motivated way of viewing the world, probably because they legitimately don't realize it). It guides the curriculum. I've seen literal racist propaganda being used in fucking textbooks.

Sorry, I'm pissed off about this today. I don't know what the solution is.

[–]soundsituation 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

What’s the (realistic) alternative though?

[–]FlippyKing 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I think there are no realistic alternatives readily available. There could be a step by step process that makes alternatives easier.

First, schools have to be seen for what they are: baby sitting, the care and tending to children while parents can not do it directly, while parents work (towards what ends they work is another topic). It should never be the first option. Schools are separate from education, and the purposes of education have to be clearly defined, as do the purposes of schooling and the purposes of training.

Schooling, training, and education are three different things. The kid who knows how to tie his gi and kneel properly and bow to sensi and to his sparring partner, and to shut up when needed and to Kiai! loudly has been schooled well. The kid who does not say anything when pre-cut boards are used for board breaking demonstrations has also been schooled well. The kid who knows the history of his art might be educated, but art is really about training first and education second. Training is what most seek. This is why most discussion about schools center around: what jobs one can get, or if businesses feel failed by the schooling process because it cranks out poorly trained workers.

Training by its nature has to be very specific, and since job markets change it is difficult to create schools that make children into adults that please future employers. But, our needs do not change. Jobs do, but our species is the same it has always been. This fact is key. We should train people to meet their own needs. The schooling they should receive should discipline them to the realities of their environment and the requirements of their needs. Can that be done by one or two adults with 20 or so kids? No. Absolutely not. Perhaps a hierarchy of adults working with kids, but music lessons are done one and one, and sparring is done one and one (between peers, but I don't think that weakens my idea).

Lectures that convey information can be done in larger groups, but how much of those are purely educational and how much of those are indoctrinational? At best, they should be held off till the mental capacities are developed well. Grammar, command of logic, and rhetorical skill, rhetorical self-defense really, are needed before we should be placed in front of some talking head lecturing on and on with no real dialogue and no pausing between sentences for questions and clarifications. Most of my take-downs of tra posts here are done sentence to sentence and finding where they leap great distances between each sentence with no justification. The poorly trained mind is lectured by those who refuse to train it with the intent to mislead. Similarly the poorly trained mind is asked its opinion on things like elections and highly emotional topics by those who would mislead the poorly trained mind before any of the underlying assumptions can be affirmed or questioned. This is the hall mark of gender ideology in schools, and it might well be literal brain washing.

Sorry for that tangent. What do we need to know? We need to know how our bodies work, our muscular growth, our need for sleep, proper nutrition, our need for actual sunlight (as much research is showing, sunlight is needed not just for Vit D, but for the mitochondria to produce its own melatonin which is maybe the most powerful anti-oxidant our body uses. It wasn't even known until pretty recently. It serves a different purpose from the pineal gland excreted melatonin which is made at a different time of day and ... it gets complicated and I don't get it all very clearly yet.) I think I'm clearly on the side of saying we need training grammar, logic and rhetoric. I'll add arithmetic to that, and that should be really worked on before mathematics is introduced. Math is not needed till very late I think, and perhaps to first set up geometry as it is needed in building things. Science? It should be taught along with the growing of food, animal husbandry (wool, cow manure for fertilizer, chickens for eggs, etc), home economics, the geography of the place where those being educated are, as well as the aspects of our relationship to the sun that influence the seasons and growing of food. What their clean water source is should be taught and as the kids grow, the can learn very practical building skills. None of these topics are simple or stupid, and they at the same time very practical and connect deeply to other topics of study. But, parents should be deeply involved in it, not outside of it. None of it really involves opinion or anything controversial.

All of it relates directly to arts and science and community survival. None of it really trains kids to be good employees, it instead trains them to be sufficient. I hesitate to say self-sufficient, as no one person has time to build a house grow food, make clothing, and all that, but we can be parts of a community that provide much of what we need. This may seem impractical, but someone is doing all the things we are not doing to provide for our current needs. How much of our own needs do we ourselves meet. I hazard to guess most would have to honestly say "none". That's frightening to me. Most of us are useless to ourselves and burdens on others then. What we call practical and impractical might need to be reversed.

[–]soundsituation 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

As usual, insightful and beyond what I expected. I think you've proposed a comprehensive curriculum. But what about kids whose parents don't have a good a grasp of grammar, logic and rhetoric, or any of the hands-on skills you listed, and who would truly be better served by professional instructors?

I personally love the lecture format (and I agree with you that permitting dialogue makes for a better experience) but when teachers' training institutions have been ideologically captured, education can easily become indoctrination. In a system that teaches logic and rhetoric instead of critical theory, though, I think lecture works well.

Since you're a Catholic who is interested in educational reform, you might like this episode of the First Things podcast. No pressure, though. The TLDR is that the guest speaker believes schools can be fixed by reintroducing the teaching of Western Civilization and instituting an alternative system of teachers' training programs focused on classical education.

Apologies for not addressing your larger point of revolutionizing the main purpose of education. I don't think it's important whether I agree or disagree (in truth I'm unsure), I'm just appreciative of the unconventional view.

[–]FlippyKing 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I think the education should not be some assembly line thing you shove kids through. That our modern public education system was spread about the country during industrialization is not an accident but that it was is still ingrained into it. The whole need for excess labor, and those above us seeing kids as nothing more than that, has everything to do with the really dehumanizing aspects of it. A primary dehumanizing aspect of it is that the kid is not hanging around with parents and grandparents (really, grandparents are the key here, as adults work and grandparents are supposed to pass on culture) uncles, cousins, but instead are under the supervision of 'professionals'. That is not a dig at professional teachers, but they are to kids what a single vax is to a whole immune system.

The parents should be part of the education process, and they should be gaining a good grasp of those things as best as possible. One of the things that I think was at the start of the Suzuki method of musical training is that the parent was there for the lesson to learn what the kid should learn. That did not mean the parent also learned violin or piano but it didn't rule it out either. Education could be a big community building and skill sharing and learning endeavor. Schools should hardly close really, it should be analogous to a big open-air market or commons where problems are solved. Education is sort of pointless if it does not address real life problems, and it is learned better when it is. This is just like in classical music where the training centers around learning the music, not theory or some weird details. Those matter and are taught, but the music is first.

I'm not getting rid of professionals, but I'm putting them in their place. Right now there are politicians and pundits talking about how important it is to turn over kids to professionals with no questions asked. Melissa Perry Harris said as much as an attempt to tamp down the push back in Virginia over what schools are teaching. Teach useful things with no BS to all who need it, put parents back in charge and in contact with their kids (as opposed to working 3-4 jobs per parenting pair), and change the focus from serving industries who have shipped manufacturing away to serving community needs locally.

A kid in rural Maine does not need the same education even as a kid in coastal Maine, nor in NYC. A kid in NYC does not need the same edcuation as kid in LA or Lincoln NE. A kid in rural New Mexico does not need the same education as any of these and vice versa. Why even try to teach them the same things? To make them easier to control, but certainly not give them control over their own lives or communities. The same can be said for the parents who have been taught for purposes that are not their own, arrogance of those who found success in 'the world' via their education and training not withstanding.

I agree with loving lecture format. I seek them out on youtube and used to go in prepared for lectures in college and all that. But, I was an adult, the teacher were not lying to me and if they were I asked questions. I took a lot of anthropology classes so there was a good mix of somewhat solid social-science along with less empirical and more activist creation things being taught. I was in school maybe at the beginning of the change in social sciences where the bs from the more useless parts of the 'humanities', was starting to filter in. But, lectures are tailor made for indoctrination and leading audiences down carefully paved roads that end up in nonsense. (again, why I go sentence by sentence with these TRA posts. They didn't invent the technique, they learned it in school.)

I'll watch the First things, hopefully Wednesday. Just on the title, if not parents, then who? Politicians? See my reply about political parties in this sub. Politicizing problems is a way to only ever think about bad choices handed to us by bad people who everyone already acknowledge lie openly and freely to us. What could go wrong? More importantly, how could anything ever go right?

Well, what is the main purpose of education now? What should it be? Those are the most important questions because that is where the roots of all the problems are. Let's say someone claims the main purpose is to make a more cohesive society. OK, then what are we making that more cohesive society out of? Communities? Cogs in a machine? Fully sufficient and capable citizens in functional and sufficient communities? Not at the moment. We churn out kids who either run from high school principle to ceo/business owner, or military recruiter, or college dean, or prison warden, always to the next outside authority to use their labor (first two) or to warehouse them temporarily (latter two).

Since you brought up my catholicism this is probably also all tied to a reorganization of the economy, which those who rule over us are currently enforcing on us as we speak. But a perhaps better economic system that might also match what I'm saying about education could be found in Distributism, which is not capitalism and not socialism or communism. I think it is compatible with some forms of anarchism, but I have not dug enough into it. It started with an encyclical written by Pope Leo XIII and was expanded upon by CK Chesterton and one other person who was more of an economist than either of them. Instead of "you'll own nothing and be happy" (or we'll shot our or lock you in fema camps is probably the fine print) it is about the opposite of a few capitalists owning everything or a government owning everything and us owning nothing, where instead we all own our things. What a crazy idea! Not some banker (capitalism) or government or committee (communism or socialism) far away owning your house or farm but you! The shop keeper owns his shop, not his lender. The farmers in Ukraine would not be tossed off their farms and all starved to death just because they were a threat to lawyers in Moscow. Bill Gates would not be buying up all the farms as families are foreclosed on. Imagine that.

I do think though, nothing I'm typing about is about gender. Women's rights in feudal Europe were better than during the primitive accumulation phase of capitalism or since. If I should add "until recently" is questionable. "We want to smoke too" (the big astro-turfed feminist ad campaign of the 1920's), or "we want to be slaves to The capitalist Man too" are hardly liberating rallying cries. Other aspects of how the modern world creates bad choices for women include the inconvenience of pregnancy in the workplace (and this might go back to either the start of this or an other post's thread), and how sexualizing everything creates a distraction from looking at society and all its warts, as well as pushes everyone into ridiculous and very shallow standards.

[–]TheOnyxGoddess 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Well, the school I WENT TO almost made me into a murderer (prepared a hitlist, put up standards of who to kill and not to kill and protocols of what to do when an innocent gets in the way, looking forward to prison time where I'm away from my original home and school life, which are both shitty etc) and years before that they've been driving kids to suicide with their horrible way of managing bullying issues, with their empty promises of "handling bullies". I wonder what's the next way of killing kids after this?

Disclaimer: I'm not saying even most or all schools, I'm just saying there are schools which have been doing that.

[–]grassfed 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

😮