We struggle in this country to ever get to the "root" of a problem. We continue to gloss over how we arrived at where we are and then clutch our pearls when the shit hits the fan....again and again.
Rittenhouse is the result of truly crappy parents, (which, imo, recieves far too little attention in this country) ignorant politics, a cult…
We struggle in this country to ever get to the "root" of a problem. We continue to gloss over how we arrived at where we are and then clutch our pearls when the shit hits the fan....again and again.
Rittenhouse is the result of truly crappy parents, (which, imo, recieves far too little attention in this country) ignorant politics, a culture that has NO nuance around anything military, and very easily accessible handguns.
The idiots that can't process what CRT actually is and have instead used it as a stand in for "I don't want my kids learning that some of their ancestors may have been on the wrong side of history" are too numerous to count. Again, ignorance. (How can you possibly want to preserve the honor of your long dead ancestors if they were slave owners?)
The left partisans that are unable to see anything except through a victim's lens.....again, ignorant.
The close minded, team oriented, zero sum game, players have taken over the field and they sadly, won't be easily moved.
Unfortunately, we don’t have empirical data to draw broad definitive conclusions about what makes good parenting. While clearly some parenting is terrible, so much is unknowable and uncontrollable, that any effort to systematize and — god forbid — enforce it is bound to result in coercive excess and woeful unintended consequences.
The truth is, we don’t know why some people do bad things and others don’t. Kids in idyllic homes turn into serial killers. Kids who are abused and neglected can become doctors and humanitarians. We can’t understand how and why these things happen so as to prescribe a better way.
One of the major revelations I had as a Peace Corps volunteer was that our system of schooling is a radical historical experiment, and we’re blind to it. In a traditional, non-migrant culture, kids are not sequestered for extended periods of each day among a cohort of their age peers. In a village of Nicaragua, kids spend 80-90% of their lives surrounded by people of all ages: elders, teens, adults, babies. The time they spend with people their own age is minimal, except near family such as siblings and cousins.
But we take an eight-year-old and stick her in a room with 29 others for 6 hours a day, five days a week. If she doesn’t have a large, close extended family, she may never have sustained interactions with a variety of older or younger kids, adults, elders or babies. This is radically different from how 99.9% of humans throughout history were raised. And we haven’t even considered the possible unintended consequences.
Traditional communities provide kids with wide variety of people to teach them a diversity of ways of living. They see kids a little older who give them ideas about what they can be; they see kids a little younger to help them understand how they’ve grown. The boys spend hours a day in the fields with their brothers and cousins, fathers and uncles, and even grandpa. The girls are in the home with their sisters and mothers, grandmothers and aunts, and the little babies. (I’m not extolling the gender roles here; I’m describing the diverse age exposure on a day-to-day basis).
But for a kid in an American nuclear family, all she has for a frame of reference are mommy, daddy, Ms. Teacher and the other 29 kids in her class. When does a sixteen-year-old get to spend time observing and relating to a 25-year-old, so as to have a role model for maturing? When does a 12-year-old learn what babies are like? How can an American child perceive her own maturity compared to younger kids if she has one or no siblings? If one of the adults in her life are deficient, who can she look to for a different vision of how to live a good life?
Our bizarre nuclear family and industrial child-rearing are so radically different from how most people in history were raised, and haven’t even stopped to look at what it means for the humans they (we) grow in to being. We fail to even acknowledge how new and unique it is. I think because we’re blind to even the existence of the experiment, we have no idea at all what its consequences have been. Maybe it’s been overall beneficial, maybe not. But we aren’t even asking the questions.
There really is no question to ask. We don't work in the fields for the most part. We work in factories or offices. So it may be a relatively new way to raise humans, but we can't reverse it.
Decades ago I read Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society. It made sense then but I was a 24 year old with no children. By the time I had a child, I worked 55 hours per week running a restaurant. In a few years, I was working in an office with a part time gig on weekends. So what to do? Well we sent our boy to school and he did fine. We were a 2 income family and not too far above the poverty line till my mid 30s.
So boys in the fields is no more applicable to us than living in an igloo. The idea that we can live is a different way is a bit dreamy.
I’m not proposing a return to agrarianism. Nor am I suggesting individual families have the ability to opt out. I’m not even taking the position that the current system is bad.
I’m saying it’s remarkably new, and we don’t understand what it may or may not be doing to our society. I am suggesting we need to consider whether the industrial warehousing of kids, and the fragmenting of the extended family and networked communities, have had unintended consequences which could be ameliorated by different social policies.
If warranted to make a better society, we can create an environment more friendly to labor, so that families can remain rooted in place and grow into a broad network. We can rethink age-based cohorts in education, and the resources we put into how we raise our kids. One-room schoolhouses may not be resource efficient, but they might be a remedy for some of the unintended consequences of the current system. We don’t need to be single-mindedly focused on efficiency as the outcome—efficient mobility of labor, efficient storage and education of children—so as to sacrifice quality. That’s a choice we need to consider if the research and evidence suggests it is creating a problem.
The current social order is so new, we should be trying to see what these methods have wrought, so as to better target what we might do to improve them.
All fine but it sounds like something based on words - so like the world as understood by Plato or Aristotle. I suggest looking at the real systems that exist. Like an engineer would look at a manufacturing process. So.. can we have ungraded classrooms? Sure. Can we allow home schooling - ok. But I see the entire modern world as schooled and divided up - and has been so for more than a century.
It has not been so “for more than a century” for most people. It was only in the 1950’s that the majority of Americans attended school full-time until the age of 16.
And even then, a century in middle America is an infinitesimal section of the human population through history.
I am not offering a policy prescription for solving a problem. I’m not even claiming that there IS a problem. It’s an observation that we have no idea what we’ve done, and might benefit from taking a look.
We need to recognize and acknowledge how remarkably unusual and new this social order is, and ask if there have been unintended negative consequences. If there have, we need to consider whether there are ways to ameliorate those consequences without sacrificing whatever benefits have been gained.
Sure we have no idea but let's not play word games. So while everyone may not have attended school in the form you mention - in fact schooling was widespread in the North and West at least, so even folks like Larry Doby (Paterson NJ) attended H.S. And we see schooling among urban folks in places as different at Japan and Germany or California and Massachusetts.
At 70, I have watched all manner of arguments and so forth. But I don't see it useful to speculate about the impossible. I prefer to look to smaller ideas. So i am interested in ideas like how (supposedly) in Japan the classroom is set up to bring all along together - whereas our system let the better students leave the slow pokes behind.
I also remember "modern math" and "Pscc Chemistry and Physics" in the mid 1960s.
Widespread, but in a very different form, and far from universal. Kids were doing half-days in one-room schoolhouses. The warehousing in single-age cohorts didn’t become widespread, much less universal, until very, very recently.
And it also has to be understood in the context of the fragmentation of the extended family and the uprooting of the local communities. Not only are we warehousing kids in single-age cohorts for uniquely extended podridos of time, but when they’re not warehoused they’re more isolated from integrated communities than at any time in history before.
The demand for mobile labor has pushed us to move and live far from our family and community roots. We’re well into the third or fourth generation, but it’s become much more universal than it was even 50 years ago.
So kids leave school and come home to a tiny nuclear family. At most they see grandma a few times a year. They never care for a crying baby. They never go to work or go fishing with their older cousins. They never spend days at a time with an ailing grandparent. They’re not intimate with the aridity and phases of life.
I would posit that leaves young adults unmoored un profound ways. Young men, in particular, are the principal sources of violence in our communities. Would a stronger mooring in the community ameliorate that? Would social cohesion help us to live better with our neighbors? And is this social experiment contributing to the problem?
I don’t know. But it should be studied. Maybe it’s nothing. But we ought to try to find out.
Well again, I think expending intellectual effort to somehow disagree re schooling is much ago about little. Or the classroom in "Blue Angel" would seem strange to us, but it does not. Same with the little rascals.
Did industrialization harm us? No doubt. But that ship has sailed.
Social cohesion is great. Can we go back? I don't see it. But if you do, please point the way.
(1) Labor policy that shifts the balance back toward labor and away from capital so that families can remain rooted in one place. Unions? Maybe. But something stronger and more vital may be needed.
(2) Prioritization of resources to public education so that schools can be re-imagined as vital social learning communities, rather than warehouses.
Is this needed? We need to ask the question.
Will it work? We need to identify the problem and diagnose its cause.
Can it be done? Someone smarter than me will have to answer that.
There have been shitty parents as long as there have been families, but what could have stopped Kyle is if those who are thought leaders stopped encouraging the cult of the gun. But these folks (by and large Republicans) like to portray themselves as gun owners and so on.
I cannot imagine John Adams today being other than embarrassed by what pretends to be conservatism.
Yes yes yes. Rittenhouse’s mother drove him and his rifle to the protest. He said he wanted to protect businesses and provide medical aid. This is a delusional kid, and he’s been encouraged in his delusions. Thousands of people were there, only 2 died. They were the ones who ran into Kyle
That his mother did NOT drive l him there was admitted into evidence and accepted as fact by both sides of the case. Kyle drove to the scene with Black, who procured the gun for him. What his mother didn't do was open a can of whupass on him when she found out he had an assault rifle, and force him to get rid of it. I really don't think the Rittenhouses are actively criminal, just weak and stupid.
We struggle in this country to ever get to the "root" of a problem. We continue to gloss over how we arrived at where we are and then clutch our pearls when the shit hits the fan....again and again.
Rittenhouse is the result of truly crappy parents, (which, imo, recieves far too little attention in this country) ignorant politics, a culture that has NO nuance around anything military, and very easily accessible handguns.
The idiots that can't process what CRT actually is and have instead used it as a stand in for "I don't want my kids learning that some of their ancestors may have been on the wrong side of history" are too numerous to count. Again, ignorance. (How can you possibly want to preserve the honor of your long dead ancestors if they were slave owners?)
The left partisans that are unable to see anything except through a victim's lens.....again, ignorant.
The close minded, team oriented, zero sum game, players have taken over the field and they sadly, won't be easily moved.
Unfortunately, we don’t have empirical data to draw broad definitive conclusions about what makes good parenting. While clearly some parenting is terrible, so much is unknowable and uncontrollable, that any effort to systematize and — god forbid — enforce it is bound to result in coercive excess and woeful unintended consequences.
The truth is, we don’t know why some people do bad things and others don’t. Kids in idyllic homes turn into serial killers. Kids who are abused and neglected can become doctors and humanitarians. We can’t understand how and why these things happen so as to prescribe a better way.
One of the major revelations I had as a Peace Corps volunteer was that our system of schooling is a radical historical experiment, and we’re blind to it. In a traditional, non-migrant culture, kids are not sequestered for extended periods of each day among a cohort of their age peers. In a village of Nicaragua, kids spend 80-90% of their lives surrounded by people of all ages: elders, teens, adults, babies. The time they spend with people their own age is minimal, except near family such as siblings and cousins.
But we take an eight-year-old and stick her in a room with 29 others for 6 hours a day, five days a week. If she doesn’t have a large, close extended family, she may never have sustained interactions with a variety of older or younger kids, adults, elders or babies. This is radically different from how 99.9% of humans throughout history were raised. And we haven’t even considered the possible unintended consequences.
Traditional communities provide kids with wide variety of people to teach them a diversity of ways of living. They see kids a little older who give them ideas about what they can be; they see kids a little younger to help them understand how they’ve grown. The boys spend hours a day in the fields with their brothers and cousins, fathers and uncles, and even grandpa. The girls are in the home with their sisters and mothers, grandmothers and aunts, and the little babies. (I’m not extolling the gender roles here; I’m describing the diverse age exposure on a day-to-day basis).
But for a kid in an American nuclear family, all she has for a frame of reference are mommy, daddy, Ms. Teacher and the other 29 kids in her class. When does a sixteen-year-old get to spend time observing and relating to a 25-year-old, so as to have a role model for maturing? When does a 12-year-old learn what babies are like? How can an American child perceive her own maturity compared to younger kids if she has one or no siblings? If one of the adults in her life are deficient, who can she look to for a different vision of how to live a good life?
Our bizarre nuclear family and industrial child-rearing are so radically different from how most people in history were raised, and haven’t even stopped to look at what it means for the humans they (we) grow in to being. We fail to even acknowledge how new and unique it is. I think because we’re blind to even the existence of the experiment, we have no idea at all what its consequences have been. Maybe it’s been overall beneficial, maybe not. But we aren’t even asking the questions.
There really is no question to ask. We don't work in the fields for the most part. We work in factories or offices. So it may be a relatively new way to raise humans, but we can't reverse it.
Decades ago I read Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society. It made sense then but I was a 24 year old with no children. By the time I had a child, I worked 55 hours per week running a restaurant. In a few years, I was working in an office with a part time gig on weekends. So what to do? Well we sent our boy to school and he did fine. We were a 2 income family and not too far above the poverty line till my mid 30s.
So boys in the fields is no more applicable to us than living in an igloo. The idea that we can live is a different way is a bit dreamy.
I’m not proposing a return to agrarianism. Nor am I suggesting individual families have the ability to opt out. I’m not even taking the position that the current system is bad.
I’m saying it’s remarkably new, and we don’t understand what it may or may not be doing to our society. I am suggesting we need to consider whether the industrial warehousing of kids, and the fragmenting of the extended family and networked communities, have had unintended consequences which could be ameliorated by different social policies.
If warranted to make a better society, we can create an environment more friendly to labor, so that families can remain rooted in place and grow into a broad network. We can rethink age-based cohorts in education, and the resources we put into how we raise our kids. One-room schoolhouses may not be resource efficient, but they might be a remedy for some of the unintended consequences of the current system. We don’t need to be single-mindedly focused on efficiency as the outcome—efficient mobility of labor, efficient storage and education of children—so as to sacrifice quality. That’s a choice we need to consider if the research and evidence suggests it is creating a problem.
The current social order is so new, we should be trying to see what these methods have wrought, so as to better target what we might do to improve them.
All fine but it sounds like something based on words - so like the world as understood by Plato or Aristotle. I suggest looking at the real systems that exist. Like an engineer would look at a manufacturing process. So.. can we have ungraded classrooms? Sure. Can we allow home schooling - ok. But I see the entire modern world as schooled and divided up - and has been so for more than a century.
It has not been so “for more than a century” for most people. It was only in the 1950’s that the majority of Americans attended school full-time until the age of 16.
And even then, a century in middle America is an infinitesimal section of the human population through history.
I am not offering a policy prescription for solving a problem. I’m not even claiming that there IS a problem. It’s an observation that we have no idea what we’ve done, and might benefit from taking a look.
We need to recognize and acknowledge how remarkably unusual and new this social order is, and ask if there have been unintended negative consequences. If there have, we need to consider whether there are ways to ameliorate those consequences without sacrificing whatever benefits have been gained.
But until we look, we’ll never know.
Sure we have no idea but let's not play word games. So while everyone may not have attended school in the form you mention - in fact schooling was widespread in the North and West at least, so even folks like Larry Doby (Paterson NJ) attended H.S. And we see schooling among urban folks in places as different at Japan and Germany or California and Massachusetts.
At 70, I have watched all manner of arguments and so forth. But I don't see it useful to speculate about the impossible. I prefer to look to smaller ideas. So i am interested in ideas like how (supposedly) in Japan the classroom is set up to bring all along together - whereas our system let the better students leave the slow pokes behind.
I also remember "modern math" and "Pscc Chemistry and Physics" in the mid 1960s.
Widespread, but in a very different form, and far from universal. Kids were doing half-days in one-room schoolhouses. The warehousing in single-age cohorts didn’t become widespread, much less universal, until very, very recently.
And it also has to be understood in the context of the fragmentation of the extended family and the uprooting of the local communities. Not only are we warehousing kids in single-age cohorts for uniquely extended podridos of time, but when they’re not warehoused they’re more isolated from integrated communities than at any time in history before.
The demand for mobile labor has pushed us to move and live far from our family and community roots. We’re well into the third or fourth generation, but it’s become much more universal than it was even 50 years ago.
So kids leave school and come home to a tiny nuclear family. At most they see grandma a few times a year. They never care for a crying baby. They never go to work or go fishing with their older cousins. They never spend days at a time with an ailing grandparent. They’re not intimate with the aridity and phases of life.
I would posit that leaves young adults unmoored un profound ways. Young men, in particular, are the principal sources of violence in our communities. Would a stronger mooring in the community ameliorate that? Would social cohesion help us to live better with our neighbors? And is this social experiment contributing to the problem?
I don’t know. But it should be studied. Maybe it’s nothing. But we ought to try to find out.
Well again, I think expending intellectual effort to somehow disagree re schooling is much ago about little. Or the classroom in "Blue Angel" would seem strange to us, but it does not. Same with the little rascals.
Did industrialization harm us? No doubt. But that ship has sailed.
Social cohesion is great. Can we go back? I don't see it. But if you do, please point the way.
(1) Labor policy that shifts the balance back toward labor and away from capital so that families can remain rooted in one place. Unions? Maybe. But something stronger and more vital may be needed.
(2) Prioritization of resources to public education so that schools can be re-imagined as vital social learning communities, rather than warehouses.
Is this needed? We need to ask the question.
Will it work? We need to identify the problem and diagnose its cause.
Can it be done? Someone smarter than me will have to answer that.
There have been shitty parents as long as there have been families, but what could have stopped Kyle is if those who are thought leaders stopped encouraging the cult of the gun. But these folks (by and large Republicans) like to portray themselves as gun owners and so on.
I cannot imagine John Adams today being other than embarrassed by what pretends to be conservatism.
Yes yes yes. Rittenhouse’s mother drove him and his rifle to the protest. He said he wanted to protect businesses and provide medical aid. This is a delusional kid, and he’s been encouraged in his delusions. Thousands of people were there, only 2 died. They were the ones who ran into Kyle
That his mother did NOT drive l him there was admitted into evidence and accepted as fact by both sides of the case. Kyle drove to the scene with Black, who procured the gun for him. What his mother didn't do was open a can of whupass on him when she found out he had an assault rifle, and force him to get rid of it. I really don't think the Rittenhouses are actively criminal, just weak and stupid.
Loved “Can of whupass”