I&#39;ve even raped and killed a mountain panda in the hills of Shaanxi.

I have always thought Junior High and much of High school was pointless and kids could be doing better things with their time like learning how to be independent human beings. This whole "asking permission to pee" thing does nothing but set the stage for excess. No one knows how to handle themselves when they get to college at that age. This is why people do things like eat nothing but french fries and cherry coke for three meals a day, fuck boring people and such.

Maybe we should do what they do in some cultures and send kids on walk-abouts or something. Make them work for awhile instead of spending time in graphic arts class making 4:20 t-shirts.

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yeah the whole "throw them in the water and see if they can swim" thing is bad. Another idea is coming-of-age rituals being brought back for more people than just the Jews.

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My Mother withdrew my two youngest siblings from school when they were nine and ten and kind of took a radical approach and let them decide what they wanted to learn. (it this whole movement called unschooling) She took kind of a leap of faith but I think it did a lot of good in the end. They are really smart kids so I think that helped. They became really independent kids and I think because of it they are less likely to freak out when they get to college. They aren't freaks who have no social life and such they have really full lives but they don't indulge in excess all that much and can take care of themselves. They are now 13 and 15 and have jobs, study things that interest them and travel when it pleases them. Maybe gliding into adult-hood is a better idea. There seems to be less angst with my brother and sister.

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Your mother RULES. I don't plan on having children, but if I did, I'd home-school them, of course. Public school is only good for turning kids into mean, narrow-minded, frightened adults, and most private schools aren't much better.

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My Mother got sick of the schools (both private and public) and said, I could do better.

The thing is I really love the idea of public schools in theory. The government offering free public education for 12/13 years is a fabulous idea and novel in some respects but it is all the dogma (like with a lot of organized religions) that puts me off. It is bull-shit, no one gets the funding they really need, no one pays attention to what really goes on. I worked in the public school system a few different times and I was just horrified by how many burned out teachers there were and they openly told me they got into the job because of the vacation time and they were waiting for their retirement which offered a pension. So if you have someone who is just cruising along many times they won't really put any effort into it.

Of course the education really isn't free. If you want to do any extra activities (especially in high school) it costs. So if a kid is poor often they are shit out of luck. The idea of making some kid's parents put out 1,000 dollars an activity seems so messed up.

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I think the main problem is that when the government offers "education," you have to realize that what they're really offering is pro-state propaganda. Public schools teach kids to sit down and shut up, and not to question "authority," and to marinate in their own medicority, just like the government flunkies who are "teaching" them.

I would never send my kids to the government for "education." I don't like the job our government is doing on anything else, so why should their "education" be any different? I'm astonished by parents who blithely send their kids off to public schools and then wonder why their kids become stupid, angry, and classist. Um, maybe because they're being taught by the government?

People are idiots.

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People aren't always idiots, some are just too trusting of the environment and there are people who are doing their best to educate kids and help them out. There is just too many who are apathetic.

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I think we may be having two different conversations. :)

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*laughs*
Well I say this because I agree with some points of your opinion that the general dogma of state run schools is to encourage the existence of calm accepting masses. After all the original ideology of the public school system in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century was to create factory workers. They taught people to respect authority, to do boring tasks over and over without question and to fear a bad report. That has been shifted from the factory job to the office job or service job.
People go with it because it seems easy if you just accept it.
But there are still people who do genuinely try and actually teach kids things and how to be independent beings and think for themselves. They are few and far between.
I had an incredible teacher when I was 13. I say she was incredible because she even interested kids who normally weren't keen on what was being tossed at them. She encouraged a lot of conversation and spirit in people. I remember distinctly this one project we did (it was US history we were taking) where we spent several weeks playing as if we were colonists in early America and we started off fairly peaceful but then we got caught up in taking as much land as possible and killing Indians and what not and when everything failed in the end and people were dying in this role-playing game she kind of took us out of it and said, "look at what you are doing." We learned how easy it was to get caught up in the blind game of capitalism and colonial warring. Fascinating stuff.
It is a rare situation.

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Yeah, I agree with you that situations like that are rare. I've been blessed by the presence of a few--a VERY few--good teachers in my life.

Being a good teacher in a public school is a revolutionary act. Bless them for their forebearance, and for actually teaching their students to analyze and think. I wonder what this world would be like if ALL teachers actually, well, TAUGHT?

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I think that teachers should be forced to take a break every five years and do something else. A sabbatical if you will. Not just hang out and do nothing but do something entirely different. Go work in a restaurant or maybe travel. Just something that takes them away and teaches them something new. It might broaden their experience and maybe foster a sense of empathy.

I do have a lot of sympathy for many teachers because they are often held to various requirements and many don't want to do it. My Mom sorta sees this one teacher (that is a complicated situation) and he talks about how much shit he has to put up with from the school board, a community, state requirements and then the general politics from various teachers. He is a real bad-ass and works really hard to keep a lot of that away from the classroom. But at the same time it leaves him really exhausted.

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Yeah...plus, so many of the kids are poorly-socialized, because their parents just don't give a shit. It's all well and good for me to wish that teachers cared more, but the sad fact is, most kids don't deserve any kindness. They're animals--racist, classist, sexist, and stupid from being raised by TV since birth. Even if a teacher went the extra mile, it wouldn't matter to most of their students.

Oh, it's all just so depressing. :)

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It is depressing. The part that depressed me the most were the kids who were six and everyone was giving up on them. The parents didn't seem to understand what was going on, the teachers were essentially placing the kid in one place and saying, "you are going to be a failure for the rest of your life" and everyone just went with it.

It made me leave.
My cousin was a teacher for a number of years and she left eventually. She said, "I left because I didn't want to hate kids or other people. It got to be too much."

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This is so, so sad. I wish there were more solutions, besides individual parents making the decision to home-school. We need systemic change, and we need it NOW.

My inclination is to encourage people who don't have the resources to home-school, not to breed. But of course, those are the very ones who ARE breeding. Thus, more thrown-away 6 tear-olds.

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That's great, but I don't really see most parents able to do that, unfortunately.

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Yeah I suppose not. Though my Mom did it at the craziest point in her life. She was newly divorced had no freaking money whatsoever. I mean nothing. She worked in a retail job plus a few other gigs as a musician and everyone was kind of a crazy mess after the past few years. Our Father had essentially walked out on their lives, my youngest brother was really a mess emotionally and she just kinda let them be. She let them take care of themselves when she was at work and decided to change her schedule a bit so that she could see them a little more. The big thing was despite having no money and never really being able to pay the bills on time she was able to spend more time with them and everyone got to sleep in for once. The sleep factor made a huge difference in their lives. I had just moved out so I couldn't be there all the time either. Though for awhile I did move back in and that was kind of interesting. Everyone did their own thing, no one had any money yet we did a lot of things and I would sometimes teach them things or I would find resources for whatever it was they were interested in. Damn were we ever broke.

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Junior high and high school are intended* to teach us discipline (read: conditioning) so that we can comply with the needs of the work force, consumer society and democratic system. This is invaluable to the overall social order. It should be clear, however, that the people who run this country (in terms of politics and business) are usually the ones who learned how to live outside this system and not only get away with it but be rewarded for it.

There is little value to improving education. If we did, we'd have too many chefs. The education system acts as a Brave New World for pumping out Betas (honors students) and Gammas. Alphas and Deltas are those who choose not to abide by the rules; the former are successful at it, the latter unsuccessful.

* This may be more of an evolutionary side effect rather than a deliberate effort, I'm unsure.

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Well, jr and High schools are just extensions of elementary schools. These were all designed to produce factory workers, basically. Sending people to college who are going to sell shoes is a travesty.

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Agreed.

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Yeah see there is that my problem. At the age of seven I had decided I had enough of this seatwork crap.
I come from a family where no one wants to join in on that fun and we tend to respond by ignoring such things and doing what makes us happy. It is like that Kauffman and Hart play, "You Can't Take it With You". That play is my family to a T. You are told to do what you like with your time as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else and you are being fairly civilized with the rest of the human race. Mind you this has so-far created me a non-paid writer, my brother who is an actor, my sister who is considering medical school but is also keen on ballet and the cello and my youngest brother the musician.
Money and stuff isn't a huge deal to us. We like things but we would rather have a good time.

I don't suppose we are successful but we are cheerful.

I only work so I can keep myself in paper and books.

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Totally. I'm very much the same way. I've been fortunate that what I enjoyed happened to be in high demand long enough to help situate me in a comfortable financial position. I am often criticized for my unwillingness to abide by or recognized social value systems or definitions for success, almost as though it's some type of obligatory pursuit. People are funny.

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If you can make money at what you like doing then yay. If you can't so be it.

I just know too many people who are miserable with their jobs and situations and it puts me off.

My job pisses me off a lot but I also get a kick out of it in a weird sense. But I also have a spirit of being really honest with my managers and I get away with some of the lack of school spirit.

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In my business, the only positions that I look for a bachelor degree in are those which are administrative/maintenance positions (ones where I don't want a lot of critical thinking or rocking of the boat). People who have bachelor degrees, as a whole, tend to be more willing to jump through bullshit hoops in order to meet cultural/social expectations. They are easier to manage and tend to cause less "problems".

Conersely, I hire people more like myself when I need people who will take risks, challenge the status quo or promote growth/change.

Naturally, companies never hire people like me if they want stability.

Microsoft has a similar hiring ethic. Microsoft's reward (and requirement) for degrees has been directly related to their need for stabilization.

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bewing.livejournal.com

Someone has to be the legal guardian of kids, until they become independent. In our society, it has been chosen that parents are the ones. They usually take this duty to unfortunate extremes, and try to "instill their own values in their kids", etc.
So, there has to be a point where the legal guardians are FORCED to finally let go.
So, logically at that point, there has to be an arena where kids can truly learn independence. Work is not independence, so I don't accept your solution. College is it. I'm satisfied with our setup. Learning what it is to be free is valuable, so I reject your initial hypothesis.

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