Famjaztique :nworthy: :nworthy: :nworthy:
I know this may seem simplistic and unconventional, obvious and rediculous all at the same time, but... what if you found and solved the problem already? School, as we do it these days, based on the Prussian gymnasium model, is one messed up thing to do to anyone, never mind impressionable, helpless, trusting children. If getting out of school is that good for him, why do anything else? Why borrow trouble?
It's been my contention for some time now that the troubled parent industry* is a natural and necessary adjunct to our modern education system. As it becomes more toxic and more stressful to the average kid, more and more kids are snapping under the pressure, acting out in ways that we old farts find disturbing and inexplicable.
But we're making kids just the same today as we have for millions of years. It's the schools and the communities (or lack thereof) in which they exist that are changing. To say that a kid who's not happy and thriving in this monstrosity must somehow be disordered and in need of treatment sounds just
exactly the same to me as Stalin's programe for "treating" people who were too mentally ill to be happy in the workers' paradise he'd given them.
But getting back to another point. What would be the value of studies to compare outcomes, injuries, etc.? IMO, not a whole hell of a lot. Certainly the true believers will not be impressed. They're convinced that their kids would be dead w/o the program. They liken it to chemo therapy or something. The trouble is there is no emperical evidence at all to support that there was anything wrong with the kids to begin with. But others outside of these cults might stand up and take notice if we could show, through peer reviewed study, the actual rates of suicide and other horrid outcomes that I believe come out of these programs.
It would be better, by far, to examine how the schools and changes in our society at large (Nazification?) and changes in the economy and in politics and war; how do these things contribute to our kids' wellbeing? And are we really seeing kids breaking down? Or are we just being overly nostalgic about our own history and deeming them disordered if they turn out a bit more like Eddy Haskel than like Wally Cleaver?
Honestly, I think that's the root of the problem. Our parents and grandparents fell for the scam that they needed professional help to make and raise kids. It was a like. The industrial revolution needed professionals to break children while they're young, to prevent them from becoming fully independent, free soverign adults. Free soverign adults don't make very good factory workers nor office workers. And, the way things are going today, any kid who resists the breaking process, who reacts to the inarticulable insult to their humanity is deemed disordered and tagged and cataloged for further processing.
Don't fall for it, that's all. Just do what comes naturally; love them.
*By 'troubled parent industry' I don't mean that parents are the only ones who screw kids up. I don't even believe that most, or even a significant minority of these kids are actually disordered or dysfunctional or in need of fixing at all. By troubled parent, I mean parents who take that bait, hook, line and sinker and who, unlike you, let the full force and brunt of the situation fall to their kids while they pay some used car salesman lots and lots of money to continually tell them they're doing the right thing, no matter what their gut says.
In all history, there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. Only one who knows the disastrous effects of a long war can realize the supreme importance of rapidity in bringing it to a close. It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war who can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on.
--Sun Tzu (author of The Art of War
