I really appreciate what Evan said about how people perceive us and what Maia said about how blithely parents ta' day take away those vital years of passage from their kids.
Not that the government indoctrination centers are quite the same as authentic community. But they're less complete in their control structures. And so those vital high school years are all about the adventures and escapades that grow out of working around that system.
Think about it. When old school friends get together after some years, do they reminisce about those wonderful biology lectures Mr. Doherty gave? Or how much they missed those period bells and how they've thought about having them installed in their own homes?
No. Sometimes they'll talk about a singularly decent mentor or teacher. But those things that make those people great are all about how they, too, work around the system to sneak a little humanity into the mix.
These other programs about which Maia and Evan write, they're just an outgrowth or response to the failures of the Prussian gymnasium system after which our public school system is modeled*. When a kid bucks all of that enough to frighten the parents, the parents themselves never had anything different or better. In these generations, they don't even know what's missing. And so they fall for the sales pitch.
"Angry, uncooperative, inconvenient kid? At a loss as to how to bring them into conformity? Fear not, m'lady! We can make all that anger and rebellion go away, make them compliant and clean cut, just like you wanted. Just get your credit card out and call 1-800-snatch-my-kid ..."
* I'm not kidding, here's the evidence:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htmso long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would neither be created nor destroyed it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?
--stephen Hawking, English scientist
_________________
fka ~ Antigen
Drug war POW
Straight, Sarasota
`80 - `82
return undef() if /coercion/i;
[ This Message was edited by: Eudora on 2006-04-21 07:33 ]
