Actually this isnt as much of a nonsense concept as you are insinuating it would be. It wouldn't teach kids to be rebellious, instead it would help them to understand they have the freedom to choose their own path in life. If the right wings can do it why cant the left wings? Honestly I'm not a fan of either but I tend to lean to the left on most social issues, education being one of them. So my question is this, what stops us from starting a school to save teens from their psycho, controlling selfish parents and teach them a thing or two about the real world, like REAL American history including an emphasis on current events and the last few decades, and teach about real life lessons. How inappropriate would it be for a high school to teach a class about relationships and dealing with grief, addiction, illness and life struggles? Especially when we would be educating them instead of just punishing and forbidding them to ever partake in any normal life experiences. We would essentially be creating the next generation of activists... which in this day and age have dwindled dangerously so much so that our government thinks they can get away with just about anything. Dick Chaney shot a guy in the face for fucks sake. wtf?
anyway Im in support of it and I garrantee you if I had the money I would.
Politics and culture norms prevent us from starting such a school. There are many aspects of child-rearing that are taken for granted, but the most basic myth is that the kind of adult a person becomes is dictated solely by how the person was raised. Mothers take on themselves all the credit or blame for how their children turn out. Modern neurology and behaviorists that base their research in biology and evolution beg to differ. Children are not 'blank slates' upon which parents and society can imprint any outcome they wish if only they could figure out the right parenting techniques to do so. That was my point in bringing up the failure of attempting to design society from the top-down. It doesn't work. Recent research points out that not only does a 'one size fits all' approach to children doomed to fail, but that to a certain extent parenting is impotent to form a particular outcome. Some personality traits are genetically based in the way that right-handedness is. The science is in its infancy, but evidence strongly supports that a complex, innate human, nature exists. Further, the research suggests the current peer group anyone finds themselves in (child or adult) can influence behavior far more than parenting can. People adjust to their current social milieu and can readjust to a new milieu. As evolved social animals, we wish to be accepted by our peers and thus are adept at doing this. Thus programs work as long as the milieu is controlled (a theme we've seen stated often on Fornit's). I direct you to Steven Pinker's
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, an excellent book.
