Quote: (05-30-2016 03:23 AM)Architekt Wrote:
Just came across probably the most stunningly constructed article I've read for months.
It is a succinct summary of almost every issue I have with the modern education system and the ways that humanity is literally forgetting how to be human.
I highly recommend this read to anyone interested in the future of society and education, or who has/is interested in having children.
On the wildness of children
The other articles from the blog look interesting also, shall investigate soon
I'm going to play Devil's Advocate on this one.
That entire long article tries to resurrect the myth of the noble savage. And the idiot writing it recognises any "educated" person is going to see that, because about halfway through the article, having waxed lyrical about kids for fuck knows how many paragraphs, she tries to sweep the issue aside:
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Our DNA is a text, a vast, intricate sacred text, carrying information not only about ourselves but about the Kosmos we were created for. We all love clear water; we all love blue sky. Our natures, our wild human natures, have evolved, like the bear’s, over hundreds of thousands of years in an intricately detailed harmony with the infinitely detailed order and beauty of the Kosmos.
Is this a romantic “noble savage” argument? Does it mean that children in their “wild” state are perfect little angels? No. What it means is that no matter how smart we think we are, we are a species of mammal, and like every other species of mammal, we have a natural history, an evolved nature — a wild nature — that we disrespect at our peril.
Well, actually, that
is a noble savage argument. This author wants you to regard men as nothing more than animals, or mammals, beholden to our "wild" nature, i.e. our impulses.
She is what I call a "Replacement Atheist": she doesn't like the Christian idea of God (else why ridicule the missionaries who tried to bring some education and civilisation to the natives, out of a genuine passion and belief in God) and wants instead to substitute the physical universe as a mystical, all-knowing deity in which our role is just to be an animal. (And I do prefer 'replacement atheist' over the simpler 'pagan'. Paganism died out with the Vikings and isn't coming back without a nuclear war and the loss of all knowledge of chemistry and physics.)
This is a persistent theme of the Left. Equality, egalitarianism, Darwinism extended beyond its scientific bounds to a political theorem: the intent remains the same - to make man think he's nothing more than an animal, subject to his impulses (no matter if those impulses including fucking arseholes or, worse, kids) and therefore that anything is permitted.
Amid all the noble savage bullshit, there are a couple of crucial omissions. For one, child mortality rates in the "wild, uncivilised" world. For another, adult life expectancy in the "wild, uncivilised" world. Let's give you a little test and see if you can spot the third crucial omission, most glaringly missing from this excerpt:
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In Indigenous societies all over the world, on every continent, we see babies and young children held close by parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, siblings and cousins. We see children intimately embedded in the natural world and free to move and use their bodies outdoors. We see children embedded in their communities and free to observe and participate in adult work, leisure, and celebration. We see complex social structures of mixed-age extended family and clan which provide child care and teach respect and hold anti-social behavior in check far more effectively and with less conflict than the institutions we now rely on. We see people connected to the land with a depth and richness and sense of reciprocal ethical relationship that is unimaginable to modern urban humans.
What's missing here? Come on. If you're on this site it should be easy to detect.
Patriarchy. Men leading and running tribes. Virtually
nowhere on Earth do "uncivilised", tree-hugging, primitive societies organise themselves along matriarchal lines. Where they do, they stagnate and decay. Everywhere else in the "wild, at peace" world, men are running the joint. But for all her paeans to wild childhoods, there's not one word, not one acknowledgement of this implicit fact.
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We do not see children confined indoors for twelve years of their childhood, we do not see children segregated with same-age individuals under the care of strangers, we do not see a state of perpetual competition in which children are measured and ranked against their peers and in which “helping your neighbor” equals “cheating.” We do not see parents having to choose between raising their children alone with no support and paying strangers to do it for them. We do not see young people starving themselves, cutting themselves, killing themselves.
Here's the interesting part: 1950s America was about as "civilised" as you can get, and it didn't see any of these issues, either. And yet our societies have become
more permissive over time, more accepting of "alternative" lifestyles, so what's the reason? Not kids in the Prussian education system, that much is certain.
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This same psychological split, or dualism, drives Euro-western understandings of children and learning today. We see our children as savages or as noble savages, as innocent angels or as little demons out to drive us crazy, deprive us of sleep, ruin our sex lives, destroy our peace in restaurants and on airplanes. As John Holt famously said, we see them as “a mixture of expensive nuisance, slave, and superpet.” The one thing we have a hard time doing is seeing children as human beings very much like ourselves.
Yeah, um, no. "We", that is, real parents, do not see their kids as little angels or demons out to play on our natures. Real parents
do see them as little human beings, even if it takes a year or two to get past the sleep deprivation of young children and realise it.
The parent who
doesn't see his kids as people has a condition far more endemic to modern Western society and wholly unconnected with "loss of wildness": narcissism. Narcissists see the rest of the world as backdrop to their personal drama, not excluding their own children. Notice how the author thinks others only see their kids as supernatural forces? That's what we call projection, ladies and gentlemen.
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But the dualistic vision runs deep in our education system, which, as Peter Gray has pointed out, divides life into “work” (which is unpleasant but important) and “play” (which is enjoyable but without significance), human beings into “teachers” (who are in control in order to impart their knowledge) and “students” (who must be controlled in order to receive it.) The underlying belief that somebody always has to be in charge is stubbornly persistent, woven into our thinking at a very deep level. There always has to be a subject and an object, a master and a slave. We have forgotten how to live and let live.
Actually modern child psychology is pushing the idea of play-based learning, that young kids do learn better with unstructured activities within the school environment. That is slowly percolating into the school system, especially at the kindergarten level. It's also amusing that the author bewails the very idea of master and student when even the ancient Greeks -- from whom she steals the word
Kosmos -- honoured that relationship. Indeed that's another big chuckle with this article: she resorts to Greek ideas of beauty and order while basically tossing out the thorough and full education that most classical Greeks got - far more highbrow than our Prussian-product kids do today.
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Political theorist Toby Rollo has pointed out how the forcible subjugation of children by adults forms the psychological underpinning of every other model of political and economic subjugation. This is not a metaphor; it’s a structuring principle of political reality. During the days of overt empire and colonialism –– the same days in which our modern school system was created –– Indigenous people, people of color, women of all colors, and lower-class whites were all viewed as childlike, in need of fatherly tutelage and discipline. And because it was understood that children often required violent “chastisement” –– for their own good! –– it was natural that childlike adults would require the same.
Oh, fuck me. Substitute in "women" for "children" here and this would be a standard feminist screed, yet here it appears in an article that's supposedly about freeing children. Did you also notice the sneering contempt for "fatherly tutelage" in there? Remember what I said earlier about the omission of patriarchal norms in indigenous societies?
It also ignores some pretty potent truths: when white men encountered them, the "indigenous" natives were often doing shit that horrified those white men who had managed to contemplate existence somewhat more abstractly than said indigenous natives. Australian Aboriginals, for example, took child brides. And we're talking children even by the standards of the benighted white men, too.
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But the truth is we don’t know how to teach our children about nature because we ourselves were raised in the cinderblock world. We are, in the parlance of wildlife rehabilitators, unreleasable. I used to do wildlife rescue and rehabilitation, and the one thing we all knew was that a young animal kept too long in a cage would not be able to survive in the wild. Often, when you open the door to the cage, it will be afraid to go out; if it does go out, it won’t know what to do. The world has become unfamiliar, an alien place. This is what we have done to our children.
Again, the agenda here is to make man into nothing more than an animal, unable to get over his conditioning. The manosphere proves the lie to that assertion. And conservative values actually
do support getting men out and in touch with the natural world - that was the original purpose of the Sierra Club before it morphed into neocon idiocy. I can accept Teddy Roosevelt was homeschooled (by paid-for tutors, one might note), but neither would he have turned down the idea of a formal education - and indeed Roosevelt went to Harvard with some serious gaps in his knowledge.
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In many rural land-based societies, learning is not coerced; children are expected to voluntarily observe, absorb, practice, and master the knowledge and skills they will need as adults –– and they do. In these societies –– which exist on every inhabited continent –– even very young children are free to choose their own actions, to play, to explore, to participate, to take on meaningful responsibility. “Learning” is not conceived as a special activity at all, but as a natural by-product of being alive in the world.
Good old "back to the land" stuff, which ignores the fact those societies essentially rely on Western infrastructure, economics, and medicine to continue to exist. Indeed some of the greatest scientists and men who advanced our world were thought failures or expendable by their rural-minded families.
Lastly, let's ask the important question: who is telling me this?
Carol Black, the founder of the carolblack.org site, and whose bio on that site says:
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Carol Black is a writer and filmmaker, creator with her husband Neal Marlens of the Emmy-award-winning series The Wonder Years and director of the documentary film Schooling the World. She studied education and literature at Swarthmore College and UCLA, and after the birth of her children, left her career in the entertainment industry to become involved in the unschooling and alternative education movement and later to make independent nonprofit films. She has two grown daughters, neither of whom has ever taken a standardized test.
That is, she's another pampered white woman who believes in autodidactism. Noble idea, like Walden, unworkable in practice -- like Walden. Her ideas essentially are aimed at destroying the middle class, which was more or less created out of Prussian education models. Even allowing for the fact that education model force-feeds feminism to boys, it's another thing entirely to make up pseudo-spiritual bullshit saying that school generally sucks. That approach is guaranteed to produce a society like that
prior to the Prussian model of education: an underclass that can only count to 20 by virtue of having sufficient fingers and toes, and an elite 1% beyond this clown's dreams.
To quote AnonymousBosch again: be careful who you let take up residence inside your head.
