Short Take: Public School and the Destruction of the American Child
To asses what's become of the mind, look at the body
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It's remarkable.
Public School is a system of violence, a total institution akin to the Military or Prison.
Children and young adults have no choice but to be there and there minds and bodies are entirely controlled whilst they're there.
DAY 1: First thing a child learns upon entering kindergarten is how to sit at a desk, on the teachers instruction, and not rise, disruptively fidget, or generally employ there body in any manner except the teacher instructs. A behaviour not a single non-crippled child would ever do of their own accord, and contrary to every instinct in their young precocious body, is the first thing they are taught to self- administer and retain for hours on end. This body destroying torture device, this modern stockade, will be their prison for the next 12-18 years of their life. Within a few short months they do not even need instruction to enter the desk, they do so on their own.
So you have this totalitarian, godlike, control of a child for over a decade... WHAT THE HELL ARE THE RESULTS?!
The failure of the pubic school system to suitably educate children is the most significant fact of American life... The Majority, 54% of Americans read at less than a 6th grade level. When you look at vulnerable minorities whom government administrators and activists have spent the last 50+ years desperately trying to improve educational results for, turning society upside down and restructuring almost every institution, but especially education, to accommodate, enable, and elevate... the numbers get even more grim.
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress only 18% of African American students were reading with grade appropriate proficiency, compared with 44% of white students.
But to see how horrifically Public Education fails students... one need merely take a look at them.
Depending on ideology one might not expect schools to produce noticeable improvements in literacy or educational outcomes... depending on where one stands on the nature/nurture debate one might think heritable biological intelligence is basically all consuming and school’s inability to produce results is to be expected. Furthermore depending on WHERE one thinks nurture matters, one might place the blame on parents or home conditions, or "Culture" for what, some may argue, we inappropriately mislabel as educational failures...
OK mind are mysterious (some more-so than others) but the failure of the modern education system is written plainly on the BODIES of America's students.
2 out of 3 American adults are overweight or obese, and almost A THIRD of American COLLEGE students, the cream of the crop, young, educationally successful, and bound for the middle to upper-middle class, are OBESE.
Who is to blame for this?
Society blames parents, students and young adults are encouraged to blame themselves... But who actually controls these bodies that are being destroyed?
9-10 hours of a young adult’s life are consumed with sleep (or should be, growing bodies and minds need more than 8) then of the 14 waking hours 1-2 are consumed with commuting to and from school, 6 are consumed in the actual building, and another 1-3 are consumed with homework (Because schools are so incompetent their official curriculum cannot be taught in 6 hrs a day for 12 years, so actually educating the student must be offloaded onto the students themselves during their "free time"... 10,000 hours may make a concert pianist, but the 12,000 hours of in school instruction grades 1-12 is not enough to teach basic numeracy and literacy)
SO. Of the 24 hours in a student's week day: sleep consumes 10, school directly or indirectly consumes 8 to 11, and our young student is left with a paltry 3-6 hours to themselves.
So when at 18 they're obese, who is to blame? Morpheus God of sleep? Them for incorrectly using their 3-6 hours on dinner, friendship, and maybe a brief rest?
Or should we blame the educational system, which somehow devours the most productive hours of the day for years, confining students to body destroying desks, and not even producing basic literacy with any consistency for that cost!?
Who's to blame? Who's more responcible? Overworked parents, literal children, or a multitrillion-dollar superstructure employing millions of professionals and which claims near godlike power to destroy the lives of the first two and either confiscate the child from the parents or indeed send them to Juvie if the child and parents show any resistance?
And the thing is... even if you are authoritarian and fully endorse the totalitarian powers of the education system as the natural and correct powers of the state over the cattle-like masses... you should still be screaming bloody murder.
Totalitarian systems are supposed to produce impressive physical specimens. Indeed we know they they can. Say what you will about the Soviet Union, or Prussian and later 1930s German ideals of education... They couldn't really make kids brighter, more moral, or new soviet... but they certainly made them fit. The athletics and fitness regimens of these totalizing societies are amongst their few marked achievements, inflecting American media to this day.
Hell America's own total institutions until recently were famed for their ability to effect fitness..
Many might debate the idea the army makes you "The best you can be" but until very recently there was little doubt it could take Americans from all walks of life and make them fairly damned fit.
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The goal of education is to grasp the MIND of a person and form it... with many tactics pursued to do so, all of debatable effectiveness.
But The first things schools do on this quest is claim control of children's BODIES and they maintain that control for over a decade.
SO WHY THE HELL ARE THOSE BODIES COMING OUT DESTROYED!?
This is the one and only thing we know for sure a decades long system of control, subjugation, massively restricted liberty, enforced by soft and hard violence can actually achieve. The Prussians did it, the Soviets did it, The British boarding school system did it, the Austrian painter did it, and until recently, the Marine Corp did it.
This is a basic fact of life. Given a disturbing amount of coercive power over a person's life and body... you can make them jacked.
Why the hell are we tolerating institutions which given that power, makes children obese.
Heaven help us if public education is actually succeeding in effecting kids minds, given this is visible surface level damage to their bodies.
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When I was in middle school, we had two or three recess periods per day AND occasional physical education classes on top of that.
I don't think that's the norm any more.
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They didn't serve school breakfast, either. (I don't mind schools serving breakfast given the ridiculously long bus rides kids endure, but school breakfast should not be pancakes, waffles, or toasted sugar bombs.
Nice post. Schopenhauer has much to say on this exact point in his essay On Education:
“The human intellect is said to be so constituted that general ideas arise by abstraction from particular observations, and therefore come after them in point of time. If this is what actually occurs, as happens in the case of a man who has to depend solely upon his own experience for what he learns — who has no teacher and no book — such a man knows quite well which of his particular observations belong to and are represented by each of his general ideas. He has a perfect acquaintance with both sides of his experience, and accordingly, he treats everything that comes in his way from a right standpoint. This might be called the natural method of education.
Contrarily, the artificial method is to hear what other people say, to learn and to read, and so to get your head crammed full of general ideas before you have any sort of extended acquaintance with the world as it is, and as you may see it for yourself. You will be told that the particular observations which go to make these general ideas will come to you later on in the course of experience; but until that time arrives, you apply your general ideas wrongly, you judge men and things from a wrong standpoint, you see them in a wrong light, and treat them in a wrong way. So it is that education perverts the mind.
This explains why it so frequently happens that, after a long course of learning and reading, we enter upon the world in our youth, partly with an artless ignorance of things, partly with wrong notions about them; so that our demeanor savors at one moment of a nervous anxiety, at another of a mistaken confidence. The reason of this is simply that our head is full of general ideas which we are now trying to turn to some use, but which we hardly ever apply rightly. This is the result of acting in direct opposition to the natural development of the mind by obtaining general ideas first, and particular observations last: it is putting the cart before the horse. Instead of developing the child’s own faculties of discernment, and teaching it to judge and think for itself, the teacher uses all his energies to stuff its head full of the ready-made thoughts of other people. The mistaken views of life, which spring from a false application of general ideas, have afterwards to be corrected by long years of experience; and it is seldom that they are wholly corrected. This is why so few men of learning are possessed of common-sense, such as is often to be met with in people who have had no instruction at all.”
How can we expect the masses of indoctrinated people, educated in a method of repetition which ignores reason and experience, to defend their own interests when they cannot figure out what their own interests even are? Worse, the level of formal indoctrination is getting cruder: do we expect California public school children, raised on anti-white race-grievance books (see their Department of Education recommended reading list: https://www.teachingbooks.net/tb.cgi?lid=10718 ), with classic books banned and IQ tests for black students banned, to even be able to function as a drone in a 21st century tech economy?