The tragedy is that the pressure on wealthy parents to not give their kids an education that sets them apart reduces experimentation for better schools/alternatives. We've deemed education "too important" to ever be improved by the processes that improve other goods & services.
Separately, we're still grappling with a crisis over the purpose of education: Is it to produce expert test-takers with a vast range of narrow skills, or to hone the natural human capacity for reflection, adaptation, problem-solving and iterative self-refinement?
I think the two are related, because once a parent feels permitted to be fully driven by their love for their child, unobscured by external expectations and social pressures, it becomes a bit clearer what the goal ought to be and how it can be aimed at. Excuses fall away.
It's easy enough to recalibrate. Is the kid coming home exhausted but energized, desperate to keep chewing or working on the day's ideas? Or is he defeated? A child that can be described as "defeated" should be the abnormality. We've let it become *much* too close to the norm.
Parents know what their kids look like when they're "in the zone" re: the thrill of learning something or developing their mastery of some skill. The real question is why they feel so helpless to find or create a situation where they're in that mode most of the time.
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I think everyone will find something to dislike in my take on Dylan Mulvaney, which is that there is obviously a desperate cultural thirst for someone, anyone, to just wholeheartedly enjoy being a girl in a way that is politically acceptable — and this is probably a good thing!
I do find it reductive and a little bit embarrassing, but man, the culture we have has got to start somewhere. The idea that there is *anything* good about femininity has been MIA for what, a decade? Longer?
While I'm digging my hole, I think trad culture could probably take a note here because a lot of it does come across as very... Girlboss, But With Apron. At times, it delves into "our way is better because it takes 20x as long and hurts." This is not the way, not always
My mom's home in Oregon is being seized by "friends" who she allowed in a few months ago, who now refuse to leave & have literally stolen keys to her outbuildings. It's impossible to navigate her rights & obligations because local housing lawyers are booked up w similar conflicts
They moved two additional people in; mom can't afford to go anywhere else, so she has four people who live rent free in her house and glower at her as they go to and fro, leaving their dishes for her to clean and taking hour-long showers
You cannot imagine how bad tenant-landlord law is in some of these coastal states
If you think this is an exaggeration, you may not fully grok the scope of this program as it *already* exists after just 5 years commonsense.news/p/scheduled-to…
To be clear, Canada won't allow the first assisted mental illness suicides until next year
To my mind, this is just one segment of a completely unavoidable slippery slope once you eliminate the requirement for terminal illness/foreseeability of death, as Canada has done