Honor thy father and thy mother

In my previous post, Bullying, I made a reference to how our parents treated us potentially being a bigger obstacle to our recognizing the systematic problems with compulsory school than how we treat our children.

I confess I have no real data to back that one up, other than anecdotal, but I've come to strongly feel that way.

It's unceasingly amazing to me the lengths people go not only to defend their parents actions but to normalize them.

At various points I've heard dozens, if not hundreds, of people use some form of "My parents did ______ when I was a kid, and I turned out ok."

The near universal truth of those is that, to the outside observer, those people are not "ok" by any of the usual standards on would expect to use to assess "ok-ness".

That applies to drinking and drug use, including while pregnant or breastfeeding, as well as exceptional punishments and probably any number of other things that aren't necessarily looked kindly upon.  These now grown people will not only try not only to defend what their parents did, but endorse it, in many cases.

I think it's one of the major barriers we have to ending corporal punishment in this country.  Again, I've anecdotally found many people who don't "believe in spanking", don't spank their own kids, but can't quite bring themselves to condemn it generally or for others, and I strongly suspect that's involved.

I find myself similarly inclined, in fact, and I was only very rarely spanked as a child and I believe my parents found themselves coming to realize the futility of it as a parenting tool, at the least, so, if anything, I have every reason to agree with the conclusions came to.

And I do really.  I certainly have not, do not and will not spank Conan, but I struggle with condemning it.  If for no other reason than the fact that the vast majority of people spanking their kids mean well and believe it's the best thing and that it in some way hurts them more than their children, as the saying goes.

We grow up watching our parents and processing what they do as "the things people do".  Their behavior, good and bad, is the very definition of how people behave.  It becomes so ingrained into who we are, that it becomes difficult to fully process them, even when we see them...  in fact, even when they are extraordinarily obvious.

I've long believed you can explain the virulence of the rage and hatred you can find in Jim Crow era southerners, in particular.

I think that for a reasonable person, once a separation takes place, it becomes impossible to find a moral justification for slavery that makes any sense at all.  Sure, we can intellectually explain the origins, the tradition and the needs that led to and fueled it, but if you're really thinking about the ins and outs of owning and using human beings, I can't make it make sense.  It's so horrifying to me, I get nauseated just trying to think about it.

I suspect being a child and having the evidence of that utter inhumanity everywhere and your parents and grandparents and everyone around were responsible.  The only possible way to process that would be to create justifying scenario, in this case it would have been to blame the slaves themselves for the unfathomable violence inflicted upon them.

That's the depth to which the vast majority of people will go to justify and normalize the actions of our parents.

It's something that worth remembering when we're repeating the things our parents do as well as the things we do in life, especially around our kids.  I know I do.

Bullying

To some extent or another, we all think of bullying as a fact of life.

I confess it was I haven’t thought about the kid who bullied me in over twenty years by Wil Wheaton that pushed me to write this and not one of the more heartbreaking stories of suicide or other ways lives are utterly devastated by bullying.

Here's the thing, bullying is going to keep getting worse.  Period.

Keeping kids in school longer hours, giving them less free time after school.  I'm a 42 year old man, and I couldn't take that schedule.  I'm not the only one who thinks that.  My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me by Karl Taro Greenfeld makes that point as well.

Without the benefit of bullying, I can promise I wouldn't have survived childhood with that kind of schedule and I don't think I would now, although obviously I have Rae and Conan to make the effort to go on for.

I don't know if I'm the best example.  I certainly don't hit any norms.  I cut class in high school and would go to the library, try to avoid notice as long as possible while I read books until I was kicked out for not having a pass to be there and I'd go outside to smoke.

This is, I suppose, where it was cemented for me that School is a prison! and not a place to learn.  I certainly have more to say about that another day.

My point is that even at that point in my schooling, I wasn't broken.  I lacked the least inclination to obey, but I was still actively and enthusiastically interested in learning.  I just knew that school classes are rarely, if ever, the best medium for learning.  They are a primarily a medium for control and any real learning is largely incidental.

I wasn't bullied in high school, except by the school administration, but I was earlier.

No, I don't have any of those stories of relentless harassment.  I was just singled out by various other kids through the years for verbal abuse.  I didn't take it well.  I'd get into fights and then I'd be the one that got into "trouble".

It was a fine system, huh?

Let me just say, even this relatively benign stuff is still able to get me worked up.  If I think about those dudes, I feel like I could punch them again now.

But really, I know who the real enemy is and if I ran into any of those administrators from The Evergreen School from those days, I almost certainly would take the opportunity to finally punch them.  Yeah, it wouldn't do anything good.  Frankly, I'm quite happy to just never run into them.

That's where we come to School Bullying: A Tragic Cost of Undemocratic Schools by Peter Gray, "Bullying occurs regularly when people who have no political power and are ruled in top-down fashion by others are required by law or economic necessity to remain in that setting.  It occurs regularly, for example, in prisons. Those who are bullied can't escape, and they have no legislative or judicial power to confront the bullies. They may report bullying to the prison guards and warden, but the guards and warden may not know whom to believe and may have greater vested interest in hiding bullying than in publicizing it and dealing with it openly"

People who are disempowered learn that disempowerment is a standard way to live.  They then go about disempowering others to place themselves higher on the empowerment ladder.  It's basic.

It's even our stereotype, our joke even, that bullies are bullied at home.  We see that as the "punchline" of those things all the time, or, in more sensitive cases, the bittersweet realization we're brought to.

As with most stereotypes, it's, at best, incredibly simplistic, but almost certainly comes from something.  In some cases, they come from what the person doing in the stereotyping brings in.  It's certainly true that a substantial number of negative stereotypes about black people in the U.S. are rooted the expectations that slave owners had for their slaves that were insane expectations for a human.

In this case, we're probably enamored of the perceived irony of the bully being bullied, but I think there's a basic truth to it as well.  Those kids who are bullied at home are even further disempowered and, as such, have an even greater need to make themselves feel empowered by disempowering others.

And now we keep buzzing about the increasing "bully problem", while we take away more and more of children's freedoms.  In many cases, I'd strongly suspect this is a media problem more than a bullying problem.  The media likes to find some issue and blow it out of proportion in order to draw viewers/readers.

This one seems to have some real weight.  The stories we hear about bullying seem to have escalated in virulence now.  The "official" explanation has something to do with the internet, but I think that's at least 98% bullshit, thrown out because they either don't know or don't want to face the more basic truth about the nature of the schools that we send our children us to, and, more importantly, where our parents sent us.

In fact, in keeping with the basic philosophy, we're creating more and more rules to curb this issue.

Look, I'm perfectly happy with the two girls in this case be appropriately punished by the appropriate harassment and assault.  I even agree with Sheriff Grady Judd that there should be a way to put the bulk of the punishment onto the parents and administrators instead (or as well).  It's important to note here that I am not favoring the creation of new rules or laws here, just the serious enforcement of the ones already in place.

Most new rules will be counter-productive, making what is already a prison even more restrictive and, as such, greatly exacerbating the problem.

Censorship

I read Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere Banned Due to Racy Jumper Fumblings by Leah Schnelbach and Media Exposure - Students, Parents and Trust at the Sudbury Valley School site in relative proximity of one another, which put me in mind of another subject that frustrates me about the merest notion of putting Conan in a traditional school.

People like this New Mexican parent feel, for reasons that make sense to them, that things should be kept from their children.  I don't necessarily disagree with regards to my own son.  He's young enough that hasn't been an issue yet. Conan's taste runs toward Quiet Loud and Roller Rintoo, so I don't concern myself much over how the things I read might affect him.

But whatever I decisions on the books, movies and other media my son is able to handle, will be handled by Rae and I based on our assessment of his needs.

How dare that woman or that administration try to take a role in what choices other parents can make for their children from the group resources of that school?  I understand that it will always play a role in what choices are made regarding ordering new items, and that's frustrating, but limited resources make some choices unavoidable, so I can release that.

So, she's a turdsicle who wants to spoil her son's enjoyment of reading?  I'm not trying to inhibit her rights to be just that shitty.  Spoiling other people's kids reading enjoyment?  Fuck you!  What the fuck gives you the gall?

This kind of thing just enrages me and I'm not going to send my son to a public school or move to New Mexico, so this has not direct effect on me.

I just can't imagine what right one could imagine they have the right to decide what other people's children should have kept from them.  It's horrifying to me!

I get that my view is less common than that, but that doesn't make it make the least bit of sense to me nor does it justify it morally in the least.

I have a recurring fear.  It's from the pilot episode of Roseanne.  I'm not generally going to defend the first season, which only rarely captured the things that would eventually make the show great, but this moment does, even if they might perhaps have done it even better once the show was in its groove.

In the scene, Roseanne is at a parent-teacher conference and the teacher is telling her that Darlene has been barking like a dog and they end up in a fuss over it, with the teacher speaking to her in an exceptionally condescending tone.  I would not handle that at well as Roseanne does, and, of course, she doesn't handle it the way one is "supposed to".

I am not built to defend my son's rights his whole life against people who find it self-evident that he should have them kept from him and not be treated like a person.  My own losing battles against those forces through my own childhood have left wounds that are too raw for me to be able to do it at all diplomatically.