Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)TG
Posts
2
Comments
357
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • How is it biased to call out people who don't raise their children right? I probably should have mentioned the role that extended family can and should play in raising a child, but still. They can pick up the slack; we shouldn't expect schools to have to do so. We as a society should stop accepting that families will just throw their kids in an institution, leave it at that, and hope for the best.

    Schools should be very defined in what they teach people. Parents, or more broadly, families, know the kids best and how they learn. They should be able to give the kids a much more individualized education on the wisdom aspects of life. If we broaden the scope of schools to include pretty much everything children need to know, then we'd be better off shipping off our kids to boarding schools and washing our hands of the whole parenting problem.

  • In the real world, trying to buy people's trust without convincing them logically/morally to do so doesn't always end well. If your boss yells at you at work every day, would you put up with the stress of dealing with that for the sake of money, even if it led you down the road to substance abuse and strained relationships with your friends/family? If you realized that you'd kill yourself within a month if you didn't quit? I sure wouldn't, unless I was dead certain that I wouldn't get a better job anywhere else. The place that tries to compensate for a terrible work environment with tons of money will eventually find that they have no workers whatsoever. Last I heard, that's actually happening to Amazon - they have such absurd turnover in their shipping plants that they're running out of people to hire.

    I threw out the Lemmy thing as an example of something I might do for the sake of money. It isn't an ideological thing for me, this is just a place for me to pass time and have an occasional interesting conversation (like this one). Having internet discussions isn't more important to me than having a stable income, it's a thing of priorities. My religion, on the other hand, isn't something I would give up for money.

  • Money by itself can't change opinions, it can only change behaviors. You could pay me some absurd amount of money and I'd delete my Lemmy account, but that wouldn't actually convince me it was a good idea for any reason other than because you gave me a stack of benjamins. I'd still remember the place fondly.

    Before we had money, we had human relationships, and those are based on trust. You can't replace trust with money; people try to do that all the time and it ends poorly.

  • I would argue that more important than money in a society is trust. If you can't trust your interlocutor to not screw you over/kill you, then you can't have a meaningful economic transaction. If you can't leave your house because the trust in your society is so low you'll be robbed the moment you go out the front door, you'll be unable to contribute to the local economy. If everything you buy online is so defective and distrustworthy that not even the most minuscule amount of money would be worth it, then online commerce would grind to a halt.

    I think what we consider currency is a different topic, but to tie it back into the conversation about parenting, if you aren't taught to trust the right people and distrust the wrong people, you're going to be duped, swindled, and abused much worse in adulthood. This isn't something we should expect a school to do for us. We need to show it to our kids ourselves.

  • I know the nuclear family isn't always possible. If it isn't, then a few aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, etc. should be in the home as well. Schools have their utility, but by no means should they replace parents in all but the most dire of circumstances.

  • I applaud the parents that are helping their kids learn actual academic subjects to help them succeed in school. My point is that we have more and more people today whose parents are failing to prepare them for the wall world, and we would be better off if we concluded that "My parents/family should have taught this" rather than "School should teach this." Then we could end the generational brain drain before it happens.

    If your parents don't know DIY or cooking, then that's a failing on their part. Hopefully they can at least get some extended family members to lend a hand in that.

    IMO, the purpose of a school is to teach you the academic knowledge you need to do well in college and have a base of intellectual knowledge. Your parents should be teaching you how to actually live out your life, because they should have those skills too. They should love you enough to pass them on, and have the time to do so. Otherwise, they're either doing you a disservice or they're being hampered by some external factor. I can appreciate that there are a lot of parents out there who can barely keep the lights on, but that doesn't mean kids shouldn't have some kind of family life. We used to have larger households with lots of people in them all pulling the weight in some way, and many people still live like this. If we could go back to something like that instead of expecting every single mother and father to live alone in a giant house with their kids, we would be better off.

    In the end, what I want is for families to pick up the slack and teach their kids the skills they need so they don't look back and say "I was failed." They should instead look forward and say, "Now it is my turn to teach," because they had a good family life.

    What do you think schools should do?

  • The point of this post is that if your parents didn't teach you this stuff, among other life skills, they failed you. Not only that, but schools can't always be expected to pick up the slack. Trying to revise schools to teach absolutely everything a parent should would just turn every school into a boarding school.

  • And forcing them to sit through those topics at school when they're so bored they will immediately memory hole the whole semester is a waste of everyone's time. Your parents should be able to sit down with you and show you why what they're teaching you matters, and know when to teach it.

  • Here in the US, it was common for my high school teachers to lament the curriculum they had to work from but still stick with it. The purpose of schools here is pretty similar, as well: prepare you for college so you can do what you really want to in life. Lots of people seem to think that you should be taught everything that is appropriate for your age in school, but I disagree. That's forgetting the role of your parents.

  • Fair point, but those activities are optional and they still need support from the parents to carry on. When I got out of high school in the US about a decade ago, we were getting let out of school at 2-3PM. The latest I ever stayed was probably 5PM for a club. Even so, you're providing food and shelter for them, you raised them from birth to when they could start going to school, and you probably want to be there for them in some way after they graduate from school, while they're in college, and beyond. Schools are too limited in scope to do all that.

  • I'm proposing parents, or at least extended family members (which I should have mentioned), act as a family unit rather than letting the school do everything. Not only will this be a more efficient arrangement, because children are not metal sheets waiting to be stamped into the shape of an ideal person in a factory, but it will reinforce the failing bond within families today. This would lead to better educated, more intelligent, and happier young people.

  • I said "should," not "will." This post is more an indictment of idiots, abusers, and sloths who decide to become parents, than it is a jab at this particular genre of nonfiction. It's more popular to say "school should have taught me this" than "my parents should have taught me this."