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View Full Version : American Schools Are Failing Nonconformist Kids. Here’s How In defense of the wild child




tangent4ronpaul
12-26-2013, 04:52 AM
This is a very interesting and shocking article. I had a lot of "I didn't know that" moments. It's also quite long, but a good read.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114527/self-regulation-american-schools-are-failing-nonconformist-kids?google_editors_picks=true

one day last fall while I sat in a parent-teacher conference in her second-grade classroom and learned, as many parents do these days, that she needed to work on self-regulation. My daughter is nonconformist by nature, a miniature Sarah Silverman. She’s wildly, transgressively funny and insists on being original even when it causes her pain. The teacher at her private school, a man so hip and unthreatened that he used to keep a boa constrictor named Elvis in his classroom, had noticed she was not gently going along with the sit-still, raise-your-hand-to-speak-during-circle-time program. “So ...” he said, in the most caring, best-practices way, “have you thought about occupational therapy?”

I did not react well. My husband reacted worse.

...

“So what’s the problem?” my husband asked. “Is she distracting you?”

The teacher stalled, then said yes.

“And have you disciplined her?

He had not.

This is when I began to realize we’d crossed some weird Foucaultian threshold into a world in which authority figures pathologize children instead of punishing them. “Self-regulation,” “self- discipline,” and “emotional regulation” are big buzz words in schools right now. All are aimed at producing “appropriate” behavior, at bringing children’s personal styles in line with an implicit emotional orthodoxy.

...

One crude way to measure the population of kids who don’t meet today’s social and behavioral expectations is to look at the percentage of school-aged children diagnosed with attention- deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Over the past ten years, that figure has risen 41 points. (A lot of these kids were just born at the wrong time of year. The youngest kindergarteners, by month of birth, are more than twice as likely than the oldest to be labeled with ADHD. This makes sense given that the frontal cortex, which controls self-regulation, thickens during childhood. The cortexes of children diagnosed with ADHD tend to reach their thickest point closer to age eleven than age eight.) The number climbs higher still if you include syndromes like sensory-processing disorder, which Newmark jokes just about “everybody” has these days. When I asked Zimmerman, the New York University education historian, if schools had found a way to deal with discipline in the wake of the students-rights movement, he said: “Oh we have. It’s called Ritalin.”

...

“I’m worried our kids are going to file the largest class-action suit in history, because we are stealing their childhoods. They’re like caged animals or Turkish children forced to sew rugs until they go blind. We’re suppressing their natural messy existence.”

Again, it's a pretty long article, but interesting if you are interested in how kids are getting brainwashed today and why you should HOMESCHOOL!!!!

-t

CaptUSA
12-26-2013, 06:30 AM
Government schools are not failing non-conformist kids. They are designed to eliminate non-conformity. They cannot afford to allow any of the herd to get out of line.

Parents who choose to send their kids to government schools are failing their kids.


(I should add that it is possible to send your kids to the education camps without failing them, but it takes daily deprogramming. The effort and stamina required to do such a thing is probably a lot harder than just homeschooling them yourself from the get-go.)

Origanalist
12-26-2013, 07:22 AM
Government schools are not failing non-conformist kids. They are designed to eliminate non-conformity. They cannot afford to allow any of the herd to get out of line.

Parents who choose to send their kids to government schools are failing their kids.


(I should add that it is possible to send your kids to the education camps without failing them, but it takes daily deprogramming. The effort and stamina required to do such a thing is probably a lot harder than just homeschooling them yourself from the get-go.)

I don't think that could be put any better than that.

Anti Federalist
12-30-2013, 08:38 PM
Government schools are not failing non-conformist kids. They are designed to eliminate non-conformity. They cannot afford to allow any of the herd to get out of line.

Parents who choose to send their kids to government schools are failing their kids.


(I should add that it is possible to send your kids to the education camps without failing them, but it takes daily deprogramming. The effort and stamina required to do such a thing is probably a lot harder than just homeschooling them yourself from the get-go.)

Could not have said it better myself.

+rep

CaptUSA
12-30-2013, 08:41 PM
Actually, H.L. Mencken probably said it better...

The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.

Acala
01-06-2014, 04:21 PM
Good article.

DamianTV
01-08-2014, 08:48 PM
http://www.zengardner.com/wp-content/uploads/schoolpurp.jpg

Suzanimal
01-10-2014, 04:52 AM
Government schools are not failing non-conformist kids. They are designed to eliminate non-conformity. They cannot afford to allow any of the herd to get out of line.

Parents who choose to send their kids to government schools are failing their kids.


(I should add that it is possible to send your kids to the education camps without failing them, but it takes daily deprogramming. The effort and stamina required to do such a thing is probably a lot harder than just homeschooling them yourself from the get-go.)

Amen to that! After a couple of miserable years in public school I pulled mine out, my only regret is that I ever sent them there in the first place.

Spikender
01-10-2014, 05:26 AM
If I could have those thirteen years of public school back, I'm sure I could've found something thirteen times more productive to do with them.