Should we bring more children into this world?

it is very present, jhereg. and it’s as difficult a meme to overcome as say eating the fruits of the agricultural revolution or escaping wage-slavery. mother culture has polluted our mindsets so much that we have to break out of these memes, and that often takes a lot of time, a lot of hacking away at the old ideas before new ones can sprout.

23, your argument convinces me, but despite the fact that it sucks, i think folks like my wife think the alternatives suck worse. “homeschooling is for fanatics,” kind of thinking. and while I am a fanatic, she doesn’t want to be. i can’t even bring up peak-oil without causing her brain to shut down.

when we watched spielberg’s war of the worlds in the theatre, she leaned over to me and whispered "promise me that we’ll commit suicide together if something like this ever happens. i was like “uh, i’m living for the day when something like this happens, so no.” it made the rest of the movie very uncomfortable for us.

i think my best bet is to try to get inside the system. i’ve been thinking about being a science teacher for a long time now. i’ve held off for so long because of all the negative things my teacher friends tell me, but then i realized that they’re not that much worse than any other form of wage slavery. and i can sow seeds of civ-dissension as i teach and demonstrate scientific principles with primitive technologies.

“today we’re going to be learning about friction, using… a bow-drill”

and i think that maybe if i’m seeing the peer pressure from that side (instead of trying to pick up on it from the hints a child drops when they get home) i can better equip my son for being able to be his own person.

plus crazy science teachers seem to be able to get away with being eccentric, so i’m hoping it will help legitimize my weirdness to the community.

Rix…

Have you read the Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto?

I’ve read his other book “Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling,” but I was not able to finish Underground History. The very foundations of schooling, how it functions, why they function in the way they do… this book goes into the science behind modern schooling and the corporations who funded the science. I couldn’t finish it because the whole fucking thing is just so horrific. I literally blacked out in anger/emotion when reading it and came to in my basement holding a can of gas in one hand and a spray paint bottle in the other. I causiously set them down and wrote a screenplay about middle school kids who burn their school down instead. I’m afraid to open the book again. I never thought I had that bad of a time in school but this book brings it all back, and articulates who, what and where this torurous enviornment came from.

I think the part of the book that made me the grieve the most, was not the content (which is horrific) but the fact that the author is a former teacher. Not just any teacher, he won Teacher of the Year for New York City three years in a row, then he won Teacher of New York State. At his award ceremony, he gave his resignation and read aloud an essay he wrote about how fucked up school is. See, for 30 years he fought the administration. He was one of the “good” teachers. All along the way the balked and tried to fuck him over (including destroying documents that allowed him to go on medical leave, and attempting to not let him come back when he healed). He was being awarded for the kids excellence under his tutelage, yet everything he did to make that happen had been against the system. He used to pull fire alarms and shit just to get the kids outside. Haha. My kind of guy. But in the end, it wasn’t enough. And he still quit to advocate against schooling.

I know it seems like being the quirky science teacher would be an ideal spot to get the message to some younger folk, and that may work. But I think that it’s also like joining the police to make a difference: you still end up beating up the poor. Regardless of the teachers personality or desire to change kids lives, you still end up yelling, giving orders, and becoming the tyranical leader of the youth-slaves. That’s the teachers position; slave master. While their were good slave-masters… they’re still slave-masters. You know? It simply keeps the cycle going. Why not walk away?

“Unschooling” is the modern, hipper, cooler, indigenous model of “Home-schooling” (which has religious conotations and practices). The number of unschoolers is growing. Did you know that on average home-schooled children score higher on the SAT’s than kids who go to compulsory school? Yeah. Throw that one at your spouse. Homeschool=smarter (not that SAT’s rate intelligence but you get it).

Why would home-schooled kids want to go to school? Because they don’t have an unschooling club and they want friends and culture they think school has. If, from the begining, you form an Unschooling group, or join your local one, your kids will actually learn the horrors of modern schooling and learn that they’ve escaped them. They’ll also have friends of mixed ages. You’ll have a network of other parents for support. I’ve worked with and met lots of unschooled kids and they are all proud of the fact they never went to school. Some of the homeschooled kids I met did end up wanting to go to school, but not the unschoolers.

Here are some leads:

Websites:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
http://www.unschooling.com/
http://www.unschooling.org/
http://www.wildernessawareness.org/about_curriculum.html#guide
http://www.wildernessawareness.org/adult/mentoring_teaching.html

Books:
*Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
*The Unschooling Handbook : How to Use the Whole World As Your Child’s Classroom
*Guerrilla Learning: How to Give Your Kids a Real Education With or Without School
*Anything and everything by John Holt

i think my best bet is to try to get inside the system. i've been thinking about being a science teacher for a long time now. i've held off for so long because of all the negative things my teacher friends tell me, but then i realized that they're not that much worse than any other form of wage slavery. and i can sow seeds of civ-dissension as i teach and demonstrate scientific principles with primitive technologies.

“today we’re going to be learning about friction, using… a bow-drill”

and i think that maybe if i’m seeing the peer pressure from that side (instead of trying to pick up on it from the hints a child drops when they get home) i can better equip my son for being able to be his own person.

plus crazy science teachers seem to be able to get away with being eccentric, so i’m hoping it will help legitimize my weirdness to the community.

A few things come to mind. First of all, Daniel Quinn’s famous line, “We need changed minds everywhere.”

Secondly, Derrick Jensen worked within the educational system and did some good things in the classroom. If you haven’t already, check out his book Walking on Water.

Third, I first of heard of Tom Brown Jr.'s work from my chemistry teacher.

Lastly, In our school district they’re trying to get funding to build a new school. Personally, I would like to see the whole thing torn down. Putting aside all the traumatizing characterstics of compulsory schooling, how are we going afford to keep the yellow buses running when we see gas hit $5…$7…$10 a gallon? But the teachers and administrators are in complete denial when it comes to this issue. Part of it, I think, is because their paychecks depend on it.

So, perhaps if you become a teacher within the system, and when a taxpayer like me suggests the district tear the whole thing down, you can be one of the teachers that agrees with someone like me. Now, that’s working within the system!

Take care,

Curt

I agree with everything Scout says. For school, the system represent the real curriculum, the real content.

John Taylor Gatto wrote a relatively short article on this that sums it up great. Give it to anyone who considers school like ‘democracy’; “it sucks but it’s the best system we’ve got.” Bullshit!

Mr. Gatto says in the following article, “It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for “basic skills” practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I’ve just taught you.”

http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

damn, scout! you take your video games and books very seriously. i like that about you.

you guys have made very good points that i am definitely taking to heart.

the main argument that i do hear against homeschooling is the socialization. granted, learning social interactions in a public school doesn’t teach a balanced form of socialization, but it is the kind that fits the image mother culture has set up for us to believe in. i know it’s wrong and that there is a better way, but i don’t believe i can hit that path yet.

the majority of my life is filled with slavery metaphors right now. i’m a slave to my rutty fast-food diet when i want to be going paleo. i’m a slave to paying rent when i’d rather pitch a tent. i’m a slave to my job because of my debts and the bills for all my civilized “necessities”. i’m a slave to my car because i can’t walk to my job.

i’m still functioning in a civilized world, and trying to do so, while i work my way out. and it has to be my way that i get out. i have to find it for me. i have to make it work for me.

i’m also a slave to my marriage even though my wife and i don’t believe in the construct of the christian marriage vows that we made to a god we no longer put faith in. but the memes hang over us, dangling into our eyes and burning them with their poisons. [okay, that metaphor was insanely intense and probably unnecessary.]

maybe this isn’t the best way to go about it, but i feel like as long as i am stuck being a wage-slave, i might as well be doing something that fits my character better while i’m doing it.

teaching resides in my nature. i live to drink knowledge in and spew it back out. i see it in my dad, and i see it in me. we dig knowledge and we love to shovel it your way. and i think i’m good at it. i feel like i can really get concepts through to people that others can’t. so i’m seeking to work out my nature in the middle of my stuck-ness.

plus i don’t think the civ will be around long enough for me to burn out as a teacher. i might be deluding myself, but i am pretty good at staying a course even if i don’t like it. i’ve had some pretty shitty jobs, been a slave master, and died a little in the process, but i know that i did some good while i was there. i worked as a night-shift psychiatric technician and chaplain for a mental hospital for adolescent sex offenders. it nearly killed my soul in a lot of ways–especially seeing how the others in my position were so quick to abuse their power. but i know that i was able to reach a lot of the kids there and give them hope in something better for themselves.

curt, i have enjoyed following your letters to the school board on your blog. i will be one to stand up and say “this dude’s right.”

we need changed minds everywhere

and i think i can change more of them in my area by being a teacher than i can by doing this compu-tech crap i'm living off of right now.

thank you both for your reading recommendations. more knowledge to drink.

the ideal would probably be for me to get a divorce, live in a hut in my friends’ back yard and be the teacher for all my friends’ kids. and even though there are a lot of reasons for me to do that, i don’t think it’s necessarily the best thing for the people that currently make up my family. but who knows, it may come to that soon enough.

and, yeah, when gas hits $10/gallon, who knows what all will come crashing to a halt. but i figure that a state-funded, mother culture-approved institution will have more longevity than a lot of other jobs.

i don’t think it will be easy or ideal. but it might be the most ideal for the situations i’m going to be in over the next 5-10 years.

Cool WildeRix! I just like to hear folks as they think aloud through all their options…what else can we do but balance the pluses and minuses of a panoply of impossible situations, situations this culture purposely set up to bedevil us!

As long we spend time sincerely thinking things through (unlike 99.9% of modern enslaved humans), any decision makes sense. I enjoy reading about you untangling all those threads!

thanks, willem. it is definitely a tangle. and i appreciate the perspectives you guys are giving me as i try to untangle it.

gatto’s The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher is pretty sobering. thanks for sharing that.

My Mom is a 5th grade public school teacher.
It’s only been in the last couple of years that we’ve reached a point in our relationship where we can actually talk about her job and how we feel about schooling.
I just read her some of what you wrote William on E-Primitive language. And it really helped us communicate with each other. It’s always been hard for her to separate her Job from WHO SHE IS. So when I’m hating on schools it breaks down our communication. Anyways… Her being “she teaches reading” or “she teaches writting” is a really beautiful way to understand things. I think everything teaches… stones, lightning, blood. I’m finally seeing understanding in her eyes and the defensiveness is fading away. It’s been a challenge to express to her my respect for SOME of the things/ways she teaches but not other things/ways… and NOT the system she works for.

I often feel very sad and fearful at the idea of haveing children someday. I can’t imagine those in power letting me teach my children how I would like/need to. I can’t imagine those in power letting me keep my children in the lifestyle I would like/need to.

I’m pretty well aware of the perks of homeschooling (or unschooling) which is why we tried it before sending our daughter to school to begin with.

There weren’t a lot of homeschoolers in our area, so forming a group wasn’t much of an option. We did make it a point to get her out with other kids (regardless of age). And she had fun with that. But there wasn’t a yellow bus. There wasn’t a real classroom. She didn’t have day-to-day contact w/ her peers.

Now, for me at her age, none of this would have been a problem! ;D

Eh, sometimes people (including kids) have to learn things the hard way.

Anyway, I’m not coming down on homeschooling/unschooling or anything, even if it didn’t seem to work out for us. I think it’s great and it’s obviously much, much closer to how we should be raised and taught. I’d absolutely recommend that everyone try it.

Rix, I feel your pain.

It’s a rare day for me when I don’t feel trapped and enslaved by the myriad things that this culture keeps throwing in my way.

I wish I had something more to offer than this, but, for what it’s worth, you aren’t alone; you have a lot of people that want out, that want free, and that want to help anyone and everyone else that’s on the same road. Do what you can the best you can, and don’t let anyone else (esp Mother Culture!!) tell you it’s not good enough!

for what it's worth, you aren't alone

it's worth a hell of a lot. thanks, j!

the truly ideal is not always the most ideal for the moment you’re in. my wife and i wanted to breastfeed our baby because it’s the most ideal nutrition for a human child. but our situation sucked: postpartum depression affecting her milk production–both of which affected her state of mind, which produced a feedback cycle that became crippling to both her and my son. in the end, feeding him civilization’s scientific concept of what a baby should eat from an artificial boob was the best thing for us in that situation. if she’d had someone to turn to, if we weren’t stuck in NY with no affordable lactation consultant more than a $45 car ride away, if her mom could just stay with us for a few more months, if my asshole boss would just let me use my vacation time…

Do what you can the best you can, and don't let anyone else (esp Mother Culture!!) tell you it's not good enough!

i think that that's what parenthood is: do the best with what you've got to give your kid the best you're capable of giving right now. that sentence is filled with so many conditionals, but it has to be.

Eh, sometimes people (including kids) have to learn things the hard way.

sometimes the hard way is the best way to learn. it may teach your daughter more than she'll let you teach her.

i used to get really mad at my dad for not letting me learn things the hard way. i’m sure he was thinking that if he let me do things on my own i would fuck them up and he’d be the one that would have to come clean up my mess. but i would have learned so much more if he would have just let me fuck them up.

the majority of my life is filled with slavery metaphors right now.

Haha. I hear that.

i have to make it work for me.

I hear that. Follow your heart, make it work.

the ideal would probably be for me to get a divorce, live in a hut in my friends' back yard and be the teacher for all my friends' kids.

Haha. Don’t do that!

I think it will all come in time. I honor those who can stomach the compulsory schooling environment. I still have to throw down my 2 cents about it though. I know it can come across like a judgement: if you work in schools you suck! That’s not how I feel or what I’m saying. Willem and I work with two science teachers at a local high school who run a “theories of knowledge” elective. In the class the kids read Daniel Quinn and Derrick Jensen and John Taylor Gatto. They have us come in and talk with the kids about surviving the collapse and preparing for it mentally. Some of the kids think were crazy, others are starving for it. However, I told the teachers that I will not lie to the kids, and will encourage them to drop out of high school (which I did). Haha. They were like, “Don’t worry, it’s a theories of knowledge class, and we’ll tell parents that you’re guest speakers on the subject of school & collapse.” I didn’t hear about any parents having concerns.

Pretty fucking cool teachers. I just can’t imagine standing in their place, nor would I ever dream of doing so. Thank goodness they do the work they do. If you feel called to do that, right on. And also, don’t have any illusions about the system.

I might be slightly biased since I have a six month old boy…but…

One time the thought came to me when I was out deep in the woods having a pretty good connection. ( I try and listen to these thoughts when they happen like that…) The thought was something like this. 'Humans have been a part of the natural world for a long time. I notice that once I really get into the woods the animals just begin to accept my presence, maybe even enjoy it! Like they are saying ‘hey were you been?’ ’
The planet’s ecosystem has gotten used to a certain number of humans interacting with it, even acting as caretakers of it. So the ecosystem needs a certain number of these aware ‘caretaker’ humans to remain on the planet…

God now that I write it, I realize just how egotistical it really is…
I guess the wooly mammoth, sabertooth tiger, and all the other large mammals(and small ones) that went extinct at the hand of man, probably don’t really think that one more of us is a good idea no matter how you try and justify it…Damn it!

As far as education goes… I am a product of the public skool system.
My mom was a life long teacher. The more I learn, the more I realize that I am going to homeschool my kids as long as they can stand it. Public school teaches kids how to be good capitalists, that’s it. Private schools are so expensive you have to be rich, or sell your soul to pay for it.

Since John Taylor Gatto and criticisms of compulsory schooling have come up in this thread, I’m going to post a small excerpt from an essay titled: Against School that JTG wrote for Harper’s magazine in September of 2003.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/hp/frames.htm

I saved the magazine when I first read it in 2003 because it had such an impact on me. The last couple of days I’ve been reading anti-school stuff because of a nasty response I got to one of my letters in the local newspaper from a teacher in the area.

Take care,

Curt

It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant’s 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a “revolution” engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis’s 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which “one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary.”

Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.

Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

1. The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can’t test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2. The integrating function. This might well be called “the conformity function,” because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

3. The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student’s proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in “your permanent record.” Yes, you do have one.

4. The differentiating function. Once their social role has been “diagnosed,” children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5. The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called “the favored races.” In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6. The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. John Taylor Gatto

For my self, being a high school dropout who has returned to college(about 10 years later!),and a brand new daddy, this is alot to consider and take in.
I am at this point in my life am constantly reminded of the faults of capitalism.
To me anything perpetuating a constantly renewing structure for a consumerist monoculture is something to be shunned-
at least at first glance.I suppose the point I make with that is that I’m not too sure what I’m going to do when it’s time to send my son to school.
I most certainly feel that my wife and I are capable of teaching our son what we view to be a better way to live, and a better way to reconnect and view the world we live in,and we also have been adamant on giving him the information and the viewpoint, and when the time comes, let him make his own choices.
One thing we do know about his schooling, is that we aren’t planning on ‘schooling’ him in the USA, but alas, it does seem that the Capitalist disease has spread in almost all directions and corrupted and co-opted many a country and many a mind across the globe.
Though i have found reading Derrick Jensen both exhilarating and horrifying I will have to check out the books on the school system,it seeming that they are even more horrifying than what Jensen said, it would only be correct to explore such information since I have been made aware of it here.
I will also check out the unschooling book.

tsuchi,

I most certainly feel that my wife and I are capable of teaching our son what we view to be a better way to live, and a better way to reconnect and view the world we live in,and we also have been adamant on giving him the information and the viewpoint, and when the time comes, let him make his own choices.

I think this is a very important realization. Most parents that I know don’t think they’re capable of teaching their kids what they need to know. And this is probably because the parents had what they needed to know schooled out of them long ago.

I’ll post a link to an amazing radio interview about Unschooling that you might be interested in.

http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_191_School_Not.mp3/view

And here is really good essay talking about why we think we need schools to learn.

http://www.ishmael.com/Education/Writings/unschooling.shtml

Good luck!

Curt

Thanks Curt!
I will check both of those our today!

tsuchi,

Your welcome!

Curt

hey, if any of you folks are coming to Feral Visions, please consider initiating a discussion or doing a workshop on this topic,… or both! maybe something on challenging the history of compulsory schooling, and some sort of free discussion on the challenges and benefits of raising feral kids… i’ll be there and if nobody else does i’ll put the discussion on the schedule.

I don’t believe I will ever be able to answer this question with a yes or no. I can see pros and cons regarding both sides, but I don’t even feel that it makes sense or reason for me to consider them, because I have felt such a strong need to have babies from my earliest childhood, at least. I remember dreaming of giving birth, dreaming of finding a baby, any way that I could imagine getting a baby of my own. This dreaming began at least as early as eight years old, probably earlier. By the time I was 16 years old, I felt an almost panicked need to have a baby, to mother, yet I waited long years, yearning for children, until I was 25. My point: Could I have lived without children? – I don’t think so. So, I could rationalize a movement to reduce the population via abstaining from breeding, but in order to even make that argument, I would have to turn away from my feeling part, the need not just to mother, but to actually give birth, breastfeed, see the combination of mine and another’s features.

I remember dreaming of giving birth, dreaming of finding a baby, any way that I could imagine getting a baby of my own. This dreaming began at least as early as eight years old, probably earlier.

My most frequently reoccuring dream also involves some variation on giving birth, breatfeeding, finding babies, rescuing babies…