Just as the cryptocracy enshittifies society, so it infantilizes individuals. Men and women with independence, integrity, self-respect, and self-confidence aren't useful to those who want to rule.
*Ariel Durant was happily married at fifteen and co-wrote a multi-volume history of the world.³⁰
*David Farragut took command of a captured British ship as a preteen.
*Ben Franklin apprenticed to a printer at the same age and put himself through a program of self-education “that would choke a Yale senior today,” in Gatto’s phrase.
*Andrew Carnegie left elementary school at seven and became a partner in business with the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad at twenty.³¹
*George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Melville, Twain, Edison, Rockefeller: none of them went through the twelve-year sequential schooling that later became compulsory.³²
-----------------------------
And what was everyone else up to? Were there not thousands if not millions of less-obviously-talented folks building, making possible, and working within the broad underlying infrastructure which made the above geniuses' achievements possible in the first place? With or without any schooling at all? Isn't it all of a piece, somehow?
I am not defending compulsory schooling or the ideology which made it "necessary". I'd convert the schools into something useful, set the kids free - and see what happens, the results of which can't be predicted. Those results might be pretty hideous, at least for a while.
Just saying that with or without compulsory education, there are outliers* - people who were born to do what they did irrespective of their education or lack of it. There's no parallel universe available where all those listed above were forcibly placed into school for many years. But I'd put money on them, because of their inherent qualities, achieving the same things.
*outlier defined: One that exists outside or at an extreme of a category, pattern, or expectation; an extreme case or exception.
At least they could teach children useful things. I agree we should all be able to read and write and do some counting (so we won't get cheated). Useful things I learned later in life in evening classes - cooking, sewing. I know a family that homeschools their 5 children. They all help on the farm and they ride horses and love nature! Not the white skinned internet surfers you mostly see. Yes computers are useful, too, but there are many things we should all know when we are young! Mom married barely 17, and I know several who had a first kid (some even a second) before age 20. Now women have kids in their late 30s and even 40s, when there should be grandbabies!
Yes, indeed. School as a place to learn useful things is fine so long as parents were not forced to send their children there for 12 years.
I think that women today are constituted differently and that is why they wait so long to reproduce. Of course, it could be a matter of their having to go through 2 or 3 husbands to find a man suitable to make kids with.
Great piece. I hated school from my first day (we were told to sit down in class, and I didn't see why I should, so I remained on my feet, alone in the class) to my last, leaving a month before sitting A levels in anger. My mother, a teacher, was very upset. I have never forgiven anyone involved with schools really. All my fellow pupils became barristers, lawyers, civil engineers, architects, consultants, millionaires, dentists. All I wanted was to be on Top of the Pops. I failed.
Strange enough I loved to go to school. My mom hated teaching me things, only before first grade she taught me to write and knit because I am left-handed and at the time that was not allowed at school. I still love to learn things. And I like company, and mom forbid me to bring other girls home. Yes strange rules, and I never found out why she did that. She was a very sweet woman.
Grandfather in Russia (born 1890) had to learn the barber trade. He was left handed but forced to use scissors with his right hand. One grandchild emulated him, writing and eating left handed and doing most other things right handed. His scissors are still perfectly sharp and wonderful to use.
I recall stories about how school teachers would force left handers to use their right hand. This was before my time, though. Kind of like forcing homosexuals to "convert", ie, conversion therapy.
so writing left-handed in school was not allowed? wow. in my mid 1950s to 60s schooling it was frowned upon, and some adults in the early years seemed to act like lefties weren't mentally normal, but afaik, they were definitely allowed to write! altho i think some teachers tried to switch them to right-handed . . . geez. . . . how did you do trying to write right-handed?
Born 1957, but went to a very conservative nun's school. The higher grades I did in another catholic school, where they allowed it, but by that time only one girl was still all-leftie and had very big problems through it (she only made it through the first 2 grades)
Mom was very patient, and I learned before first grade, and kept writing right-handed. I can still write left-handed but it looks pretty bad! (thankfully, after I sprained my right wrist in 5th grade, I still could do a bit better still) But I do all the rest left-handed, sewing, cutting with scissors, soup spoon and fork eating etc.
Yes, I notice that nowadays they are easier on it. Even my late father-in-law here in the US was a leftie! Someone in our class was allowed in middle school to use her left hand, but she was extremely nervous and did not make it through school. I used to be in the high-middle part of the class, 70-78 % of points. I think mother's gentle intervention saved me a lot of trouble in school. This other girl had no one to properly show her how to crochet or knit left-handed, whereas nowadays there are even Youtube channels specializing on this. I can do both crochet and knit right-handed, and write, and that's it!
sounds like you had a wonderful mother. so glad for you ( : mine also taught and demonstrated SO many things - cooking, sewing, knitting, strength, morality, self-sufficiency . . . i wish i had appreciated her more while she was still here . . .
altogether thought-provoking as i ponder how this institution shaped our perceptions and lives. strange to consider the (potentially nefarious) founding and actual purpose of public schooling - which i have always accepted as just a normal part of life, oh brainwashed me.
as a girl who pretty much liked school in the early grades, i find it hard to believe that impoverished early-1900s children really would have preferred industrial slave-labor over school, if they knew . . .
but many of the boys would probably have chosen an active outdoor job to being imprisoned inside all day, chained to a desk doing nothing real - not to mention that school did not suit the tsunami of dyslexia, dysgraphia and ADD which boys in the early 1960s were prone to. (vax damage, i think).
and ALL of us, from 1st grade until the end of our senior year, were jubilant when school was out for summer vacation.
You missed the "best" part of that Oliver Wendell Holmes quote:
"It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. [...] Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
Compulsory vaccination and involuntary sterilization upheld by the same legal principle!
There is a reason why every culture kicks out its (male) progeny in roughly the same age group. An age group that happens to overlap adolescence. Which is an age of profound physical and emotional transformation (and insufferability).
Unbekoming seems to be going down kook road, by knee-jerk opposing anything modern. It's not all a conspiracy against nature, ya know.
They arent kicked out, they are put through a "training program" and rites of passage by the grown men of the culture and welcomed into manhood/full participation when they succeed. That's a far cry from the female-dominated schooling that emasculates boys today.
I wonder if societies thru all times and cultures had trouble with their teenage boys, though. They may be over-represented in trouble-making & insufferability but still, maybe the majority lurched through without being all that bad, in both precivilized and civilized times.
The theory that entry into the teenage years (approximately) from childhood harks back to a difficult, long, evolutionary process millions of years ago - and lasting millions of years - is not necessarily a wrong idea. From water beings to mammal vertebrates, maybe. I know it was not a simple development. Just throwing out some ideas here. Thanks, Ted.
Mostly excellent, thanks. The stench wafting from the tyrannical outlook of 'Progressives' is stomach turning.
One mistake. "Big factories need two things to make money. They need lots of workers who will do the same job every day and not get bored or angry. And they need lots of people who will buy things, even when they do not really need them."
Kreynesian post modernists claim 'overproduction' impoverishes and what is really scarce is 'consumption'. Which is nonsense. More production brings material abundance which comes to be reflected in lower prices for everyone. People always consume, but Keynesians imagine that saving is bad becaused it reduces consumption. But saving makes possible more capital investment, which increases productivity and real wage rates, which increases average material well being. The greatest beneficiaries of capital accumulatiion are the poorest, because it increases their productivity and real wage rates.
If "adolescence" is a made up thing, after being taught how to read, write and do arithmetic, would it be beneficial for males (especially, but not necessarily exclusively), to be apprenticed to the father, or other older males, to learn real life skills and trades? And those who are particularly scholarly, musical or other, be able to go to places of higher learning, or to be apprenticed to people more experienced in their particular interest - or some version of this idea, to cut out the unnecessary years of classroom propaganda?
Just as the cryptocracy enshittifies society, so it infantilizes individuals. Men and women with independence, integrity, self-respect, and self-confidence aren't useful to those who want to rule.
*Ariel Durant was happily married at fifteen and co-wrote a multi-volume history of the world.³⁰
*David Farragut took command of a captured British ship as a preteen.
*Ben Franklin apprenticed to a printer at the same age and put himself through a program of self-education “that would choke a Yale senior today,” in Gatto’s phrase.
*Andrew Carnegie left elementary school at seven and became a partner in business with the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad at twenty.³¹
*George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Melville, Twain, Edison, Rockefeller: none of them went through the twelve-year sequential schooling that later became compulsory.³²
-----------------------------
And what was everyone else up to? Were there not thousands if not millions of less-obviously-talented folks building, making possible, and working within the broad underlying infrastructure which made the above geniuses' achievements possible in the first place? With or without any schooling at all? Isn't it all of a piece, somehow?
I am not defending compulsory schooling or the ideology which made it "necessary". I'd convert the schools into something useful, set the kids free - and see what happens, the results of which can't be predicted. Those results might be pretty hideous, at least for a while.
Just saying that with or without compulsory education, there are outliers* - people who were born to do what they did irrespective of their education or lack of it. There's no parallel universe available where all those listed above were forcibly placed into school for many years. But I'd put money on them, because of their inherent qualities, achieving the same things.
*outlier defined: One that exists outside or at an extreme of a category, pattern, or expectation; an extreme case or exception.
At least they could teach children useful things. I agree we should all be able to read and write and do some counting (so we won't get cheated). Useful things I learned later in life in evening classes - cooking, sewing. I know a family that homeschools their 5 children. They all help on the farm and they ride horses and love nature! Not the white skinned internet surfers you mostly see. Yes computers are useful, too, but there are many things we should all know when we are young! Mom married barely 17, and I know several who had a first kid (some even a second) before age 20. Now women have kids in their late 30s and even 40s, when there should be grandbabies!
Yes, indeed. School as a place to learn useful things is fine so long as parents were not forced to send their children there for 12 years.
I think that women today are constituted differently and that is why they wait so long to reproduce. Of course, it could be a matter of their having to go through 2 or 3 husbands to find a man suitable to make kids with.
Great piece. I hated school from my first day (we were told to sit down in class, and I didn't see why I should, so I remained on my feet, alone in the class) to my last, leaving a month before sitting A levels in anger. My mother, a teacher, was very upset. I have never forgiven anyone involved with schools really. All my fellow pupils became barristers, lawyers, civil engineers, architects, consultants, millionaires, dentists. All I wanted was to be on Top of the Pops. I failed.
Strange enough I loved to go to school. My mom hated teaching me things, only before first grade she taught me to write and knit because I am left-handed and at the time that was not allowed at school. I still love to learn things. And I like company, and mom forbid me to bring other girls home. Yes strange rules, and I never found out why she did that. She was a very sweet woman.
Grandfather in Russia (born 1890) had to learn the barber trade. He was left handed but forced to use scissors with his right hand. One grandchild emulated him, writing and eating left handed and doing most other things right handed. His scissors are still perfectly sharp and wonderful to use.
I recall stories about how school teachers would force left handers to use their right hand. This was before my time, though. Kind of like forcing homosexuals to "convert", ie, conversion therapy.
so writing left-handed in school was not allowed? wow. in my mid 1950s to 60s schooling it was frowned upon, and some adults in the early years seemed to act like lefties weren't mentally normal, but afaik, they were definitely allowed to write! altho i think some teachers tried to switch them to right-handed . . . geez. . . . how did you do trying to write right-handed?
Born 1957, but went to a very conservative nun's school. The higher grades I did in another catholic school, where they allowed it, but by that time only one girl was still all-leftie and had very big problems through it (she only made it through the first 2 grades)
Mom was very patient, and I learned before first grade, and kept writing right-handed. I can still write left-handed but it looks pretty bad! (thankfully, after I sprained my right wrist in 5th grade, I still could do a bit better still) But I do all the rest left-handed, sewing, cutting with scissors, soup spoon and fork eating etc.
very interesting. i wonder how the forced switch affected your scholastic performance - or maybe it didn't. there's no "control" you to compare ( :
btw, you probably know, there are a lot more lefty kids these days . . . or maybe they are just being allowed to be who they are!!
Yes, I notice that nowadays they are easier on it. Even my late father-in-law here in the US was a leftie! Someone in our class was allowed in middle school to use her left hand, but she was extremely nervous and did not make it through school. I used to be in the high-middle part of the class, 70-78 % of points. I think mother's gentle intervention saved me a lot of trouble in school. This other girl had no one to properly show her how to crochet or knit left-handed, whereas nowadays there are even Youtube channels specializing on this. I can do both crochet and knit right-handed, and write, and that's it!
I sort-of watch major league baseball and it looks as if left handers are over represented.
sounds like you had a wonderful mother. so glad for you ( : mine also taught and demonstrated SO many things - cooking, sewing, knitting, strength, morality, self-sufficiency . . . i wish i had appreciated her more while she was still here . . .
altogether thought-provoking as i ponder how this institution shaped our perceptions and lives. strange to consider the (potentially nefarious) founding and actual purpose of public schooling - which i have always accepted as just a normal part of life, oh brainwashed me.
as a girl who pretty much liked school in the early grades, i find it hard to believe that impoverished early-1900s children really would have preferred industrial slave-labor over school, if they knew . . .
but many of the boys would probably have chosen an active outdoor job to being imprisoned inside all day, chained to a desk doing nothing real - not to mention that school did not suit the tsunami of dyslexia, dysgraphia and ADD which boys in the early 1960s were prone to. (vax damage, i think).
and ALL of us, from 1st grade until the end of our senior year, were jubilant when school was out for summer vacation.
And the final end is the destruction of the middle class, the only independent body that can defy the government.
You missed the "best" part of that Oliver Wendell Holmes quote:
"It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. [...] Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
Compulsory vaccination and involuntary sterilization upheld by the same legal principle!
chilling. and tho i really knew nothing about him, his name was emblazoned in my young mind as someone admirable!
We were all fooled exactly the same way. Part of the plan?
There is a reason why every culture kicks out its (male) progeny in roughly the same age group. An age group that happens to overlap adolescence. Which is an age of profound physical and emotional transformation (and insufferability).
Unbekoming seems to be going down kook road, by knee-jerk opposing anything modern. It's not all a conspiracy against nature, ya know.
They arent kicked out, they are put through a "training program" and rites of passage by the grown men of the culture and welcomed into manhood/full participation when they succeed. That's a far cry from the female-dominated schooling that emasculates boys today.
I found that the word 'teenagers' contains clues as to their nature.
https://baldmichael.substack.com/p/the-nature-of-teenagers?utm_source=publication-search
Forgot about this article.
It’s a great one which ties into this article perfectly.
Thanks for reminding us and sharing for ones who have not read it yet !!!
I wonder if societies thru all times and cultures had trouble with their teenage boys, though. They may be over-represented in trouble-making & insufferability but still, maybe the majority lurched through without being all that bad, in both precivilized and civilized times.
The theory that entry into the teenage years (approximately) from childhood harks back to a difficult, long, evolutionary process millions of years ago - and lasting millions of years - is not necessarily a wrong idea. From water beings to mammal vertebrates, maybe. I know it was not a simple development. Just throwing out some ideas here. Thanks, Ted.
Mostly excellent, thanks. The stench wafting from the tyrannical outlook of 'Progressives' is stomach turning.
One mistake. "Big factories need two things to make money. They need lots of workers who will do the same job every day and not get bored or angry. And they need lots of people who will buy things, even when they do not really need them."
Kreynesian post modernists claim 'overproduction' impoverishes and what is really scarce is 'consumption'. Which is nonsense. More production brings material abundance which comes to be reflected in lower prices for everyone. People always consume, but Keynesians imagine that saving is bad becaused it reduces consumption. But saving makes possible more capital investment, which increases productivity and real wage rates, which increases average material well being. The greatest beneficiaries of capital accumulatiion are the poorest, because it increases their productivity and real wage rates.
“They need lots of workers who will do the same job every day and not get bored or angry.”
Now they have AI and robots so don’t need lots of workers after all 😪
If "adolescence" is a made up thing, after being taught how to read, write and do arithmetic, would it be beneficial for males (especially, but not necessarily exclusively), to be apprenticed to the father, or other older males, to learn real life skills and trades? And those who are particularly scholarly, musical or other, be able to go to places of higher learning, or to be apprenticed to people more experienced in their particular interest - or some version of this idea, to cut out the unnecessary years of classroom propaganda?