gog
1mo ago
Gymnastics or dance lessons are the standard answers for girls that age, but for a 5-year-old, just waking up is a pretty rich experience already. I wouldn't worry until she's 7 or 8.
This is not a small-scale question.
But anyway,
(1) An external motivation to act rightly. In the old internet-atheist days, there was lots of indignation at the perceived attitude of the religious that atheists can’t be good people. That was always a strawman, though. There are lots of good atheists. The question is why there should be. Penn Jilette famously protested that he doesn’t need religious belief to keep him in line, since he already rapes and murders everyone he wants to, it’s just that he never wants to. I admire his purity, and grant that in a society as decadent as ours rape and murder are less tempting than they might once have been. And maybe Penn Jilette has never reflexively blurted out a self-exculpatory fib, or fumed internally about some kid getting the last burger at a barbecue, but it would appear that a lot of people have, and it would be surprising if the rest of humanity had jumped straight to Einsatzgruppen and Congolese rape-battalions without passing through lower levels of immorality.
We can Euthyphro this all day but even setting aside questions of the One True Good, the loss of that external nudge has been disastrous. Law cannot fill the gap- there can be no law against selfishness or contempt, for example.
(2) A prescribed human identity. Religions tell people who they are. Muslim women know exactly what they are supposed to do. Orthodox Jewish men know exactly who they are supposed to be. Suicide bombers know. The vast majority of people are incapable of forming an identity from scratch. Religion offers/offered identities that had many drawbacks and did not adequately serve a lot of people, but they did the job for the vast majority. Among the truly religious, there is no self-expression-by-buying-tattoos, no retail therapy, no do-it-for-the-gram; indeed such narcissistic paroxysm is a sign that someone is on their way out of the religion. Religious people have/create lots of problems for themselves and others, but the defining problem of our age, lack of identity, is the result of the loss of religion. No such broadly effective alternative source of identity has yet appeared.
gog
4mo ago
I'm not trying to morally compare the current Canadian government to the Nazis, but I was thinking the other day about how they are comparable in terms of "commitment to the bit". The war was well-lost and everyone knew it, but they were still rounding up Jews until the very end. We see that now and think "Guys, take the hint, throw in the towel," but Jew-gassing was just THAT important to the Nazis.
It looks like the current government is finished. Pretty much everyone hates them, Canada is (relatively) crumbling around us, and the government is trying to do things like find a path to citizenship for illegal migrants. I used to console myself with the knowledge that they were a bunch of bad-faith virtue signalers, but their laser focus on moremoremore immigration- to the exclusion of many, if not most, other issues- makes me think they really do believe in this stuff. Talk about commitment to the bit.
gog
3mo ago
Minor quibble: Kids have no real frame of reference, so they are easy to satisfy. Every kid at my daycare except the screaming one-year-old would have said they liked me and the daycare ladies and the food and most of the other kids. One kid (the one who never spoke) tried to refuse to return to the daycare when I quit, though- because she now had a point of comparison.
Main point: Does it matter? Think of watching a movie with a kid and all the jokes and references that the kid doesn't even realize are jokes and references. He doesn't know what he's missing. He might enjoy the movie more than you did, but your experience of the movie was richer/denser. The entire world is like that, all the time, and as you become more culturally educated you realize how many well-credentialed adults are in the same position as the kid watching the movie. Doctors and physicists and professors all the way down to gas-station clerks are missing a huge part of human experience and there is no way to even explain that to them since they don't even realize it's there. So all that wordcel cultural stuff is of limited economic benefit, but it is of extreme personal benefit. And it is a benefit that I want to pass to my kids. But there's too much to absorb to start late, so having a dad like me isn't enough. There needs to be teaching and exposure.
So you learn algebra when you're nine, because algebra is easy- it requires no real experience of the world. And then, when all the other 16-year-olds are learning algebra and how to write a sentence (really), you can start philosophy and literature because now you understand death and fear and maybe love. And you don't have to start by learning to read archaic English because you've been reading archaic stuff since you were 7 even though it didn't matter and you can engage the material because you aren't just stepping into the cultural conversation cold- you've been sitting at the grown-ups' table, silent and listening, since you were 10. And when everyone else is taking out student loans to go get an ersatz "The Marvel Cinematic Universe and Feminism" liberal arts education, you already have one at least as good as what they will get, probably better, and you can now study something that pays because you need money but you also need a lot more than that.
So I'd say it matters very much.
gog
3mo ago
I worked at pretty mid-tier daycare in Canada. It was bad.
The studies that show daycare is good for child development use highly curated daycares, with like 1:4 adult-to-child ratios. These studies actually simulate a mom staying home with her kids. MY daycare was a charity daycare run by a church, so to help single mothers, they took everyone. I worked with the 3-year-olds, and the worst ratio was 1:21 (illegal). A normal day was 1:12. In either case, the kids were supervised, I guess, but the priorities were no fingers in power outlets, no vomit, no urine, etc. Learning to count or something was a complete impossibility.
-The kids could talk, but it was garbled and they couldn't tell you what they had done the night before. Conversation was difficult, so their language development was definitely stunted. A child psychologist once told me that language abilities develop most in early childhood- if that's true, daycare damaged these kids' brains. I would meet kids who stayed home with their moms and those kids would tell me what WOULD HAVE happened if something the night before had turned out differently.
-One kid in the one-year-old room cried LITERALLY all day, 8-5, for about her first month. The metabolic stress alone must have affected her, and the noise and tension affected the other kids.
-One kid didn't talk for the 5 months I worked with her. Not word to me or anyone else.
-The one-year-old room was a pen. The kids sat on the ground with toys pretty much all day. The ratio was better, but the workers were occupied with diapers and feeding most of the time, so interaction was limited.
-About 8 kids (out of around 50) were at the daycare from 7 am to 5 pm. A little kid sleeps about 12 hours, so that leaves either 2 hours with their parents or sleep deprivation. Both of those are bad for kids.
-Since the kid spends the majority of his waking life at the daycare, the workers are raising him. I thought I needed resume padding for teachers' college (incorrect), but the other workers were low-IQ, 5th-generation underclass hillbillies under the stress of just being in a room with so many feral kids, let alone trying to manage them. Since middle-aged women generally don't like the cold, and Canada is cold, the kids spent very little time outside.
I am now a highschool teacher, and while I am certain that intelligence is fixed and genetic, I am confident that IQ depends on nurture. Exposure to puzzles and vocabulary and general knowledge and grammar are extremely important. It takes years and years to acquire that stuff and you can't speedrun it when you realize that it's missing. My kid is 9 and just finished Algebra 1 on Khan Academy. I don't know how that compares to actual school algebra in the US, but in Canada that's pretty good (she can't rotate shapes to save her life though, so that's 1 point for the nature crowd). At this rate she's going to have math powers. She has extreme reading powers. It is possible, and some even say probable, that she will not be able/interested enough to spin that into some high-paying job, and she might turn out a bored housewife or HR-lady-that-none-of-the-other-HR-ladies-like-because-they-think-that-she-thinks-she's-better-than-they-are, and the Nurture Assumption crowd will say "See, Gog? Similar outcomes to other women with parents like you."
But quite apart from money, or propensity to addiction and crime, how do you think her model/experience of the world differs from that of one of the kids who went to that daycare, and which model/experience would you prefer your child to have? What sorts of questions will she wonder about, compared to the daycare kids? How will she experience movies and music and advertising? How many more topics of conversation will she be able to discuss? How much more will she bring to the romance table? None of that just develops because of genetics. Daycare is bad.
gog
2mo ago
WHY is there a culture war?
I think most people around here accept the existence of a red tribe and a blue tribe, and accept that most of what happens in western society and politics, from George Floyd to Taylor Swift, follows from those two tribes trying to weaponize events and ideas in order to dunk on their enemies. As a description of the world, our culture war theory works very well. But as an explanation, maybe not. Yes, yes, there are these two tribes, but WHY do these tribes hate each so much? It seems obvious to me that the red tribe is currently on the defensive, and so fights on out of a spirit of plucky individualism/puerile defiance (you choose). They could just stop, but that would amount to a capitulation. Rightly or wrongly, the red tribe won't accept that, so they continue they culture war.
But the blue tribe's motivation is harder for me to explain to myself. Why do they hate the red tribe so much? One could point back to Trump and say "Look at all the damage the red tribe did!" but Trump himself seems to have been the red tribe lashing out at blue tribe condescension/scorn. Do they just want revenge for the 80s? The 50s? In I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, the suggestion is that the tribes are too similar, and so therefore hatred is somehow inevitable. He compares the situation to Germans hating Jews, or Hutus hating Tutsis, but in both of those cases, the party on the offensive accused the other party of a pretty specific set of misdeeds. Those accusations may have been false, but they mobilized a lot of hatred. It appears that the Blue Tribe today does not accuse the red tribe of anything specific at all (barring some attempts that certainly haven't had the hoped-for effect, like mass Residential school graves or Jan 6). One might point back to the legacy of slavery or something, but that is largely absent from other Western histories, and the tribes have sorted themselves out the same way, with even more hostility, as in Canada, where the Blue hatred for Red (using the american color scheme for consistency) takes the form of quite overt punching-down.
So: 1)Is it naive to think that the red tribe hates the blue tribe defensively? 2)If it is naive, why does the red tribe hate the blue tribe? 3) Why does the blue tribe hate the red tribe?
gog
2mo ago
Not that anyone is obligated to play along, but I'm not getting many answers to my question. There's lots of "no, women don't do that" and lots of "preach, king!" but the question stands. How does a run-of-the-mill progressive expect people with much more credible claims to oppression than middle-class women to talk themselves into striving when the highly privileged are so consistently talking themselves out of it? Anyone?
gog
2mo ago
This makes sense. I am a teacher, and it's worse than that, though. The teachers hate KIDS because the kid has an Audi that his dad bought him.
gog
2mo ago
Oh, I barely move in any social circles at all. This is all at work, which is a high school, and therefore maybe selects for people without much ambition . . .
gog
1yr ago
I’m a teacher in Canada. Points below about teachers finding phonics boring are true, although there is constant pressure from administrators and colleagues to be FUN, and phonics doesn’t make class fun.
It is impossible, however, to overstate the staggering stupidity of the average teacher. Intellectual mediocrity combined with everyone else in the room treating you like an authority (and shamelessly kissing your ass) is a really bad combination for self-awareness.
Examples:
-Test question shows a French peasant and a priest riding on a rich guy. Implication is that he is supporting them. Correct answer is “this image depicts France after the revolution.” I show up and point out that the nobility was destroyed (not esoteric knowledge) and largely the clergy too, and therefore this image cannot depict France after the revolution. Say it is more like some noble’s uncharitable take on the true motivations of the 3rd estate. Unanimous response from the entire department: “we’ve used it for 17 years, we’re not changing it.”
-kid gets shunted out of AP English for arguing that the accepted interpretation of a story is wrong. “It’s not what you’re supposed to think.”
-AP English teacher says a play is racist because it contains a song where a girl mocks the bumpkin townsfolk by listing all the stereotypes they expect her to fulfill, and agreeing to enact them because that’s all their tiny minds can understand. Teacher protests that stereotypes should never even be mentioned unless he (personally)is present to make sure kids think correctly about them.
-I teach French, but can also teach math. Have no degree in either. Fellow teachers universally baffled that, in the 20 years after university, I have learned other things to slightly above high-school level. I say “you can learn new things.” One says “NO, I CAN’T.”
-Gr 3 math teacher comes to me, kid is multiplying stuff like 71x83 incorrectly, but getting correct answer every time. He’s doing tens then ones, instead of ones then tens. She cannot understand how this can work, because she has never actually understood multiplication.
-At provincial gr 12 French immersion meeting, teachers unanimously lament that, after 12 years of relentless French instruction, kids can’t read French novels and they must be read to them. Final essays are 80% about hallmark-grade movie Intouchables, a black-guy cool/white guy uptight shlockfest. Teachers are SO happy. It’s the BEST movie, with SO many themes.
I could go on and on (“I showed my students this really good TED talk”), but if you are wondering “how did they not see that the kids weren’t learning,” the answer usually is “they were, on average, not smart enough to do anything other than follow a recipe.”
gog
2mo ago
I'm not asking about how these sorts of people affect poor black kids. I'm asking how someone like a middle-class woman explains the wider world to themselves. There is a pretty big group of people who fall between the extremes of "systemic racism has totally rigged the game against the underclass" and "HBD is true and there is no hope for any of them." This group is not super ideological, feels bad for poor people most of the time, but thinks that if the underclass had fewer kids at 14 (via abstinence or abortion or whatever) and worked hard at school, etc, then many of them would rise into the middle class themselves. Does the thought process only go as far as entry into the middle class? In that, hard work and respectability gets you across the threshold, but then further advancement is obsructed by shadowy puppet-masters? Is it just brute Karenism, in that there is no wider world to them, or that it consists only of NPCs? Is it an aloof acceptance of the hard facts of life, and requires no explanation? I'm asking here because there is no polite way to ask these people in real life. I used middle-class women as an example, but as many of the comments have pointed out, lots of people make these sorts of excuses. They can't all be HBD realists or DEI ideologues, can they?
gog
2mo ago
This goes back to waaaaaay before Covid, though. I feel your pain, but it's not an answer to the question.
gog
2mo ago
But did the Red Tribe do something to obstruct the path to Utopia? I'm not talking about Ronald Reagan- I mean did cousin Merle on his camo 4-wheeler do something?
gog
2mo ago
Okay, but then why do the classes hate each other. It's not like Marxism- their class interests aren't necessarily opposed.
gog
3mo ago
For the first thing, I have no idea, but I suspect that COVID was not the problem. Kids learn almost nothing at school until grade 10, and the gains after that could be achieved much more efficiently. So educationally, staying home is probably better if your parents take any steps at all toward teaching you something. Socially, school/daycare does not offer great opportunities: If a kid needs development, it's hard to see how he will get it from his similarly undeveloped peers. Furthermore, the main social lesson of daycare and elementary school is that disagreement is forbidden and that you should weaponize the authority of 3rd parties to harm your enemies. Teachers always tell kids to "solve the disagreement with a discussion," as though 6-year-olds are going to convene a Special Council on Pokemon Cards or something. That doesn't happen and fighting is looked upon with horror (see TLP on how people don't fear someone getting hurt in a fight, they fear the existence of a fight itself)so you get preference falsification and a lot of tattling. This is a pretty good practice for our new era, but not something I want a kid steeped in. But it's better than watching unboxing videos all day.
For the second, if you can make the question more specific, I'll give it a go.
gog
1yr ago
Orange Shirt Day update:
(edited original comment, but no one saw it, so posting the edit here.)
Lots of ideas worth considering from everybody. Thank you all. In the end, I just didn't wear the shirt. It turned it to have been hugely overthought on my part because:
a) 4 other people had no orange shirt, and 5 more had shirts of strategically (cowardly!) ambiguous orangeneity.
b) A kid GRIEVOUSLY injured himself in the shop class, which made everyone forget about Orange Shirt Day entirely. Apparently he's fine.
As an aside, I am increasingly doubtful of the sincerity of the people who are the public face of this stuff in schools. Twice now I have seen people go all in on this stuff, then 2 years later apply to become principals, fail to become principals, and then set it all aside, thereby revealing that the entire thing was resume padding. I believe I am seeing a third case now. For a day of grim solemnity, the video they used to Educate students was some instragram girl's "Top 5 questions about truth and reconciliation" (it's really called that here) but it was an actually an ad for her online feather-and-bead store. The bathos boggles the mind.
gog
2mo ago
Being imposing is absolutely a huge advantage when dealing with students in an anarchic environment. Even in Canada. But the complaints are never about that. They're about how some man got to go on (="he organized") a field trip, or how some guy rear-ended their car "but that would never happen to my husband" or whatever.
gog
3mo ago
IQ lets you use the info, but it doesn't make you prefer it to video games. Parenting removes the possibility of video games.
My kid is 9 and has been homeschooled the whole time. She is far ahead of grade 4 (she just finished gr 8 math, but math is pretty a priori, so it's easier to push than history or something) and she isn't that much weirder than the other kids. I'm not even sure her weirdness is from homeschooling- it might just be hereditary. I am a public highschool teacher, and quite apart from the low-balled curriculm and culture war stuff, just talking to other teachers is enough to make me prefer death in the street to sending my kid to school, at least until 10th grade (I'll consider it then).
Social interaction is absolutely the biggest problem. We live in Canada, in the reddest part of the country (although blue is the colour of the red tribe here, and red is the colour of the blue tribe), so there is no shortage of homeschooling families but they are a)weird as hell and b)hyper individualists who prefer to opt out rather than to work within a system. I don't blame them, that's why we homeschool too, but the result is that the slightest disagreement over vaccines, or theology, or which video games kids are allowed to play, leads to ghosting. These are people who REALLY fear that their kids will develop the wrong values, so they try to find people with perfectly matched values. This works great for Mormons, but not for anyone else.
The next part of the problem is that virtually all social interaction is mediated by mothers and determined by their relationships to each other. Just dropping your kid off at their friend's house is pretty rare. If the kids are hanging out, the moms are hanging out too, so the moms have to be friends. Sometimes they form Mom Groups. Often these groups become Machiavellian dens of intrigue and betrayal, and now your kid's friend just doesn't exist anymore. If you try to organize stuff yourself, it freaks out the moms.
So maybe you sign your kid up for soccer or swimming or something so they can make friends there with some normal kids. The problem is that no other parents thinks of these places as incubators of friendship- that's what school is for. So if you suggest that your kids hang out together sometime, people act like you just invited them to a threesome.
Now, my kid has like 4 friends, and I went to school and had like 4 friends too, so maybe she's not missing out, but maybe she is. I tell myself that it's a tradeoff- you can't count on getting a liberal arts education at university anymore, and you shouldn't try anyway because of the costs, so this way I can give her something like that between ages 12-17, and then she can go get technical training and in any case, who still talks to their elementary school friends?
So if you're opening yourself up to "You kept me isolated throughout my entire childhood," you want to be able to say "No I didn't but also, look at the education you received."
Math is easy. Push Khan Academy. My kid starts Algebra 1 next month, and she's 9. That's not prodigious, but it's pretty good. She'll understand it at least as well as the average kid in Algebra 1. I pushed her pretty hard, pretty young, which led to a lot of rage from me and I don't recommend it and I wont do it with my other kid. Eventually I figured out that as long as her age matches the grade level (9 years old = grade 9 math) everything works okay. If we creep beyond that (because you can advance through this stuff really fast when you aren't doing a crossword about fractions every Friday) she muddles through but it's just not worth it. This takes about 45 minutes per day.
Reading is easy. Teach your kid to read early. My one kid could read by 3, the other one is taking a little longer, but will be semi-fluent by 4. This literally adds years to the kid's info-absorbing life and boosts vocab hugely. This isn't just a party trick, since vocab limits comprehension of text. Push reading fiction to learn words and culture, and non-fiction to build a model of the world. Building an accurate model of the world is the most important way schools fail children. This takes about an hour per day.
Writing is less easy: Get the kid to write poetry and descriptive stuff, emulating the style of distinctive things they have read. There is a book called "Writing Power" by Adrienne Gear which has a lot of good tips for making a kid's writing suck less. This varies hugely. Writing about a trip to Disneyland takes 15 minutes, writing a 12-line poem can take an hour.
Science is easy: Science up to like grade 7 is just general knowledge. If the kid reads a lot, you're good. We follow our province's curriculum as a minimum standard, but it's stuff like "opposite poles attract, similar poles repel." Pretty simple stuff. We do this as the opportunity arises. Maybe an half an hour per day when we're doing it.
History is easy: History up to grade 12 is just bien-pensant propaganda. If your kid reads a lot, you're good. My kid is now at the age where we watch a lot of pop history videos, and we also read The Story of The World, which is a homeschooling classic and is a good starting point for building the model. We cover our province's curriculum in about 10 minutes every year just to be safe: "What happened to the Indians?" "Everyone was mean to them." "Was residential school a good thing?" "I'd say no." Done. This mostly is covered by reading time and conversations in the car.
Gym: BJJ and lots of swimming and biking. She has no idea what to do with a basketball or a baseball. I'd sign her up if she asked, though.
If your wife has a PhD, the above is probably all you need to do. We tried The Good and The Beautiful, which might be good for older kids, for for a small kid it was a lot of "Write 4 facts about Switzerland" and "Memorize this poem of dubious artistic merit that was clearly chosen for no other reason than its memorizability." It's made for stay-at-home essential-oil-selling moms with no real education of their own, and is pretty good for those situations. My wife sorta falls into that category so she gets my kid to do a lot of Duolingo and stuff like that, but I supervise most of the real work.
It's a ton of work. I help my kid with her math in the morning before I go to work and check her writing when I get home and ask her about the books she's reading and read classic stuff to her at night and show her the movies of cultural importance that she can understand. But when it goes well, the pride is indescribable, and we share enough of a common language that when she asks something like "What came before God" I can explain most of the debate pretty quickly in terms she can understand and she wails in frustration as she realizes that some things are not just unknown but unknowable because she really does understand the problem. This might happen if she went to a regular school, but the . . . intellectual(?-she's 9?) . . . relationship wouldn't be there, it would be- if it existed at all- between her and a childless 30-year-old wine-aunt teacher who obsessively watches The Bachelor. There's a fine line between "Why have kids if you're going to have someone else raise them?" and "I'll keep your body in the freezer so we'll never be apart," but I think all this effort and interaction and conflict leads to a better parent-child relationship, and I wouldn't want to cede that to an appointee of the state. Many parents have ceded that relationship with their kids to me without even knowing it ("I asked my mom about this stuff, but she doesn't know anything"), and I don't feel good about it.
gog
2mo ago
Sure, but why? Whence the universalism? Is it a holdover from Christianity? From Communism? They don't seem to care about what happens in Mali, for example, the way Christians and Communists do.
gog
2mo ago
Those examples are from a culture war in full swing, like saying "we hate the other soldiers because they shot a bunch of our guys in the last battle." My question is why is there even a war going on.
UPDATE:
- Lots of ideas worth considering here. In the end, I just didn't wear the shirt. It turned it to be hugely overthought on my part because
a) 4 other people had no orange shirt, and 5 more had shirts of strategically (cowardly!) ambiguous orangeneity.
b) A kid GRIEVOUSLY injured himself in the shop class, which made everyone forget about Orange Shirt Day entirely. Apparently he's fine.
As an aside, I have come to doubt the sincerity of the people who are the public face of this stuff in schools. Twice now I have seen people go all in on this stuff, then 2 years later apply to become principals, fail to become principals, and then set it all aside. I believe I am seeing a third case now. For a day of grim solemnity, the video they used to Educate students was some instragram girl's "Top 5 questions about truth and reconciliation" [it's really called that here] but it was an actually an ad for her online feather-and-bead store. The bathos boggles the mind.
I need advice on what amounts to conduct in the Canadian culture war.
-
For a little over a hundred years, indigenous (native/Indian/aboriginal) children in Canada attended boarding schools designed to drag them into the modern age. For about 40 of those years (a bit longer, depending on the area), attendance was compulsory, and at all times physical and sexual abuse were at least common, though not universal. A little less than half of all indigenous children who lived during that period attended these schools. 4100 deaths are known to have occurred at these schools, most of them from tuberculosis. While the death rate of the schools was not way higher than the death rate generally, it was higher and most of the children who died in the schools would not have died if they had not attended the schools.
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Indigenous people in Canada today are not well integrated into society. Many live on reserves (reservations, if you're American) and these reserves are isolated, sometimes accessible only by air. Almost no economic activity occurs on these reserves, so unemployment is widespread. The reserves are plagued by extreme substance abuse problems, sexual violence, parental neglect, lack of education/credentials and the shame that results from knowing that these problems are much less severe everywhere else. Even people who move away from the reserves are affected by these problems, or from having grown up surrounded by them.
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For the past 20 years or so, but especially following the George Floyd affair, there has been a major push by the people who set the cultural tone in Canada to establish that (2) is a direct result of (1), just as in the US there is a great yearning to prove that the problems faced by black Americans are the direct result of slavery. In Canada, this has led to strident narrative-crafting. It is commonly (but mistakenly) accepted that residential schools were a big secret, that children were murdered routinely in them, that attendance was always compulsory and, most recently, that there are hundreds of tiny graves hidden all around Canada concealing the remains of the victims of what all bien-pensants agree was a cultural genocide (Side note: While the culture is definitely damaged, there is much evidence to suggest that it was damaged before the imposition of the residential school policy, but this is a matter of historical debate, and no such debate is currently permitted in Canadian society). These graves are in some cases the confirmed rediscovery of previously marked graves in community cemeteries, but the most cited example is of 215 ground-penetrating radar hits near a former residential school in Kamloops, BC. 2 minutes on Google will explain that GPR cannot find human remains, it can only find disturbances, and that those disturbances must be investigated by excavation. No excavation is happening in Canada because it would be disrespectful to the spirits of the children.
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One former residential school student once received a special orange shirt for her first day of school, but this shirt was confiscated by the nuns when she arrived at the school and was made to wear a uniform. Therefore, orange shirts have become/been made a symbol of public regret (in a bizarre inversion of the American culture war they bear the slogan "every child matters"). Regret over what? Formerly, it was regret over the abduction of children by the state, though this was always the policy, but more and more they have become a symbol of regret that the Canadian government literally murdered children and hid their bodies and used residential schools as a way of making this possible.
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Ironically, schools are the main institutions pushing the new narrative, in many cases explicitly as a means of correcting the backward thoughts of the students, since they cannot correct the backward thoughts of their parents. This was precisely the rationale for residential schools.
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Advice time: I am a teacher. Tomorrow is my school's Orange Shirt Day. I have lived in the fly-in communities I described above. I have seen the mind-boggling material and moral squalor of reserves. I have lived in it. I do not see how anyone wearing an orange shirt will bring about one iota of improvement in the lives of the people I knew Thus, if I were to wear an orange shirt, it would only be to avoid the consequences of being literally the only member of a 60-person staff without one, but these consequences would be entirely social. Canadian teachers are virtually impossible to either reward or punish. I would be something like Havel's Schoolteacher, only worse, because of the much smaller threat.
-I could wear the shirt but inwardly resist acquiescence to the narrative. This is what Havel argues quite convincingly against.
-I could wear the shirt so my friends on the staff are not marred by their association with me, although the consequences would be entirely social.
-I could wear the shirt because, having argued against pretty much every hyper-compassionate wine-mom idea my fellow teachers have, I am now regarded as a mere contrarian, so if I don't have a shirt they'll just roll their eyes and whatever statement I think I'm making will fail.
However, if I were to wear an orange shirt, in addition to just feeling like I took an L, it would also greatly undermine every argument I have made to my students regarding the value and possibility of resisting conformism. I am not so naive as to think that any of this will be remembered a year after they graduate, but day-to-day we all have to look each other in the eye.
Not wearing the shirt incurs only social consequences, but I have been incurring them for years now, and it's getting tiring.
I don't want to wear the shirt, but I also don't want to make a scene, but I also want to be credible to the people I ask to believe me.
Someone talk me into the right course of action here.
Yesterday, I heard a woman casually, as though it were self-evident, explain an undesirable outcome in her life with "because I'm a woman." I have heard this used by many women to explain: -Why they are not managers -Why their students cannot read -Why they follow pointless workplace rules that no one ever enforces and most employees don't follow -Why they live in fear of the disapproval of superiors -Why a waiter was rude to them -Why a waitress was rude to them -Why they must conform to community norms
Though the explanation sounds like a confession ( "I can't be a manager, I'm just a girl!"), in all cases it is an accusation, intended to imply that the patriarchy is manipulating things behind the scenes, or that "everyone knows" men never get punished/demoted/frowned upon, so only women have to actually worry about their behavior/reputations/whatever. I have been shocked both by how readily this explanation is confirmed/affirmed by other women present when it is offered, and also the wild confirmation bias on display. The women are not managers, but they never applied for the job, and their bosses are women. They have never been reprimanded at work, but neither has anyone else. The male students can't read, but neither can the female ones. None of this is considered. It boggles the mind.
Nevertheless, it is a fact about how a certain class of Western woman explains the world to herself. If people so privileged are so certain of how the deck is stacked against them, what hope is there for people with stronger evidence for that belief about themselves? How does a standard right-thinking (from "to right-think") respectable Westerner expect anyone else to transcend their culture or overcome oppression or break the cycle when their default, axiomatic explanation for why they only make 100k and three trips to Mexico per year is "society cheated me." What is a black kid supposed to think? Or a kid on a reservation? "I'll give it my best shot"? I have heard black dissidents make this argument against the idea of systemic racism- that even if it is real, thinking about it stops black people from trying things. But how can self-exculpatory models of the world be eradicated in people with somewhat credible claims to oppression when they are so popular even among the most privileged members of society? How do the "it's the culture" people expect the culture to change if the winning culture tells itself the same story as the losing one?
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