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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   20847 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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First homework is stupid. Even worse it is pointless.

Most work you perform during your working years will be stupid and pointless, but you still need to do it. Better that children are taught early to swallow their pride and get shit done even when they don't see the point in it.

You might as well put blinders on the kids to prepare them for the fact many of them will develop vision problems as they get older, and force them to wear fatsuits to get them ready for the obesity many of them will acquire as they get older, and steal their lunch money to prepare them for taxes, and...

"Adult life sucks, so we should make life for children suck to prepare them for it" is such an insanely negative-sum, anti-child view that I am filled with shock and outrage every time it comes up. It's like you don't remember what it was like to be a kid, because you don't treat children like people.

From "Book Review: The Cult Of Smart" by Scott Alexander:

School is child prison. It's forcing kids to spend their childhood - a happy time! a time of natural curiosity and exploration and wonder - sitting in un-air-conditioned blocky buildings, cramped into identical desks, listening to someone drone on about the difference between alliteration and assonance, desperate to even be able to fidget but knowing that if they do their teacher will yell at them, and maybe they'll get a detention that extends their sentence even longer without parole. The anti-psychiatric-abuse community has invented the "Burrito Test" - if a place won't let you microwave a burrito without asking permission, it's an institution. Doesn't matter if the name is "Center For Flourishing" or whatever and the aides are social workers in street clothes instead of nurses in scrubs - if it doesn't pass the Burrito Test, it's an institution. There is no way school will let you microwave a burrito without permission. THEY WILL NOT EVEN LET YOU GO TO THE BATHROOM WITHOUT PERMISSION. YOU HAVE TO RAISE YOUR HAND AND ASK YOUR TEACHER FOR SOMETHING CALLED "THE BATHROOM PASS" IN FRONT OF YOUR ENTIRE CLASS, AND IF SHE DOESN'T LIKE YOU, SHE CAN JUST SAY NO.

I don't like actual prisons, the ones for criminals, but I will say this for them - people keep them around because they honestly believe they prevent crime. If someone found proof-positive that prisons didn't prevent any crimes at all, but still suggested that we should keep sending people there, because it means we'd have "fewer middle-aged people on the streets" and "fewer adults forced to go home to empty apartments and houses", then MAYBE YOU WOULD START TO UNDERSTAND HOW I FEEL ABOUT FREDDIE F@!KING DEBOER AND HIS CULT OF F#$KING SMART.

I sometimes sit in on child psychiatrists' case conferences, and I want to scream at them. There's the kid who locks herself in the bathroom every morning so her parents can't drag her to child prison, and her parents stand outside the bathroom door to yell at her for hours until she finally gives in and goes, and everyone is trying to medicate her or figure out how to remove the bathroom locks, and THEY ARE SOLVING THE WRONG PROBLEM. There are all the kids who had bedwetting or awful depression or constant panic attacks, and then as soon as the coronavirus caused the child prisons to shut down the kids mysteriously became instantly better. I have heard stories of kids bullied to the point where it would be unfair not to call it torture, and the child prisons respond according to Procedures which look very good on paper and hit all the right We-Are-Taking-This-Seriously buzzwords but somehow never result in the kids not being tortured every day, and if the kids' parents were to stop bringing them to child prison every day to get tortured anew the cops would haul those parents to jail, and sometimes the only solution is the parents to switch them to the charter schools THAT FREDDIE DEBOER WANTS TO SHUT DOWN.

I see people on Twitter and Reddit post their stories from child prison, all of which they treat like it's perfectly normal. The district that wanted to save money, so it banned teachers from turning the heat above 50 degrees in the depths of winter. The district that decided running was an unsafe activity, and so any child who ran or jumped or played other-than-sedately during recess would get sent to detention - yeah, that's fine, let's just make all our children spent the first 18 years of their life somewhere they're not allowed to run, that'll be totally normal child development. You might object that they can run at home, but of course teachers assign three hours of homework a day despite ample evidence that homework does not help learning. Preventing children from having any free time, or the ability to do any of the things they want to do seems to just be an end in itself. Every single doctor and psychologist in the world has pointed out that children and teens naturally follow a different sleep pattern than adults, probably closer to 12 PM to 9 AM than the average adult's 10 - 7. Child prisons usually start around 7 or 8 AM, meaning any child who shows up on time is necessarily sleep-deprived in ways that probably harm their health and development.

School forces children to be confined in an uninhabitable environment, restrained from moving, and psychologically tortured in a state of profound sleep deprivation, under pain of imprisoning their parents if they refuse. The only possible justification for this is that it achieves some kind of profound social benefit like eliminating poverty. If it doesn't, you might as well replace it with something less traumatizing, like child labor. The kid will still have to spend eight hours of their day toiling in a terrible environment, but at least they’ll get some pocket money! At least their boss can't tell them to keep working off the clock under the guise of "homework"! I have worked as a medical resident, widely considered one of the most horrifying and abusive jobs it is possible to take in a First World country. I can say with absolute confidence that I would gladly do another four years of residency if the only alternative was another four years of high school.

If I have children, I hope to be able to homeschool them. But if I can't homeschool them, I am incredibly grateful that the option exists to send them to a charter school that might not have all of these problems. I'm not as impressed with Montessori schools as some of my friends are, but at least as far as I can tell they let kids wander around free-range, and don't make them use bathroom passes. DeBoer not only wants to keep the whole prison-cum-meat-grinder alive and running, even after having proven it has no utility, he also wants to shut the only possible escape my future children will ever get unless I'm rich enough to quit work and care for them full time.

When I try to keep a cooler head about all of this, I understand that Freddie DeBoer doesn't want this. He is not a fan of freezing-cold classrooms or sleep deprivation or bullying or bathroom passes. In fact, he will probably blame all of these on the "neoliberal reformers" (although I went to school before most of the neoliberal reforms started, and I saw it all). He will say that his own utopian schooling system has none of this stuff. In fact, he does say that. He sketches what a future Marxist school system might look like, and it looks pretty much like a Montessori school looks now. That just makes it really weird that he wants to shut down all the schools that resemble his ideal today (or make them only available to the wealthy) in favor of forcing kids into schools about as different from it as it's possible for anything to be.

I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!

And from "Chattel Childhood: and the way we treat children as property" by Aella:

In response to my childhood post, many people responded by saying homeschooling should be illegal.

But homeschooling was probably the best part about my childhood, because it allowed me freedom. I had to do a few hours of schoolwork in the morning from various books, at my own pace - and then I had the rest of the time to do whatever I wanted (so long as it wasn’t sinful and I wasn’t at the ass end of the funnel).

I consider my childhood to be, in many ways, obviously better than most other kids’ childhoods - they had to go to school. I only had my agency violated some of the time, but they had theirs systemically violated for a minimum of seven hours of the day, and realistically probably more than that. Sure - mine hurt worse physically, but that was temporary - theirs did much more permanent damage to their relationship with learning.

When I was fourteen, I was extremely well behaved, and so my parents tried (briefly) sending me to public school. I had massive culture shock. The kids’ humor felt regressive, I was horrified by everyone using bad words - but most of all, I was shocked by the amount of time wasted.

I would spend all day at school and learn as much as I would have learned in an hour at home. It was tedious. I had to be at certain rooms at certain times, I had to sit in a single spot and stare at a teacher who took a while to get going with the lesson, and then delivered the lesson slowly, and then we were made to leave. Rinse and repeat. And after I got home, I had to do more homework, most of which I wasn’t interested in. I couldn’t believe it, it felt like I was watching a TV show made out of entirely filler episodes.

I had much less life in me during my time at public school, because they had taken my time away from me. I had less attention and energy to devote to stuff I cared about.

When I first got out of being homeschooled, I ended up in a group house with open, smart people who’d gone to public school. It was an amusing point of difference between us that I didn’t “think learning was uncool”. They explained to me that in the normal world, trying to learn stuff about the world was actually pretty low status. This was mindblowing to me. It felt like someone was telling me that listening to music or enjoying a beautiful sunset was embarrassing.

I feel like I’m in absolute crazytown that everyone seems to think the school system is okay. You’re pouring the most vivid years of someone’s life into the fucking drain, forcing them to sit and wait and stare at walls and spend their attention focusing on stuff that most of them don’t care about at all, and will barely remember afterwards. This is how you treat property, not people.

I am extremely triggered by the way everyone treats kids. It’s upsetting to me that people get mad at my childhood, but aren’t near equally as mad at everyone else’s. You’re mad at the wrong thing!

Every culture throughout history has justified the abuse of treating their children as property by arguing this is good for them and good for civilization. Kids )need_ to learn this stuff to be functioning members of society! It’s good to learn discipline! You can’t have kids just sitting around playing video games all day! Not everyone is self-directed autodidacts!

Sure, I know that argument. But hopefully if my parents had said to you “do you expect her to learn good morals if we spare the rod?” you would have said “have you even tried other methods?”

If you were trying to get an adult to learn how to do something without being able to resort to using physical force, how would you do it? Maybe you would find something they’re interested in and show how learning a specific skill would let them accomplish what they wanted. Maybe you’d point out how their coolest friends who they respect are pretty good this skill. Or maybe you wouldn’t try at all - do they actually need to learn how to do that thing? I personally failed to learn a bunch of stuff as a homeschooler, but simply went and learned it as an adult when I needed to know it in order to achieve a goal.

I’m not sure many people have ever figured out what it means to learn at all, because the thing they’re doing in school is very rarely it. Everyone seems to have fooled themselves into thinking that school is about learning. But half of the skill of learning is knowing how to be curious! Schools force facts down incurious throats; if you grow up in a world where the thing they call “learning” is enacted upon you under the implicit threat of violence, completely independent of your will, then you will never learn how to weaponize your own will into the true Learning.

I feel like an alien, having traveled down to planet earth and found that society just does this and thinks it’s normal, and I am personally horrified but gently going ‘are you sure this is ok’ to people who insist that no, this was necessary and they will happily do it to their own children. On a planet made out of Aellas, any one of you who attended public school could go on the talk shows and discuss your traumatic upbringing where your entire childhood was wasted away into systematic damage to your curiosity. You’d get massive sympathy from the audience and you could go on a book tour and they’d make a dramatic tragic biopic about your life. On a planet made out of Aellas, you’d need therapy.

When I was very young, I remember adults treating me like I wasn’t a person, but this didn’t upset me quite as much as the fact that no adult seemed to remember what it was like to be a kid, or else they certainly would have taken my feelings much more seriously, like they did for other adults.

I was terrified that I, too, would one day grow up and forget what it was like to be a child, and would also stop taking other children seriously. So I swore to myself I wouldn’t forget - I chose the phrase “Don’t forget, I’m a person!” and deliberately sent it up the chain across my older selves by regularly meditating on the phrase and the importance with which it was carried. I’m an adult now, but I have not forgotten what it was like to be a child.

We really need to stop talking about education like we're just educating ancient nobles' children.

Or as if the fact that a handful of related universities in one single country were based on an idea two hundred years ago somehow makes that idea The One True Fundamental Truth globally today.

Going by the digging ditches comparison, it's also pointless and stupid, but for many kids it would be genuinely more fun and engaging. That's because it has the possibility of a positive reward signal: finishing the ditch. But the quadratic formula is something many genuinely are just not capable of: there is no final "get shit done" point for it.

And better still that we work on removing the stupid and pointless work as much as possible.

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