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Do specific parenting choices really make a difference for how people eventually turn out?
@gog posted a comment fairly deep in the thread about courtesy, which seemed worth discussing further. (https://www.themotte.org/post/812/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/176067?context=8#context)
The obvious: misery is bad all on its own, regardless of whether it affects future earnings. So, for instance, Aaron Stark’s childhood was bad (https://youtube.com/watch?v=su4Is-kBGRw) and his parents should feel bad, even though he eventually turned out alright. It sounds like Aella’s childhood was bad and her parents should feel bad (https://aella.substack.com/p/a-disobedience-guide-for-children is not about her childhood specifically, but is the kind of discourse she and others with similar childhoods end up in. FWIW, “my parents are too violent, maybe I should escalate to breaking windows” sounds like an absolutely terrible plan), and it’s debatable whether she turned out alright or not.
Also obvious: It’s possible to prevent children from learning basic things like reading by never reading to them, teaching them, or exposing them to reading culture, not having books at home, not reading or writing oneself, etc, as has been common historically among impoverished households. There seem to be a fair number of children on the margin, who can learn to read just fine with proper instruction and interesting materials, but fall off with poor instruction and boring materials (c.f. Los Angelas whole language program). There also seem to be a fair number of people who will learn to read with just the Bible and an adult who will eventually, somewhat irritably answer their questions.
Contentious: given a certain genetic makeup, family environment, and baseline level of things like nutrition, how much difference do things like daycare, schooling methods, or specific actions make?
Does teaching a child to read at 3 vs 6 matter? Does teaching them algebra at 9 vs 16 matter? Does it only matter under certain circumstances (such as a future mathematician needing to learn math early, or a future world class musician needing to learn to play an instrument early)? Do the children of the sorts of people who like cramming them full of Math and Culture and Literature end up with a richer inner life than if their parents hadn’t had time and energy for that?
I’ve read a lot of fairly surface level articles and reviews about this by people like Scott Alexander, Brand Caplan, and Freddie DeBoer, but mostly forget the details. They tend toward saying that most things work about as well as other things, but some situations are miserable or waste a lot of money and resources, and wasting billions of dollars making people miserable for no reason is probably bad.
I was homeschooled, and am now teaching public school, and sending my daughters to public preschool. Several of my friends are homeschooling or planning to once their kids are old enough, and more are stay at home parents than not, despite being generally lower middle class. I don’t have anything against homeschooling, it just isn’t pragmatic given my personal financial situation and the personalities of my older daughter vs husband and I. This might change as she gets older, she’s still in pre-K, and when I try to teach her something, she tends to argue with me about it.
My general impression on the ground, as it were, with two children and teaching 600 elementary children, is that there is not necessarily any One True Way that will work for every child. And that there are children who are thriving in the large elementary school, and children who are miserable there. Their autism program, especially, seems very stressful for everyone involved, like placing it inside a very large elementary school was probably a bad idea.
Both my daughters seem pretty happy with their publicly funded daycare/pre-K. Two year old is always waving bye to everyone and seems pretty happy to see them. Four year old talks about liking the playground, some friends, and learning to write her name. We bought food from the school cook, and it was quite good. Gog’s preschool did sound pretty unfortunate.
Is there any useful way to systematize any of these observations? Any high leverage changes people are able to make but don’t?
Today our teenager’s school was put on lockdown. A few days ago someone claiming to be a student posted on Reddit, anonymously, a specific threat to shoot the school up. Then has been anonymously emailing every night threatening to do it the next day.
Everyone has been on edge.
While our kid was in class today, An announcement came on to enter lockdown, this is not a drill. The school procedure for this is that each classroom door should be locked, shades drawn, and students should huddle up in the part of the room with the least line of sight (fire?) to the outside.
They texted their families while huddled up, shaking from adrenaline but also trying to stay quiet.
It took 45 minutes for the school to give the all clear. It was a false alarm. A rando maintenance person that some staff didn’t recognize was on the grounds and then they lost sight of the guy and escalated.
So.
Home schooling sounds pretty good to me.
This is basically "How to emasculate a teenage boy 101", or at least one of the ways to do it without necessarily involving anyone female.
My school does the same; barricade the door, get the students to the corner of the classroom away from the doors and windows.
Maybe a little emasculating, but I'm struggling to think of the alternative. Train the boys to banzai charge the shooter?
Pretty much anything where the boys can assist in their defense would be less emasculating. Prepare to banzai charge the shooter, have them draw rifles from the school armory, have them keep a lookout (which of course implies there's someone they can inform who can do something more)... almost anything is better from a "keep their balls attached" viewpoint than teaching them to cower every time there's a drill or a false alarm.
(I doubt cowering is that great for teenage girls either, but I don't have visceral knowledge of that)
Based, but but lossy.
I'm madly in favor of arming everyone and their dog, but the obvious problems here seems to me to be IFF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identification_friend_or_foe) and friendly fire. Any solution I can think of - school uniforms, transponders, pass-phrases - would be fairly easy to subvert for a shooter who comes from the same school. It's easier when the shooter is an outsider, of course, but AFAIK that's fairly rare? Maybe by having teachers act as pack leaders and drilling students to only fire on a teacher's command? But teachers, adults that they may be, are probably far from the best people for this job. Now, I still think risking friendly fire is superior to huddling in a corner and waiting for death, but I guess you'd have to make some very good suggestions as to the details in order to make it palatable to parents.
Now this sounds eminently feasible.
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If I was prowling a school with a gun and they announced "active shooter! all male and male identifying persons are encouraged to form wolfpacks and destroy anyone holding a gun that's isn't a cop. this is not a drill. show no mercy" I'd consider myself done. An entire building full of teenage boys given permission and encouragement to kill you sounds like you have approximately a minute tops before you're beaten thoroughly to a bloody pulp.
Doubt that many parents would want their kid to be one of the 5-10 mowed down before the shooter runs out of ammo, though.
True, but I'm not convinced we should care what they think.
Once, a couple of people flew planes into buildings. Since then, passengers have thwarted 100% of attempted hijackings or suicide bombings at no small risk to themselves. Those kinds of attacks don't happen any more; most fatalities within the last 20 years are evenly split between pilot-as-hijacker (which would have been preventable had the bureaucracies at fault for them accepted the above fact), plane-as-hijacker (737 MAX 8s), or shootdowns.
Then, there was a cultural meme that made some angry men decide to shoot up churches. Since then, church security (formal or informal) has thwarted the vast majority of attempted attacks, generally by shooting the attackers. There was a video of the last attempted one in the US getting summarily executed (or at least there's a photo of the defender, don't remember). Church attacks (in the southern US, at least- risk factors are "living in other areas" and "being the religion most favored by the local authorities") don't really happen any more.
Now, there's another cultural meme suggesting angry men should shoot up schools. We only trust teenagers with guns at school if they bought them explicitly to shoot up the place these days, so obviously the most effective means of defense is impossible, but the message "if you try this, you will fail, die an ignoble death, and the footage of your summary execution [or your being subdued] will be made into shitty memes for years to come" is starting to get out there (the fact that a trans person is the subject of that video probably made it even less cool- but having the lowest-status men on the planet doing either this or the Default Dance right next to you/r body is probably even worse).
Nothing sounds more unbearable than the vision of going into school with an MP5 and 10 30x round magazines ready to get a massive kill count only to score one leg shot before all of the sportsball kids swarm you and beat you senseless with their bare hands. Get some stories like that in the media environment and school shootings become pretty unfulfilling.
This really only has to happen 2 or 3 times before school shootings completely fall out of fashion.
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Personally, when I was in high school, I didn’t find these active shooter protocols merely emasculating, but just plain poorly-thought out. If the shooter is able to force his way through the door into the classroom, then he now has a line of sitting ducks to fire at. Far better to set up an ambush: a student or a few standing right beside the door, ready to smash the heaviest object present in the classroom right on the shooter’s head the second he enters, so that he collapses, stunned, and is promptly beaten to a pulp. Even if the ambush corps suffers casualties, it beats the probable massacre that would result if the shooter is able to enter the classroom with all the students neatly lined up for target practice.
Years after graduating high school, I talked about this with some friends, all of whom had attended different high schools around the country, who all said that they independently thought the same thing.
I’m now wondering what the efficacy of this approach would be. There’s gotta be a tactical flaw here somewhere, right?
You need to consider that the enemy isn't breaching and clearing- they're usually targeting specific people, then picking off targets of opportunity after that (the penalty for lateness is death and so it's no longer a deterrent). "Get everyone into the classrooms and lock the doors" is good enough and even arguably the best you can do; the reason it's made a whole big thing is purely for political reasons (that's what happens when you don't have an even gender/political distribution in education). There's zero reason to announce a lockdown over PA, just quietly send someone to go make sure the outside doors are closed; if shit is going down, you'll know.
It is still the case that schools are vulnerable to casual attackers just walking in the front door, it is still the case that efficiency in these crimes is not the goal, it is still the case that the countermeasures and drills will do nothing to stop a truly indiscriminate attacker, it is still the case that drilling against that scenario would be even worse (psychologically speaking), and it is still the case that attacks of that nature are incredibly rare.
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Last time I received active threat training as a high school teacher, the police officers were responsible for the training, and it was basically: run away, if that seems viable, out of the building, go somewhere safe -- wherever seems safest to you, call and check in later. Otherwise, barricade, throw stuff, there are probably heavy tables, probably books and stuff. It seemed very in line with instinctual responses. It was a pretty small school, though -- possibly a large school would have trampling problems or something?
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Yes. It's a pretty outrageous scene.
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