Slashdot Mirror
The New School Nurse Is Nurse Ratched
theodp writes "In Ken Kesey's 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Nurse Ratched maintained order in the mental institution by dispensing antipsychotic and anticonvulsant drugs to the patients. Fifty years later, the NY Times reports that some physicians are prescribing stimulants to struggling students in schools starved of extra money, not to treat ADHD, necessarily, but to boost their academic performance. 'We as a society have been unwilling to invest in very effective nonpharmaceutical interventions for these children and their families,' said Dr. Ramesh Raghavan, an expert in prescription drug use among low-income children. 'We are effectively forcing local community psychiatrists to use the only tool at their disposal, which is psychotropic medications.'"
We can make the kids parents pay for pills to almost fix the problem.
Instead of actually fixing the problems which might be expensive and take a long time.
Cheap easy short term gains are awesome! Lets build an entire country like that!
We've gotten to a sick point as a society. We know what works when it comes to education, it is no great mystery. Smaller classes, highly qualified and motivated teachers, involved parents. Instruction that imparts a love of learning and cultivates the desire to investigate the world around us.
Instead of providing this, we drain schools of funding and treat teachers with hatred and distrust. Students in low income schools are subjected to draconian learning environments where their future is ruled by testable metrics and a discipline fetish.
So doctors - despite knowing the significant risks of drugs that alter brain chemistry (especially with children) - are using their own tools to step in and help. Either they are way out of line, or they have hit the nail on the head by classifying academic performance as central to a child's long term health. Either way: they wouldn't be in this mess if we just invested in schools with a fraction of the enthusiasm with which we invest in bailing out banks and fighting wars.
I don't even know Laura. And I guess you'd not be happy if I had an amazing sexy night with her. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Ever notice the drug commercials? None of them address the underlying cause -- they address only the symptoms.
* Your dick doesn't work: Don't get exercise that could actually improve your blood flow. Don't eat right. Take this ridiculously expensive pill. Notice the age of the men on these commercials has dropped from what once was older mean, now the guys could be in their late 30s. WTF?
* Your cholesterol is thru the roof: Don't cut out fatty foods and fried goodies. Don't get exercise. Take this pill that has more side effects that the black plague.
It's all about the money -- and it should be illegal. America hates drugs? Start with big pharma. They kill more people every year than illegal drugs.
If I had my way, I would dictate all pharm companies become non-profit. All money goes to R&D and moderate salaries. Then and only then would the research perhaps be about people and not profit.
These commercials now about one kid in 110 being autistic. No fracking way is this possible. ADHD? Same thing. When I was a kid back in the 70s, kids were hyper. It's normal. Now? Drug the poor things until they comply. People think a pill can solve anything. Want to lose weight? Take in fewer calories than you burn. Make sure those calories are good calories like fruits, veggies, lean meats like fish, turkey. Actually exercise. Almost no one was fat when I was a kid. Fat people were rare. Now? Almost 40% of Americans are considered fat. Why? The crap that passes for our food should be illegal. We need to become like Europe and ban all the junk. When it's about profit, the people get screwed. What's next? Soylent Green?
Tech the test and having funding be all about the TEST needs to go.
As well college for all over more trades / tech schooling.
While I'd be hard pressed to say nice things about the cheap seats of US educational policy, isn't it a trifle hyperbolic to equate ritalin and friends with the genuinely hardcore pharmaceuticals you'd find in a '60s psych ward(or even a present-day one, antipsychotics are not a pleasant bunch, on the whole)?
It certainly seems like a bad plan to make psychiatrists(or GPs and nurses forced to fill in because real psychiatrists are expensive) the first-line people for problems that often have social fixes; but are the common psychostimulants really serious enough to fill the role of terrifying bogey-man here?
The problem is that "society" never can and never will replace the nuclear family. Until we realize this and start supporting the traditional family children don't have a chance.
Apropos of nothing in particular, I got this story first from the Daily Show, downloaded yesterday, broadcast the day before, and summarising TV news stories from earlier in the week.
Being a school nurse is not a resume enhancer. It's not a position most nurses will seek out. It is often a last resort because they've screwed up or washed out elsewhere.
I disagree. School nurses make pretty decent salaries, work on average 200 days a year (60% of the year), have a fairly stress-free existence, and work Monday - Friday 7:30 - 4:30. It's not always about the money. I'd gladly trade, say, a 70,000 a year job with stress and only two weeks off, loose hour/work boundaries for a 45,000 a year job that gives me almost no stress, great hours, months off to spend with family. Money and titles are overrated. Life has no rewind button. Spend it with family or friends or spend it chasing a profit for some asshats who could give a monkey's toss about you or yours.
Disclaimer: I work for a school system.
Really! They made a movie about this.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
You name your blow up dolls? Creepy...
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
False. Total Expenditures for 2008 = 596 billion for both primary and secondary education. Of that, 506 billion was directly being spent by the districts (vs adult education, debt obligations, etc for the remainder).
Excellent debunking! I'll just leave this here:
Pyrrhic victory
I have mod points, but since you are well on your way to +5 insightful, I just want to add some data to this. I am interested in this topic, and I have noticed a series of articles in influential venues, like the Economist, the New York Times, etc. beginning a couple of years ago. They all have a common point: they are reporting some kind of controversial news, like here "doctors are prescribing drugs to poor kids to help them, is this good or bad", while the underlying message is unquestioned, that is, whether those drugs work at all. The underlying message is that they do and that would go without saying.
In the case of the Economist article, unfortunately for the drug companies and the PR firms probably doing this work for them, the reader comments were devastating for this underlying assumption. This article was asking whether it was fair that some students could have recourse to "brain enhancing drugs" bought illegally (like the one used in the treatment of ADHD). Dozens of people having taken drugs as students in the hope of helping at exam times reported their horror stories, and shredded every point of the article.
Big pharrna is financing PhD students in prestigious universities around the world, for work on the use of drugs, not for therapeutic purposes, but for enhancing the brain. This is something that I have myself confirmed meeting one of them.
Now it is the Slashdot crowd being targeted. According to the comments I am reading already, I would say this is another mistake of theirs...
As a child of the sixties, I can testify that psychotropic medications are fuckin'-a great.
I was medicated through half of high school and all of college. I was too broke to score during grad school, but managed to bogart enough from the trust fund babies in my class at Columbia to maintain.
And look how well I turned out. My twelve-toed daughter is very proud of her old dad.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Life has no rewind button.
Yes. But thanks to drugs, it has a fast forward button.
Have gnu, will travel.
At least since the 1980s.
See the racket is with big phrama, its a shell game. They get everyone hooked on drugs, and when they can't pay, they get the government to subsidize it.
If the government subsidizes it, the poor can pay for the life destroying chemicals, and the tax payer foots the bill. Big Phrama is still getting paid somehow.
Like other industries, they can use celebrities, hollywood PR goons and famous "liberal" personalilities to spin their racket into a "postive good".
As a society, we have tried multiple ways of fixing educational under-achievement. We have free breakfast and lunch programs, money spent for tutoring illiterates, funds for experimental programs, various foundations trying the latest and greatest ideas and very little of it works. We are very willing as a society to spend money on academics, it is just they we have not found an universal solution. And in my opinion, a lot of the investment has gone to the lowest 10% instead of trying to raise everyone else.
As far as I know, the only person in my granddaughter's high school that did not have drugs was the school nurse. Changing this could cause panic!
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
We should all 3 have a sexy night with Laura!
Also, more on topic, whats wrong with giving the students what they need to excel if there are NO serious health detriments?
It sounds like some fundamentalist conservative garbage notion along the line of drugs and guns are bad and women belong in the kitchen.
Same idea with the attack against college students using adderal to get good grades. If its a "smart drug" we should all use it? Or is doing well in school a bad thing?
If you ask me, prescribing medications to people who don't need them is medical malpractice.
At a minimum, the FDA should step in and make each doctor swear that in his medical judgment, his patients actually need the drug for their health and that the drug would still be needed even if the school provided the appropriate educational environment for that child.
If the doctors won't swear to this, then suspend that doctor's right to prescribe the drug to that patient. If he will swear to it but is saying something else in public or even in private, then go after him for perjury.
If he really is prescribing the medication in good faith according to his medical judgment, then that's okay. Sometimes doctors do over-prescribe in good faith, but that's far different than deliberately over-medicating a patient.
As for the schools:
Parents and the doctors should file complaints with the schools and sue them if necessary for failure to provide reasonable educational accomodations. The ADA and other federal laws come into play here. Also, "we don't have the money" shouldn't be an excuse, as the feds provide extra funding for students who are in special education. Special-ed isn't what it used to be. Today smart kids who need special accomodations like smaller classes or a quiet place to do schoolwork during the day or after school are put in special ed for paperwork and funding purposes.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_on_Kids
"The War on Kids is a 2009 documentary film about the American school system. The film takes a look at public school education in America and concludes that schools are not only failing to educate, but are increasingly authoritarian institutions more akin to prisons that are eroding the foundations of American democracy. Students are robbed of basic freedoms primarily due to irrational fears; they are searched, arbitrarily punished and force-fed dangerous pharmaceutical drugs. The educational mission of the public school system has been reduced from one of learning and preparation for adult citizenship to one of control and containment."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still,homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it becomes, because there are more families close by with which to meet during the daytime (especially in rural areas). And sometime just knowing an alternative is possible can give one extra hope. Who would have predicted ten years back that NYS would have a governor who was legally blind and whose parents had been forced to change school districts just to get him the education he needed? So, there is always "the optimism of uncertainty", as historian Howard Zinn says. We don't know for sure what is possible and what is not."
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
A "basic income" for all is an other solution...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Surely the State medical boards should be reminding doctors that they are there to treat ILLNESS, not act as equivalents to the team "medical consultants" on your average Tour de France team or whatever.
> We as a society have beenunwilling to invest in very effective nonpharmaceutical interventions
Alternatively, we as a society continue to be plagued by memes of the inherent value of spartanly toughing things out instead of throwing pills at things.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The slashdot summary has this sentence quoted from a doctor: "We as a society have been unwilling to invest in very effective nonpharmaceutical interventions," hyperlinked to this blog post on Salon. However, there appears to be no logical link between the quote and the blog post. The blog post doesn't describe any "effective nonpharmaceutical interventions." Actually, what it describes is a situation where a sixth-grader wasn't interested in doing his school work, the parents tried dealing with it using normal parenting techniques, that failed, and what worked was ... a pharmaceutical. The story told in the blog post leads to a conclusion that's precisely the opposite of the words in the hyperlinked quote.
What exactly does it mean in this context to have "society invest?"
Whoever put together the misleading slashdot summary seems to have in mind that we should have "society invest" in better schools. But the situation described in the blog post is one where basically the kid wasn't interested in doing school work, enjoyed wandering around the school and helping to fix computers, etc., and although some of his teachers thought it was cool to let him do that, not all of them did, and the principal didn't either. This situation doesn't seem to have anything to do with how much money their state was spending on schools.
I suspect that the doctor being quoted actually had in mind options like talk therapy, which is more expensive than prescribing pills. (WP says that specific types of non-drug therapy that are effective include "psychoeducational input, behavior therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT), family therapy, school-based interventions, social skills training, parent management training, neurofeedback, and nature exposure.") But the thing is, society *is* investing a ton of tax money in treating disabled kids. Special ed programs are extraordinarily expensive. At the community college where I teach, we have a whole disabled student center, with half a dozen full-time employees, who seem to spend most of their time helping the huge number of students who are diagnosed with ADHD.
If it was true that kids with ADHD just needed expensive non-drug therapy, and then they'd be fine, then we'd expect to see affluent parents paying for it out of pocket. But that's not what we see at all. What we really see is that affluent parents make sure their kids get drugs.
The real problem isn't that we need to have "society invest" more money in kids with ADHD. The real problem is that (a) kids lie on a bell curve in terms of their ability to learn (in a school environment, but also in any environment), and (b) there has been a long-term historical trend of requiring people to be more and more educated (e.g., a doctor in the 19th century usually has only a few years of college education). If education was really an equalizer in our society, smart working-class kids would end up being more successful than dumb affluent kids -- or more successful than affluent kids who just hated school. This would be unacceptable to affluent parents. It's an arms race, and everyone has the highest possible motivation to get their kid diagnosed with ADHD and get the kid taking the drugs that will allow him to compete.
The problem isn't occurring because of a lack of "investment" by society at large. Society has been investing for a couple of hundred years now in raising the level of education. The result of that investment is the extremely competitive environment we have now, where there is intense pressure on kids who are at the low end of the bell curve in terms of "doing school." Investment by society at large isn't the cure for the problem, it's the cause of the problem.
Find free books.
Ignore the problem as long as possible and, when it no longer be ignored, look for the fastest, easiest fix without considering the long-term consequences (because, hey, it'll be someone else's problem by then, right?)
It's easier to shove pills down their throats than it is to foster a supportive and productive environment (that takes time and effort ... who wants to do *that*?), but how will these kids cope in the future when their minds haven't learned how to function without psychoactive drugs?
Oh, that's right, nobody's thought that far.
I think the major problem here is the inflated role of academic performance. Our society drains the individual of value and reduces him to pieces of paper. What we need is to change society, such that people are judged on their individual merits and not on academic performance.
Reform the educational system, provide alternate routes to good employment. Shutdown the school-prison pipeline.
Story, story, blah blah blah. Nurse Ratched was evil/good Winn from DS9 and Frank's mother from Shameless? I just.. I...
There is an interesting misconception that all psychotropic drugs have sedative effects or make the user more submissive. That's not true. Antipsychotics are sedating, the older typical antipsychotics more so than the newer ones. However, stimulants are the opposite of sedatives. Antidepressants aren't sedatives. Most psychotropic drugs aren't sedatives.
most Asian parents work. A lot. 6, 13 hour days is standard fare. I always here Asian parents trotted out as the example, but fact is there's no way to work those kind of hours and raise a kid. How do the majority do it? They let the government, specifically school teachers, who take a MUCH more active role in the students' life.
As for Asians valuing eduction, that's because in most places it's a dog eat dog hell hole due to their surplus population (that's surplus, no over, population. Over pop means there's not enough, surplus means there's enough to abuse). Americans value those things not because of a weak culture but because we're wealthy enough we can.
Put another way, I'm sick and tired of this weird cult of frantic, desperate, dog-eat dog work. The puritan work ethic is a scam that the Romney's of the world use to make excuses for their grotesque wealth.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Except the stimulants they give kids are bad for them, personality changes, repetitive behavior, loss of creativity, abnormal development of normal executive function skills.
Not sure what you're complaining about -- all the things you list are the intended effects.
I used to be against using these pharmaceuticals to enhance academic performance until I was prescribed them myself. To my amazement THEY WORK! There are no side effects that we know of unless you abuse them.
So why not give them to anyone that wants to do better in school?
Taking drugs so you can hit more home runs and command a higher salary is bad bad bad and may result in congressional hearings.
Taking drugs so you can get a letter grade higher on that all important pre-algebra test is good good good!
Does that about cover it?
treat teachers with hatred and distrust
Nope. Some of us treat Public Employee Unions with hatred and distrust. They are responsible for a system that rewards people based on how long they've been there, as opposed to how effective they are. They stand in the way of giving us the tools we need, like the ability to fire teachers who aren't good. That's not hating and distrusting teachers anymore than allowing corporations to fire for cause is "hating and distrusting" the rest of us. If you have a programmer in the next cube who can't program his way out of a paper bag, you shouldn't want to work with him just because he's been there 10 years. It should piss you off that he makes twice what you do because you've only been there 1 year. That is, it should piss you off if you're a real professional and not just an aspiring union hack.
I know you are being sarcastic, but those aren't the intended effects. The intended effect is increased scholastic performance, and nothing more. Whether the anti-school nutters think that school exists to beat the individuality out of children is irrelevant to what they actually intend. I guess the problem is that the Republicans they are voting in intend to make school as bad as possible until there is no choice but to stop funding it, while the teachers work as hard as possible to make it work. I had more than one teacher who spent 40+ hours a week teaching students outside class (unpaid). Their full-time job was teaching (unpaid), their part time job was paperwork designed to prevent them from teaching.
Learn to love Alaska
for the most part, are about as effective as showing the kids pictures of fluffy pink bunnies? Just maybe. Sorry, but after you get a psychology degree, you're likely to get *really* unromantic about human behaviour. It's not magic, or unpredictable. You can fix certain things with chemicals, or other direct neurophysiological interventions commonly called "punishment" or "reward," but virtually all other merely cognitive or verbal efforts fail miserably.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Considering the drugs typically used to treat ADHD, and in light the sort of horrors the same drugs are described as being by the likes of DARE and the DEA, it seems our society is adopting a Trix-inspired motto: Silly adults, speed is for kids!
Of course, there is a difference between using drugs and abusing drugs, but good luck getting drug warriors to admit that. As unhelpful as DARE has been since it's start, it reaches a new level of absurd when police officers come to schools to teach classrooms full of children on amphetamines that even the lightest use of the very same drugs as teens or adults will ruin there lives.
That's the problem right there.
When all you've got is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. And there's way too much money being made with this particular hammer for shrinks, in their "right mind" of self-interest and ultimately greed, to refrain from using it. I think it's altogether too common for shrinks to have material conflicts of interest due to unseemly financial ties with the collusive and highly profitable industry of Big Pharma.
I also want to remark that it's unfortunate that legitimate opposition to the excesses and corruption of the psychiatric industry appears to have been co-opted by the Church of Scientology, whose real intent appears to be to collude in allowing such corruption to continue unrestrained behind the scenes while they make an outward show of railing against it in public.
See here at 7:48 where the Mom has the Dog on an anti-anxiety medication :)
AccountKiller
Just say no to drugs!
The personality changes are desired; the child is expected to become less of a problem. The repetitive behavior is desired; that's what schoolwork is. I might be pushing it with loss of creativity, but I suspect that helps with the schoolwork as well. And the "abnormal development of normal executive function skills" are intended as well -- although the abnormality in this case is increased, not decreased, executive function.
Laura Bush?
Repetitive behavior like scratching sores into their skin and scalp or spending six hours kicking a soccer ball against a wall.
Also little kids are learning how to make themselves do shit on their own, if they're not having to learn that at a young age when it's easy they're going to be dependent on chemicals. Decreased executive function. In the long term. Not to mention they become much less social.
As far as "no a problem, the problems that are removed are normal hyper child personality things, adderall and ritilin is just as likely to make your kid punch some other kid.. it's likely to turn him into an unstable drama queen when his dosage hits a low point... you
Go ahead and show me some long term data on the effectiveness of addreall. Have you taken this stuff? It feels really gross.
If that means it's even worse than ten years ago.... More people need to drop out....
I went to private school because we lived in a not-great city area. I then went for one year to that city school, as we were moving to the suburbs. I then went from inner city to nice suburban school. Private-smart kids, very motivated parents, they taught to the smart kids and made everyone else keep up. inner city-definitely not as smart, parents not very present, working two full years behind private..taught those who could learn, others warehoused. Nice suburban-moderately smart kids, very involved parents, taught mostly to the middle of the class. When the time came for me to provide this, I got my kids to a "good school district" in the burbs. Kids mostly smart and ready to learn. Parents extremely motivated. PTA raises money for "extras". In the US, it is safe to say that public schools reproduce the parents of the children. Inner City nonsense...that is what will come out. Professionals in Suburbia....that's what you will get from the kids too. A fair opportunity for all kids ? No, not as long as property taxes finance our schools-you will never consolidate school districts in the US.
If you do not want to do something it frankly wont get done.
People have to want to do something for anything to succeed that requires work. I assume you are a teacher as this is the number one issue. You have to motivate children but at the same time you have to rush through no child left behind state standards garbage and rush content as fast as possible. A very difficult job.
http://saveie6.com/
Not necessarily. Many take it because of the days off. Mothers love it as they get the same days off as their children so they can watch htem or vacation with them in the summers.
It doesn't pay as much but the hours are half of what they are in a hospital. Someone people would prefer to work less for less money and they are fine with that. Not incompetent.
http://saveie6.com/
I like listening to music. Here is what some people have to say about forcing other people to listen to music:
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-06-02/news/31989906_1_music-groups-torture-prisoners-guantanamo-bay
"A new documentary released by Al Jazeera exposes the use of childrens songs and heavy metal music to torture prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. "
I also like math... By analogy, what is forcing people to do math against their will?
You wrote: "I hated highschool..."
Then you wrote: "I have to ..."
Why do you have to perpetuate the system you hate?
I know there are answers -- the right to consume in our society is linked to participating in our current economic order. See: "The Triple Revolution Memorandum".
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/11/17/why-the-triple-revolution-memorandum-was-ahead-of-its-time/index.html
So, maybe you have to stay a school teacher for that reason. I certainly face the same economic issue myself regarding other paying work. And maybe you students are indeed better off with your approach in the context you describe, all other things being equal. So, then the issue is, how can one change the context so all other things are not equal and there is a rebalancing?
Still, either a universal basic income or the proposal I outlined would give families plenty of money to hire math tutors like yourself if their kids wanted to learn math. Or a basic income for everyone would mean you could do different things with your own time.
What you say from your experience is truth. But, you can still think more deeply and creatively about the meaning of it, like John Taylor Gatto, Jeff Schmidt, or John Holt did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holt_(educator)
If all the kids you were teaching had freely chose to be in your class, would you have to think so much about authority? What would your day be like if the only kids you were interacting with explicitly wanted to be learning math or anything else you wanted to teach (like they wanted to be engineers or whatever)? The fact that there are children who are compelled to be in your classroom when they don't want to be there is a big part of the problem. Sadly, Jaime Escalante's efforts were essentially shut down by the school bureaucracy that could not accept them, so I'm not saying creating or sustaining alternatives in public schools is easy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante#National_attention
Khan Academy is one example of part of a different way forward. Free schools are another:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school
http://www.sudval.org/
Or:
http://www.augusttojune.com/
"Come inside a public school happily and purposefully going against current trends and join 26 8-10 year olds, their teacher, and their parents for a year bursting with opportunities for curiosity, creativity and compassion. "
The last link, is a documentary about an alternative public school, so things are possible.
More alternatives:
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
More on this theme
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"The three assumptions for home schooling are that it is inherently preferable for a parent to stay home to be there for the kids if they are needed, and that school as it is now is a negative influence the children who parents want to bring them up in a morale world. The third, and more controversial, is that 12 years of schooling is overkill. "
There is a lot more complexity to this than that, although you make some good points.
I'd rather see a "basic income" for all than paying people to be responsible parents, neighbors, or friends.
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
Home-based and community-based education is often about reclaiming family and community from institutionalization.
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."
It certainly is true that unhealthy habits may get passed from kid to kid in schools (they are probably the easiest places to buy addictive drugs, for example). There are other addictive and unhealthy things passed on too at schools, even if they may originate elsewhere:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.chefann.com/
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077
But public school can be seen as inherently immoral in part because it rests on a premise of unneeded violence through coercion.
http://www.educationrevolution.org/blog/educating-children-in-a-violent-world/
Contrast a "public" school with a "public" library, where many peopel throught the ages have learned a lot without someone grading them or monitoring everything they learned or forcing them to read certain books on a certain fixed schedule.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3a.htm
"One way to see the difference between schoolbooks and real books like Moby Dick is to examine different procedures which separate librarians, the custodians of real books, from schoolteachers, the custodians of schoolbooks. To begin with, libraries are usually comfortable, clean, and quiet. They are orderly places where you can actually read instead of just pretending to read.
For some reason libraries are never age-segregated, nor do they presume to segregate readers by questionable tests of ability any more than farms or forests or oceans do. The librarian doesn't tell me what to read, doesn't tell me what sequence of reading I have to follow, doesn't grade my reading. The librarian trusts me to have a worthwhile purpose of my own. I appreciate that and trust the library in return.
Some other significant differences between libraries and schools: the librarian lets me ask my own questions and helps m
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You may be in denial about the potential of AI and robotics? Saying horse carts were replaced by automobiles and human workers switched from making one to the other is different from saying most human automotive assembly workers and human automotive drivers are about to be replaced by robots and AIs (along with most other human workers in their respective jobs).
Also, compulsory public schools institutionalize various incremental levels of violent coercion to all children (including increasingly essentially forced drugging). It is difficult morally to justify the institutionalization of all children in day-prisons based on pointing out some bad parents, especially when the obvious results of doing that for generations are so bad. As is said here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling#History
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During this time, the American educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studies by other researchers and a review of over 8,000 studies bearing on Early Childhood Education and the physical and mental development of children.
They asserted that formal schooling before ages 8-12 not only lacked the anticipated effectiveness, but was actually harmful to children. The Moores began to publish their view that formal schooling was damaging young children academically, socially, mentally, and even physiologically. They presented evidence that childhood problems such as juvenile delinquency, nearsightedness, increased enrollment of students in special education classes, and behavioral problems were the result of increasingly earlier enrollment of students.[9] The Moores cited studies demonstrating that orphans who were given surrogate mothers were measurably more intelligent, with superior long term effects -- even though the mothers were "mentally retarded teenagers" -- and that illiterate tribal mothers in Africa produced children who were socially and emotionally more advanced than typical western children, "by western standards of measurement."[9]
Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made at home with parents during these years produced critical long term results that were cut short by enrollment in schools, and could neither be replaced nor afterward corrected in an institutional setting.[9] Recognizing a necessity for early out-of-home care for some children -- particularly special needs and starkly impoverished children, and children from exceptionally inferior homes -- they maintained that the vast majority of children are far better situated at home, even with mediocre parents, than with the most gifted and motivated teachers in a school setting (assuming that the child has a gifted and motivated teacher). They described the difference as follows: "This is like saying, if you can help a child by taking him off the cold street and housing him in a warm tent, then warm tents should be provided for all children -- when obviously most children already have even more secure housing."[10]
Similar to Holt, the Moores embraced homeschooling after the publication of their first work, Better Late Than Early, 1975, and went on to become important homeschool advocates and consultants with the publication of books like Home Grown Kids, 1981, Homeschool Burnout, and others.[9]
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Also on that theme:
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
"Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off so adopted.
But by the time the chil
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Put the stupid kids together where they can all learn at their level. Put the smart kids in advanced classes so they won't get bored. ADHD is an overly diagnosed condition, FACT
There are 2 groups of people you can make fun of on the Internet without fear of attack. The illiterate, and the Amish.
(I'm going to post this Anon for the sake of my own sanity.)
Long term prescribed patient using Dexamphetamine Sulfate. Not adderall or whatever new brand name they just made up, since over here in Australia all Dexamphetamine is provided as a 100% generic and in my case, covered by the goverment's public health care. (oh noes!! communism!!! ..Its pretty much the best thing ever if its done right. I can call a doctor at 2am to come check out why im doubled over in pain vomiting, and he will come to my house in the middle of the night and I dont pay anything, dont know what you Americans are on about some times, public health care is great lol)
I was diagnosed pretty much after leaving kindergarten. My family also all show symptoms of what is typically labeled "ADD". In my case, through study & testing of alternative medications, it has been established that my particular case is abnormalities in the cognitive behavior moderated by noradenaline.
I've taken other medication that worked better than Dexamphetamine, and Ive taken a lot more than are worse, like Ritalin which gave me psychotic nightmares, SNRI's which left me (a health 26 year old male who is not overweight) completely anorgasmic (for those too lazy to think/look it up, thats complete removal of the psychological/mental orgasm. I'd climax, and 'feel' nothing.) The Interesting thing is this actually can cause men to go a little bit crazy, drunk guys think 'hey $new_thing might be fun', guys in my position start thinking 'i should try $new_thing', and want to do it as soon as possible. At the worst, every second or third female or suitably feminine/attractive male even, would elicit several seconds of intense fantasizing about varying (typically increasing) degrees of depraved and twisted situations, despite getting laid on a regular basis & having a girlfriend. Male brains arent very good at dealing with the removal of the orgasm when you've been having pretty good ones for over a decade. Despite the SNRI having me feel physically and cognitively the best I'd ever felt aside from the one morning I woke up feeling perfectly refreshed, I was being psychologically ground to a pulp by the side effects.
Side effects for Dexamphetamine Sulfate (which I'm on the maximum dose of btw, a 60mg daily split dose 30mg in the am, and 30mg around noon) I kinda feel tired in the morning for an hour or 2 if i skip it, I need a drink or two to get into creative flow sometimes, and my resting heart rate is a little high.
I dont think you know what 'feels really gross' is until you realize the 'better' stuff has you mind raping every 3rd hot thing you see and you havent felt intimate pleasure in nearly a year and your realization of these facts (zero pleasure, seriously disturbed mental state), has triggered clinical depression.
Come back when you've taken a drug in this category for 21 years, over a decade at max dose, tried pretty much every alternative for more than 3 months, and then you can tell me whats gross.