(I’m being downvoted, but this just objective fact, and something my grandfather brings up commonly).

Edit to clarify they are state funded and not private.

> By the end of the 1980s, all of the grammar schools in Wales and most of those in England had closed or converted to comprehensive schools. Selection also disappeared from state-funded schools in Scotland in the same period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar_school

There are private schools that call themselves grammar schools (paid schools, not state funded) and some grammar schools still exist in Northern Ireland.

But the system that defined what a grammar school is - has long since been abolished, and all free-access grammar schools were completely gone from my area before I was even born.

That's because you lived in an area that didn't have the 11+ exam. I did, and I went to a state-funded grammar school in the 1990s. It's still there, famously.

Most grammar schools are gone but there are far from none.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grammar_schools_in_Eng...

The only issue is that Grammar schools are super selective these days, based on my own experience there are at least 10 applicants for every single place, as well as multiple rounds of tests to filter out children. In the end it’s a lottery of sort too as local councils decide who is awarded a place.

https://www.queenelizabeths.derbyshire.sch.uk

But to confirm, there are still areas that have state grammar schools and have the 11 plus: Buckinghamshire, Essex and Kent spring to mind as the obvious ones in the South East.

This all became more complex again with the introduction of academies (twice, with different goals and subtly different setups) and free schools (although are those really a thing any more?) and I'm sure New New Labour will at some point add another category if school in the interests of simplicity...

They were created to provide a pathway to the middle class for bright children from working class families. But the entrance exam was heavily biased in favour of children from middle class backgrounds.

Famously the first 11+ tests had questions like "Name the various types of servants in a household and what they do".

In later years, getting out of school tuition was the main way to prep for the 11+, which put grammar schools financially out of reach for a lot of working class families. It had basically become a parallel state funded education system for the middle class.

Obviously some areas still have grammar schools and the impression I get from people living in those areas is that to stand a fighting chance with the 11+, you need out of school tuition or for your parents to be educated enough and have time to tutor you yourself. House prices are also obviously high in grammar school areas too! I've seen recent 11+ papers and having bright children at state schools around that age who are at the top of their year academically, I think they would struggle with them without any preparation or tuition.

This is incredible...

But given most schools now in the country (given only a small subset still have grammar schools) are done by catchment area, much of this still exists in comprehensive education too. Now, if you're well off you just buy a house in the right area so your kids get in to the good school.

I suspect in the past, people were less mobile, there wasn't the same disparity in wealth between different localities in the same general area, and school league tables weren't published. So the idea of moving to an area for (among other things) better education for their children wasn't something that was done.

> Famously the first 11+ tests had questions like "Name the various types of servants in a household and what they do".

That doesn't sound like a question a middle class kid would know anything about - not unless your definition of "middle class" is far different from mine.

My kid got in, and it turns out everyone else used a tutor (I stupidly took the advice not to do so from his teacher, who thought he'd get in just fine). This is in fact why playdates seemed to die out in the year or two before the test, the kids were being tutored but for some reason nobody would admit it.

When I went for the intro evening, the parents were simply the same kinds of people (often the same actual people) as the private primary where my kid went. Essentially, it is a private school where you don't pay fees. Same parents, with £30K more in the bank each year. The kids get into the top unis at a similar rate to the local fancy private school, which takes in all the classmates who didn't get in.

I have to say, they are a good bunch of kids. There's none of the bullying problems that everyone else is reporting in my kid's year. They have an environment where they have other quite nerdy kids doing nerdy kid stuff, without judgement.

But they are not a socially diverse bunch of kids. I'm not seeing any social mobility at all. Where are the kids whose parents are in the trades? Parents who aren't working? How come everyone I meet works in finance, law, accounting, medicine, or other white collar work?

I think it's the tutoring. It lets the marginal white collar kids win over the marginal "other social class" kids.

You will also enter other communities, where again, you will find bullies.

God how I hate idea of "safe spaces".

Nope, if I have to share an office with an ethnic gang that attacks co-workers because of their different ethnicity I will certainly not "deal with bullies" but leave the place.

I don't know what kind of places you've worked at, but everywhere I've worked if anyone behaved even 10% like the average high school bully they'd have been fired on the spot.

Cause there is certainly better ways to prepare a kid to the real tough life than having him to go through a prison. I can certainly see what the OP went through by relating to my own experience. I managed better, I was more often than not in the neutral ignored camp but I really see how bullies made life miserable to others, and how it could have been very different. These tensions didn't help me, it was just an issue I had to deal with, more or less successfully. But I really felt a liberation when I started my first job, though I've no rights to complain about my childhood.

Regular teaching is a thing of the past. Specific lessons tailored to a kid capacity through AI (let's give it a few more years) is the future. Most modern countries will certainly start swapping regular teaching within the 10 next years, the rest of the world will follow.

I have worked in 5 different companies, not one had any bullying. (Technically there was a one-off event involving a colleague and it was dealt with severely enough that it never happened again)

Sadly, it wasn't so easy as that with school.

In a way you're right, I worked in a consulting firm that seemed to have that mentality, and I did find bullies, and it seemed the only way to go forward was to become a bullying, lying cheat yourself.

Then I went on to work for a more civilised company that believed in people being decent and such, and discovered that you can actually coexist with people and foster growth without stepping on other people on your way.

If you think one can just "fight with bullies, find inmates, find friends" and everything will be alright, you're quite clueless to some experiences many people have gone through.

<< God how I hate idea of "safe spaces".

It is not a question of safe space. It is a question of what you are teaching. Because of the people like you, who think it is perfectly fine education, I can accurately pinpoint 'troublemakers' and 'danger' as I walk down the street and avoid the place. That is explicitly NOT what early education should be.

Where I live (U.S.), new schools are literally built like prisons... each wing is laid out from a central "observation area" for the administrators. It's just a panopticon design modeled after penitentiaries.

I was with my family in our new local high school. My dad and I were the only two who noticed the layout.

> Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, and asylums. He devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a panopticon prison, so the term now usually refers to that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

Whether it’s friendly and encourages healthy development is another question.

In my school experience they turned a blind eye unless you fought back in which case they would punish you for fighting back.

Craiglist-mediated exchange is a choice. School, prison or workplace is not - not in any practical sense.

If a teenager fails to show up for school, a police officer will eventually show up to arrest their parents and place the teenager in the custody of a "foster family." Now both parent and teenager are imprisoned. And we are told this is freedom.

To make matters much much worse, children in state custody with the foster system are routinely exposed to all kinds of abuse. Many foster families operate like a profitable business where costs are minimized and care is entirely absent.

People look at ugly schools, and they look like prisons, and the kids are captive in the ugly buildings, so it invites the prison metaphor. But makes no sense. Schools are a series of classrooms, prisons are a series of small cells. The designs would not be reusable at a fundamental level, or any practical level.

That said, I am still doubtful there are 1:1 copies of jails being used as schools, regardless of visible similarities. I don't see any of these supposed jail/high schools with secured rec yards for instance, which generally make up part of the structure of the facilities that look most like the examples given.

I think we pretty much universally agree that mandatory schooling is preferable to the alternative, do you really think an illiterate populous is preferable? So yes actually that is freedom. Society guarantees that you will not be illiterate just because your parents were crack addicts, I think that's a good thing.

You are missing the point, "most" is not all, I don't think most people/families are like this at all, we don't do this for most people. I think you would be surprised about the number of low-income children in the US who will never see a classroom if we abandoned compulsory education. It is also an effective measure to increase equality and class mobility.

14 million children in the US are food insecure. 43 million people live in poverty, 12.9% [1]

You know how many people in the US are illiterate? 21% [2]

Do you think that number will increase or decrease if we got rid of compulsory education?

[1] https://www.nokidhungry.org/who-we-are/hunger-facts [2] https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-s...

Just 20% in 1875[1], despite the primitive education system of the time. Is the answer no change, it being limited by the innate capabilities of the people, not limited by what they do?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--rt8aVV2zk

You describe hell. But I don't believe that your experience is dominant or even that common in the UK. Which generation are you from?

As a consequence of this experience, though, I saw that I wasn’t exactly entirely unique either, as there were other children treated as I was and we sought each other out. So I know that while my experience is not universal: that it is at least shared by a handful of people within my schools alone. - I would hazard to guess more outside of my school have these experiences too.

Having said that, your experiences weren't a million miles from mine in the 80's in the crap end of Hampshire. Most of the violence there though was from other pupils, rather than teachers.

However, speaking to my daughter schools these days do tend to be kinder, gentler places than when I grew up. Fights seem to happen never rather than on a daily basis.

I know my experience isn't especially portable as I went to a public school in the home counties, but not all of my friends did, and while I understand they experienced teachers with varying levels of competence and interest, none of them has described it in as harrowing terms as yours, and all came away with friends and a fairly decent education, albeit one that they probably had to have a bit more determination to get than I did.

My mum worked in various UK state schools as an assistant from around 2000-2010 and described serious budgetary problems throughout the system, and teachers trying their best in adversity. She also described the many obstacles in the way of getting the bad kids out of classrooms so they couldn't disrupt things so much. I have a friend who teaches at a grammar school, who is fairly intelligent and interested in his subject, and seems to teach well to kids who are interested, though again there seems to be little money to achieve anything.

I'm not claiming shitty, prison-like schools don't exist or trying to invalidate your experience, it was clearly terrible, but I'd be wary of drawing too many wide-ranging conclusions about school education as a whole from it.

From my position, saying: "I'd be wary of drawing too many wide-ranging conclusions about school education as a whole from it." Comes close to invalidating the experience of another.

"Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education."

"I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding. "

> why on earth should a conclusion about school _not_ be drawn?

It depends on the conclusion. If the conclusion is "school as a concept is so irredeemably bad that we should scrap schools entirely because of my experiences", I'm not sure it's supportable because of the lack of universality.

If the conclusion is "some schools have been run so poorly that students are left with lifelong emotional scars and little education to show for it, we need to do something about that", I'm all onboard.

Not saying it doesn't need to be fixed, but that like most systems handling large volumes, for better or worse, it caters to the majority:(

If the percentage is 10% of children suffering through school, that's a horrendous number, but still leaves school as an overall positive experience for the vast majority, even though significant work needs to be put it to fix its problems.

If the percentage is 50% of children suffering, then it's a crapshoot if your child will benefit or be deeply disturbed by school, and the whole system needs to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch.

One anecdotal experience can't help one decide which of these is the right approach. I'd venture a guess that, since most people are not clamoring for fundamental school system reforms, the experience of most voting adults has been largely positive or at least neutral in school.

1) My primary school clearly took children's advancement seriously (more in things like handwriting, bladder control and cycling proficiency than in subject-matter knowledge or understanding), so it wasn't all pain and no gain, but that mostly stopped at secondary school.

2) Secondary-school maths lessons were (usually) something of a haven because maths teachers were willing to engage in unplanned reasoned argument and for almost three years we worked independently, at our own pace, from booklets while the teacher gave us each in turn one-on-one tuition (for only one or two minutes per lesson, but it did mean that I escaped being uncomfortably pressured to speed up or slow down both when I was working independently and when I had the teacher's attention for a non-punitive reason).

I think British education would be better if secondary schools had a clearer purpose and treated pupils as stakeholders. My experiences was that my formal education started at primary school and resumed at university after a seven-year gap. I never really found out how my secondary school was meant to benefit pupils. Pupils ought to not only benefit from school, but understand how it benefits them.

I think schools should reflect clearer thinking about ability-based selection. If pupils are grouped by age and location only, and not at all by ability, then requiring the whole class to work through the same material, in the same way, at the same pace risks seriously inhibiting subject-matter learning. On the other hand, grouping pupils by "general ability" risks putting pupils in some classes more or less advanced than those that would benefit them most, and permanently disadvantaging those who are rejected from the more prestigious academic path at an early age.

Pupils also ought to lead lives they have reason to value. Corporal punishment even for bullies is a net negative, and there should be meaningful protections against teachers using loopholes, such as turning a blind eye to bullying or perpetrating emotional abuse themselves. We had many teachers like that at my secondary school, and one of them was found to have assaulted a pupil while I was there.

Edit:

I think some important points aren't really clear above. I agree with dijit that school can provide pupils with very poor value for the burdens it places on them, but I consider this a missed opportunity, rather than a lost cause. I also suspect teachers' toxic attitudes about class and violence contribute to the bullying problem, so we should be careful not to let cognitive biases lead us into doubling down on "discipline" in schools, when that's part of the problem. I left school many years ago, but before I did, authority figures bemoaned the end of "discipline" and the coddling of pupils, which was at odds with my experience, so I'm sceptical of claims that the problem has since been solved.

In the same way, my own experiences at school were a significant attitude change compared to the learn-by-rote and corporal punishment era of my parents.

I couldn't claim that it works for every student or that every school is like that - plus the entire school system is now stretched financially to breaking point in a way that it wasn't when I was there, and there are additional new problems such as social media - but I do feel that in general things have moved in the right direction.

That said, parents without much of an education themselves may tend to set the bar too low for their children, but that often appears to be an issue in the public school as well.

It's funny that society has the same issue - refusing to expel disruptive students, refusing to imprison or deport criminals, it's all the same.

In that case the homeschooled are akin to the "savage" in the story.

EDIT: corrected spelling!

https://laniakeabooks.org/books/letters-from-prison/part-1/#...

So I escaped the prison. I dropped out at age 14 and went to work in a book warehouse at the age of 16. Everybody was screaming about how much I'd regret it, but to this day I consider it among the best decisions I've ever made.

Now I have young children of my own, and I'm not sure how I'm going to handle their education, but home schooling -- /w private professional tutoring and organized athletic activities -- looks like the best option. There's no way I'd subject them to public school.

In a really healthy society, with really good schools, dropping out would (99%) be quite regrettable.

Some of those screaming people probably cared about you and your future. Most of them just resented you, for highlighting the actual state of their society and schools. And perhaps making them doubt their own choices.

That depends.

Those who drop out because they can't hack it will find misplaced regret, blaming future woes on dropping out when in reality the problem is a continuation of the deficiencies that lead them to dropping out.

Those who drop out because they have bigger and better plans won't think about it again.

1) The people who are on to bigger and better things are in fact vanishingly rare. Like, yes, Bill Gates dropped out of college, but he dropped out of Harvard, not Evergreen Community College. He wouldn't have been there in the first place if he wasn't already capable of some big things.

2) A really healthy society, with really good schools, would provide a path for those who can't hack it. Its almost definitionally not a good school if the process exposes some deficiencies, then just gives up. Like "well, it turns out your dyslexic, here's your cardboard box and begging pan" sounds like a bad school.

Dropouts are rare full stop, and those that do drop out overwhelmingly have life issues that causes them to drop out. The well rounded people who do okay in school aren't the ones dropping out, it is those with things like mental disabilities. It is not the act of dropping out that is impactful, it is the problems that lead to dropping out that continue after dropping out. It is a misconception that continuing in school would have cured what ailed them.

> A really healthy society, with really good schools, would provide a path for those who can't hack it.

You severely underestimate just how challenging life is for some people. If dyslexia was the biggest challenge to overcome, we'd have nothing to speak of. Some of these kids are, to be blunt, effectively vegetables. They are accepted into school for the sake of relieving the parents/primary caregivers, offering what is a babysitting service, but there is no academic value in them being there. They will not continue in school for prolonged periods of their life and there is no reason for them to.

I guess in your imagined "really healthy" society, all people are perfectly equal. That's impossible. But if we did somehow live in your made up world then we can say that we already have "really good schools". Nobody in our schools we have drops out without a good reason.

From a quick search, the State of Michigan has roughly an 8% dropout rate. Whatever your criteria for the term "rare", that is a huge number of kids.

If you are trying to run a really healthy society (vs. a Social Darwinism dystopia), then putting all the kids who don't do well in academic classroom settings on a "things like mental disabilities" - "effectively vegetables" spectrum seems extremely counterproductive.

It is! When I go to the school to pick up my child, it is shocking how many have overtly visible challenges, never mind those who don't present to someone just casually walking in the door. It is rare, but rare is still a lot of people in large populations.

I live next door to Michigan and 3% of the students have their own personal assistant in school for the schools to be able to cope to their severe challenges, and, by accounts of family who work in that industry, that many more should have an assistant but there isn't a sufficient workforce to fill those roles. So that is around 6% of the students, give or take, right there who aren't really a good fit for being in schools. Used to be that they would have been dumped into institutions and never step foot in school, but that's not socially acceptable anymore.

I dropped out simply because I found school insufferably boring and an almost complete waste of time. Some of my earliest memories are of myself thinking "oh man, it's still just Wednesday -- two more days to go until the weekend?!" (Fast forward to today, and I find myself looking forward to Monday!)

Just about everything else I found myself doing with my time -- including actual hard labor -- felt more rewarding and productive. (At least I was making money that I could use to buy 3dfx cards and RAM chips.) In truth, past phonics, don't think that I even learned anything in school; I was always ahead of the class just by reading books at home and at the library.

My parents shed many tears, but they came to terms with my dropping out, because I had exhibited depressive symptoms from about the age of 9 or 10, and those symptoms entirely vanished when I didn't have to go to school.

I'm sure that there are many others like me. Public school often tries to shove round pegs into square holes. There are better ways to learn, of that I'm certain.

Montessori, vocational programs, self-directed learning on and on and on.

Nobody should have to pick between "follow this specific concept of schooling" or "be institutionalized". That's not good schooling.

The best way to figure out what you are good at is to do it. That is not the role of school and will never best be served by school.

I know we've gotten caught up in a society that dreads children doing anything other than academics and sports, but it needn't be that way. In this hypothetical ideal society, it is most definitely not that way. Be careful to not let a poorly considered status quo cloud your judgement.

That's having a bigger vision. Never fear, you are already well accounted for.

I know the feeling.

Emotionally? It is really hard to top those times in high school.

It was the opposite of a prison for me. Like a garden of adolescent roses that had nothing to do with the real world other than the sweet smell of roses as an adolescent.

It is why I am glad to be child free. Anyone posting here is going to have a child that is better off than almost anyone who has ever lived.

I would suspect the best strategy in 2025 for anyone here is to not crush the creativity of the child. The only thing bad you can really do is to impose yourself too much on the child. The more hands off the better. The lighter the touch the better.

Yours skills are not what your child will need t+50 years.

I will send them to the school just because I want them to interact with other people of same age, and also learn how much stupid people is around, and show them it won't get any better later in life. But I do not expect, at all, that they will learn something useful.

I'm sick and tired of being told what school is good and bad for by the very people who never paid attention. A school cannot magically make you motivated to learn things for 16 years. It's drudgery to most humans and always be, because we aren't naturally """meant""" to learn complicated and robust concepts for 16 years.

Our options are deal with that and help kids who don't want to learn do things they don't want to do, or have a general populace that knows nearly nothing about the world around them.

I had problems also speaking to people, and understanding what they were saying.

Maybe a child could put up with the incarceration if it wasn't for the bullying on top of that too. No escape.

Aside: In the 70s the Headmaster had a cane that was used occasionally but at least that died out later.

But on a more optimistic note, I think there's some 'alternative schools' becoming more popular in Ireland now, like 'Forest School Ireland' etc... sounds more healthy anyway!

But when it came to bullies, the school was just as you described. Worse, the punishment for being in a fight was the same whether you started it or you were just beaten up. If you made the fight get noticed, you got punished. It was quite clear that they had no interest in stopping the fights, just in making sure they didn't get reported.

And on the bus, the driver didn't like my family because she once turned the bus around on our grass, tearing up a bunch of it, and my father was angry about that. In retaliation, she let bullies beat me up on the bus for years and turned a blind eye.

My education would probably have suffered if I was home schooled because both my parents were forced to work to make enough money to survive. And I'd be even more introverted than I am now.

But man, the bullying was bad.

I'm not saying that this is anything close to optimal, but it should be noted that under this system (which is reminiscent of the way ancient Chinese criminal law worked, per Legal Systems Very Different from Ours[0]) people who get beat up should still report and take the punishment. Sure, you'll get punished for it once but you'll also build a solid reputation for not letting things slide, so it's highly unlikely that anyone will want to beat you up again.

[0] Except that the punishment back then for being involved in a crime (generally a theft or a swindle of some sort) was, guess what-- you got beat up.

That is, unfortunately, not how this works. The only ways to stop bullying are to be able to stand up to the bullies, which usually is not a realistic proposition (you wouldn't get bullied in the first place if you could) and can lead to further escalation (right on up to shootings or stabbings); to have a very, very empathic teacher who will put their foot down; or to have solid anti-bullying programs which use effective, proven methods to stamp out bullying.

Mind that nothing will deter a really determined bully, and getting punished because your victim spoke up instead of accepting the bully's power will escalate things from 'bullying just because you are available' to 'bullying because I now want you, and specifically, you, as miserable as you can be, all the time'.

Of course, if you're young and you have no friends, good luck getting your peers to think you're worth defending.

The one time I got attacked, one of the top three popular guys in the class went berserk on my attacker. This happened in grade school and the next aborted attempt at bullying wasn't until the end of middle school by someone who had transferred in later on.

This is a terrible idea that was obviously flown as a butt-covering excuse by administrators who, like the school administrators, have discovered that it is much easier to fight reporting of crime than it is to fight crime.

I am deeply disappointed to see it treated as some sort of deep truth, when in fact it is a shallow lie that anyone with the slightest understanding of bureaucracy ought to have seen through in no time at all.

He was only scared that I'd hit him back, and nothing else.

I hope life has been kinder to you following this. :(

I definitely don't condone all that as a way to get stronger, but at least I got something from it. Silver linings and all.

I was also a highly sensitive kid so took the abuse pretty hard. I was bullied by both other kids _and_ by teachers. I still remember one teacher openly calling me weird in class and picking on me (I was very introverted and shy due to years of bullying/anxiety, which I guess made me "weird"). Both physical and mental abuse from other kids. One "highlight" was being openly sexually assaulted in PE class and the teacher didn't even care.

I was messed up psychologically for a very long time after my school experience. Extreme social anxiety, hyper sensitivity to criticism, constant feelings of anxiety and depression. It took a failed marriage and years of therapy until I was able to overcome most of this trauma and kind of start to live normally (in my 40s).

As a result, like you, I am incredibly cynical of schooling systems. I see my kids suffering in British schools (in secondary), and it really pains me. They loved primary where there were small classes and secondary just has completely sucked out the joy of school for them. I wish I could just retire from work and full time home school them.

Open an history book and look how it was before schooling was free and mandatory.

I do agree that the most recent spin on it is far from ideal and that the underlying goals seem to have shifted, but I can clearly and easily imagine an alternative way that doesn't involve home schooling.

The problem is the same as in many other industries, once you optimise everything to please the capitalistic beast we created you're set for personal hell

Also maybe I have a false impression but I always thought people decided about homeschooling long before the kid(s) get to normal school age.

That said, I don't have a strong opinion here and I can see how it's useful in certain situations, but I guess might have hated it even more than I hated school (after a certain age, I liked it when I was little) - but also none of my parents went to university or something, so I was on my own in math etc after a certain point, so not sure how they would have even managed to get me to finishing.

When I, have a good reason why I might consider not sending my own kids to state school, because my experiences were so bad.

It's easy to be pigeon-holed by the class, and it's self-reinforcing.

But I was lucky enough to go to a good public school, found many lifelong friends there, learned a ton of aside skills that help me now in my personal and professional life.

I think it’s really sad that more and more people opt out of society, either in school or elsewhere. I can understand it to some extent but I think everyone will come of poorer in the end if we all sit in our separate boxes, only thinking about ourselves and how we can profit more.

I’m usually optimistic about the future but this is a hella depressing trend.

A few times my parents hired tutors for subjects I was struggling in, and I remember that suddenly I found myself enjoying them. I think I would have benefited greatly from being homeschooled, but of course at that time it was unheard of in the UK. I know it's not for everyone. There's no perfect answer. What's certain is that there's nothing 'normal' about sitting in a room with 30 people who are exactly the same age as you, plus one official authority figure.

So school certainly 'socialized' me, but not in a good way.

It wasn't entirely bad. I got a reasonably good education, and some of the teachers have left a positive impression. Overall though it was horrible.

Glad to know you've received the help that you needed and have been able to move on. I compartmentalized and put off working on my traumas for far longer than I should have. People underestimate how much a dysfunctional school environment can mess someone up even when the home environment is mostly healthy. I screwed up great relationships in large part because I still had trust issues and CPTSD triggers that I didn't even realize at the time.

No joke, I'd rather have only known the neighborhood kids growing up than have thousands of kids to socialize with while having fucked up things happen to me. So what if I wouldn't experience prom night? If it's not the right environment for me, then it's not worth it.

But I have lost many friends and career opportunities as a result of my time at school. I had a basically healthy and happy home environment, but as you say, school can still screw you up badly.

Yeah, just from my perspective having gone through the US public schools, the schools here seem to be a lot more open and friendly (following the American stereotype). But at the same time, we probably have a lot lower standards in terms of learning, and also the US has a lot of variation in school quality.

I went to school in California, and I would say my school experience became prison-like between grades 4 and 11. In fairness, I can now look back at my child self and realize that I was delayed in terms of emotional maturity, which contributed to my social problems, but the kind of environment I was in was the wrong one for helping me overcome that delay. Any slight difference about myself, whether it be my body, or my clothes, or my interests, was a target of daily ridicule. The majority of teachers were entirely self serving and didn't give a damn, even when I was being victimized out in the open. Oh yeah, and my property was repeatedly stolen and my belongings destroyed in front of me.

Having gone through all that, there is no way I'm ever putting my future children in such a system.

The way I think about the socialization argument against home schooling is this: Is it better to be highly socialized but traumatized or modestly socialized by not traumatized?

I think it's more valuable for children to be socialized with a smaller number of other children while being in a safe environment. Tossing children into an ocean of other children that is poorly controlled with callous teachers, creating an unsafe environment, has a rapidly diminishing returns on socialization and a greater chance of being counterproductive.

They also assess the kids emotional maturity early on. Those that they feel are not ready to go from Kinder to 1st get a 'Primer' year. It's basically holding them back in Kinder but with a positive twist.

Tons of other benefits as the parents hold a lot of power (since we pay). But also, the quality of staff/teachers, and low ratios are quite a perk compared to our area's public schools which are poorly rated.

I went to public school myself, and while I was never bullied, I do think I was a target of bullies at some time. Any time I felt like someone was bullying me, I fought back and would often be disciplined under zero tolerance rules. That's how my parents taught me to deal with it, 'stand up for yourself boy' kind of thing. We've taught our kid not to hit and to be kind and he is, but that's exactly what I think would make him a huge target in a public school environment.

1st: 2

2nd: 4

3rd: 4

4th: 3

5th: 5

6th: 3 (so far)

why am I saying this? we pay tens of thousands of dollars per year for having access to this kind of environment. if there is a kid who is fucking up everyone else, the “everyone else” should not have to suffer through it. I would pay double what I pay now for this priviledge for my kid. so yes, 100%, more expelling and more discipline is needed

I'm for things that entails negative consequences for the parents prior to the kid being pigeon holed as a deplorable or unfitting for academic environments. Sending them home is one way to make the parents suffer. But before that, let's group them together and then find ways to level them up as a cohort. Everyone suffers when the class has a huge standard deviation of skills/knowledge/enthusiasm/engagement/support/etc.

let's group them together and then find ways to level them up as a cohort I also agree with this but am thinking there has to be time limits etc... everyone should be given a 2nd chance and for kids I think everyone should be given 10th chance :) but both parents and kids have to understand that there are consequences and there are time limits to patience for behaviour correction.

there is a lot of parents that have money to pay for private education for their kids and there is also a lot of those kids that are fuckups.

if you mean failure of the parents - you are 100% - complete failure of the parents.

In a perfect world, most of those problem children would be mentored correctly in regular schools and given a path to a better adult life, and therefore not create a future "problem adult".

In practice, it doesn't seem to work like that, and I agree, "problem children" do cause frictions and disruptions and worse for other children at regular schools.

If you want to improve schools quickly, expelling problem kids is the easiest way to do it. But that would cause consequences to the expelled kids, as well as society.

"Your kids should be stuck with people who ruin their lives because criminals are" is also terrible.

The correct response is moving problem kids to problem schools, then to disciplinary schools, and if necessary to juvy.

Put people where they belong, with the people they belong with.

Otherwise the people stuck with the trash will leave (and maybe that's okay in the end)

It’s not like those kids were born genetically terrible.

April 2021: https://publications.csba.org/california-school-news/april-2...

Ballard Brief at BYU: https://ballardbrief.byu.edu/issue-briefs/racial-inequality-...

2018 GAO report: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-18-258

I've been following the topic for a while as a minority and I worry about this as well as cops in our schools continuously raising the specter of violence and school shootings raising the real concern of violence.

It doesn't feel like expelling students has reduced violence or improved the quality of the day to day when I see the tracking of these issues.

It is the equivalent of eating soup at a homeless shelter when you can go to the store and buy something better, made worse by the fact that you are making the decision for someone else that cannot decide on their own.

Now obviously this is going to be neighbourhood, country, and community specific, but the problem I had with observing private schools was that now the school had an additional incentive not to expel students, rich and influential parents had extra influence over whether their child could be disciplined and how the school should do things, and half of the time the problematic behaved people were... the rich people and their children. Having and paying money isn't exactly a free ticket to well-adjusted children especially if the children are mimicking the culture they see at home and the society awards bullying and various behaviours with more money... Which most of ours do.

And this was on top of the downsides of private schools: being image obsessed over academics and intellectual investigation, surrounded by non egalitarian private school twats, and bunches of arbitrary private school rules. Now obviously this is not all private schools, but in the same way it's not all public schools either.

I think in this system it's a roll of the die. In my country, neighbourhood and in my life, my kid is currently going to public school and, touch wood... thriving for now. The other private schools around here have too much woo like Waldorf and Steiner and they steer away from evidence based methods in literacy and numeracy.

But I don't know if that's going to hold off into the older ages, and I can't promise, much to my wife's chagrin, not to consider homeschooling considering my own experience of high school also approaching that of a dysfunctional prison and a poor educational environment.

PS: there was plenty of interpersonal violence at the private schools when I grew up.

The key thing that enables bullying is your being confined in a space with them. Bullying can leave scars that last a lifetime that will affect your employment, your relationships, your children, everything. Not least hearing complete crap from authorities primes you to distrust authorities unconditionally.

It reminds me of how we were told "stick and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me", which is easy to say as an adult with autonomy and other sources of fulfillment; in reality, words not only hurt, but have lasting social consequences. If some turd of a kid has the charisma to humiliate you in front of everyone, even when only verbally, that can lead to a permanently damaged sense of self and lack of respect from peers.

Some people have a positive charisma that comes out of treating people well. I'd expect this from the captain of a sports team.

I knew someone who had a negative charisma, who was criminally minded. He was popular among drug users at my school because he would take more chances and thus have the best supply. He got caught on tape selling 3 kilo of cocaine to a cop after I'd graduate. He had a talent to motivate other people into criminal activity and became the leader of a gay bashing gang that seemed to mainly target straight allies because this was the 1980s and folks like that were probably scared about getting AIDS.

I don't picture the elementary school bully as being particularly popular, but he certainly gets deference from the other students. I think of the popular kids in school as being genuinely likeable even if they didn't take a stand against bullies.

Adults can watch something happening and think nothing particularly significant is going on while some kids are experiencing extreme internal distress.

I’m not accusing you of misrepresenting the situation, just trying to convey what’s objectively going on can feel very different from what people’s lived experience is. Someone with older siblings can barely register being bullied in some situations that really are traumatic to others.

I do remember school being this survival of the fittest type of thing as well. Some were naturally good at it, others not so much, different people handled it differently.

If my children lived in a war zone and were suffering constant (high risk) of being killed or mutilated, the mature way of dealing with that wouldn't be to teach them to take cover, or survival skills, or medical triage and first aid... it'd be to just leave and never go back. Get one million miles away from it. Normalizing it, saying "what are you gonna do, we live in a war zone" is strange. But it's just as bizarre to say "you should become an anti-war activist and demand that the diplomats make a lasting peace".

No, just get the fuck out as quickly as is humanly possible, and never look back. Later, when you're someplace safe, maybe you do therapy for the PTSD (I have my doubts that it works), but the first and most important step is to put distance between yourself (or your children) and the threat, enough distance that makes it impossible for the threat to follow.

I think because that is also often because they regard it as normal for kids. A lot of people say things like "bullying toughens them up".

They would not think its OK for the same things to be done to adults. I wonder what the toughens them up lot would think if I showed up at their house with a few friends and gave them a light beating - I think calling the police would be a more likely outcome than thanking me for teaching them to be tough!

I got picked on all the time as a kid in school. I did not like it, but it did develop several traits that I learned to appreciate later in life. First and foremost, I am not the slightest bit bothered by anyone mocking me anymore. I don’t get easily embarrassed at all.

At the same time, I also learned to fit in a lot better. Getting picked on for things I said or did create some social conditioning about what was and wasn’t acceptable.

This type of bullying was helpful in hindsight.

Physical bullying is different ballgame and I don’t understand anyone that thinks it’s acceptable.

Cyberbullying is on a whole other level of publicly humiliating a developing child in front of everybody they know, often by anonymous people who will take steps to make sure it never goes away if they want to.

The latter 2 are totally unacceptable and dangerous.

The first getting lumped in with bullying creates bullying apologists I think, because there can be beneficial side effects of helping kids learn social norms.

I think the root of this problem is the principal-agent problem.

It literally doesn't matter to teachers (a) if you get bulled at school (they are not being bullied themselves) or (b) if you have problems later in life.

Maybe a bullied kid will completely lose it as an adult and murder a bunch of people. But does the teacher who completely failed to help them get arrested? No, therefore it just doesn't matter to them at all.

The only thing that would prevent this is teachers actually caring or being kind. And of course there are some that do and are. But relying on that isn't enough. There need to be right incentives set in order enable the majority of teachers to put in the effort to act in the right way.

(I don't know what that incentive structure looks like I'll admit.)

I am fortunate enough that I was too young to get sentenced when I snapped, and that I somehow managed to not get badly hurt in that fight. On the other hand, sending those twats to the scool nurse's office and just laughing at their bruises the day after... Worth it! I still smile when I see my own nose in the mirror.

Mind you, teachers are often powerless in many such situations. They can and should follow whatever procedures they have, but the main problems are the toothless anti-bullying policies and those are usually set though some vague government policy rather than schools themselves.

You couldn’t really own anything and had to prepare for anything nice to be stolen, or anything they looked dear to you (even if not nice) to be destroyed.

I heard of kids having their shoes stolen, but I never had that.

I’m sorry that happened to you, I hope you are doing better now. :(

There is some risk of their being isolated (but very low, since they are with other kids three days a week), and a slightly higher risk of missing chunks of learning (which we aim to mitigate in the obvious ways). But ultimately I'd rather my kids have a few gaps in their knowledge than be traumatized by the school system.

I went through a normal school system (the first 8 years still during the communist regime in my country, so take that "normal" with a grain of salt), and the gaps in my knowledge are enormous, in some cases subject-wide. I know literally nothing about chemistry, except the bits you learn here and there from TV shows and such. I vaguely remember some kind of equations, but nothing stuck. Biology - everything I know I know from somewhere else, mostly from that TV show with talking blood cells [1]. Surprisingly, I had pretty good grades, but it had nothing to do with knowledge - I was able to quickly scan the textbook before an exam and somehow it was sufficient, but there was no retention, I forgot everything after the exam. I was forced to learn Russian for 4 years and I remember literally nothing, not even the alphabet.

Those are mostly just anecdotes - I am sure that modern schooling can do better than rote memorization in a toxic environment. What I want to say is that motivation, a friendly environment, and fun learning are a lot more important than how well the teacher knows, say, chemistry. It is entirely possible that your kids will retain more knowledge, not less.

I am only talking about elementary school, college was different - I loved it and learned a lot.

[1] Il était une fois... la vie - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284735/

I'm saying that, all things being equal, I'd rather my kids be homeschooled with a few gaps, than go to a government school (and be traumatized) and have no gaps.

Worse, its a prison with cult-like re-education towards elements of Marxism, without calling it that, in many cases. Its a spectrum so not all teachers are like that, but there are enough that it can be seen widely.

Most of this comes from teacher's followed recommendations made during conferences held by the National Teachers union, which has used many Marxism-based pedagogy while obscuring it.

These things are subtle to anyone who doesn't have some exposure to real life torture constructs, and how those constructs work (mechanism and means).

Schools are also failing to educate and provide people with the skills they need to succeed, the sole purpose for the school's centralized state-run existence.

The teachers exhibit qualities that any centralized system without a loss function has. They have no duty to investigate issues of performance with co-workers since absent an effective loss function (cutoff where you get fired), social standing and seniority become more important. In these types of collectivist systems, regardless of role, creating a hostile work environment hurts the group, and investigating issues creates a hostile work environment. They are all co-workers after all.

Social mental coercion also occurs towards the excellent teachers, since they make all the average teachers look bad. Those teachers then haze, backstab, and undermine in any way they can sabotaging and interfering while imposing social personal cost until the excellent leave, the ones that remain are the average, continually gravitating towards the least common denominator. In state-run institutions with free money, this becomes negative production value.

Sending and subjecting your children to brainwashing and torture is the greatest betrayal.

An example of one these subtle but effective techniques follows, its called the hot potato. It is one of many techniques.

A student is called out in front of the class and asked to answer a question, the question will be opinion based, and the teacher will reflect disapproval if answered incorrectly (in their opinion). These will be mixed in with fact questions to muddy the water so its unclear this is what they are doing.

This technique in pedagogy isolates the student called, making them anxious in front of their peers, often times because answering incorrectly has delayed be inevitable personal cost. At this age, they often don't have the biology to self-reflect or introspect to recognize the basis for why this is happening. They just feel anxious, and rightfully so.

The level of disapproval shown by the teacher results in driving two parallel processes. One that results in inducing bullying from the approval seeking students in that peer group, without the teacher needing to directly or explicitly take action. This bullying, or coercive shunning, is an ever present threat to the subject. The bullies having participated have (their own) consistency drive their efforts, with negative consequence. These are circular processes where both participants become the victim and perpetrator through induced behavior (as a result of structure).

Answering according to the torturer's opinion, forces inherent challenges of fighting your own psychology. It enables the consistency principle in psychology to warp the subjects mind over time (our identity largely remains consistent, which is based in this underlying cognitive bias we all have). What we write, and the words we use, even if we consciously don't agree with them will warp us towards agreement given sufficient repeated exposure and time.

You see this with used car salesmen when they ask innocuous, but carefully constructed questions seeking agreement, and once you answer (in any way but a specific way), they know they've got a sale excepting external factors.

The main principles of influence can be applied beneficially, or coercively. Robert Cialdini goes into these principles, and how they work.

Robert Lifton, and Joost Meerloo cover the reality of torture, how it actually works in their books written in the 1950s (with details from actual torture done by Mao, and the Nazi's).

The reality is, in the 1950s the limits of perception were found, and processes and techniques discovered that let you break and twist people. It started with torture, then a big issue with Cults, then it was used in AdTech and business process design to impose personal cost on the customer. It wasn't just used there, it spread widely, and its hard to find areas that have not in part been shaped by this to an individuals detriment.

The research was also not shared widely in whole either, its been repackaged to obscure the origins, such as conferences on pedagogy done by the Teacher's Union, or Game Design (within the Octalysis Frameworks), too many other places to count. The elements are there for those that know what to look for.

In general, all you really need to get this started are three elements for torture. Isolation, removal/lack of agency (unable to leave without causing loss, disadvantage or detriment), and cognitive dissonance; often where what is said isn't true, and loops back forcing the subject to engage in a endless loop of torture.

It caustically will break anyone down, and Social Media ensures Children can't limit exposure because of addiction triggers, and the lack of biology during Children's existing development to control addiction. The phone follows them everywhere they go, as it does for most of us. These things do break down everyone eventually, and quite a lot of the indoctrinated masses lack the ability to discern or recognize it is happening. Once broken and blinded you tend to stay blinded and broken excepting certain rare individuals.

Ironically, when people break down past a point they segment into the unresponsive dissasociate, or the psychotic seeking self annihilation. Two cohorts. The latter is often a semi-lucid state capable of planning. It seems to mirror objective characteristics seen in Active Shooters.

Rational thought under such psychological stress described breaks down fairly quickly.

You send your kids to school to receive the same tools that were provided to the parents in living a beneficial productive life. Many important tools are no longer taught, and in their place frameworks promoting inducement in false belief, practice, and ideology (towards nihilism) while blinding them to rational thought, have grown. You see this in the Woke cult, and many maoist/marxist inspired movements under adopted group names that change regularly to obscure and mislead.

These two things are why smart and intelligent parents are homeschooling. You don't send your children to Maoist re-education camps and expect them to be able to survive afterwards. The process destroys the individual psyche.

Even the intelligent may not know the process of what's happening, but they often more keenly discern and sense something being wrong and remove their kids from such environments, so long as they were paying attention and fulfilling their parental obligations (many today have or do not, unfortunately).

If you don't read what you comment on, then you miss out on the things you then ask about. It makes anyone look stupid.

The sources on how torture works, were referenced. The authors are well established in their fields, its old material that has not been refuted in any way and is backed by first-hand accounts in the case studies (1950s).

The structural elements they cover are well discussed. These elements are also present in material pushed at the recommendation by the national Teachers Union in the past (at several points). This included, iirc, the Roots movie controversy and this revisionist fictional film being portrayed as historical to push a false narrative.

Teachers aren't generally malign, but bureacracies can be (NEA almost without a doubt imo). The teachers simply did what they were trained to do without knowing what they were trained to do. A potential example of the banality of evil with regards to complacency and sloth.

You may not like it, and not want to see it, and not want to believe it. Nonetheless, it is clearly happening.

James Lindsay has published quite a lot of rationally backed literature on Woke-ism, and its relation to Marxism/Maoism, and how its a cult. He has several publications, and a youtube channel if you are so inclined.

Regardless of what you happen to call a thing, you can describe a thing based on its elemental component or characteristics. Rationally this process is called characterization, and when you find the same elements, and the same outcomes, that suggests a thing that goes by another name (deceitfully to obscure), is the same thing functionally.

When you see the same structures used in Maoist prison camps in the 50s being used in education, the question shouldn't be is this happening because the characteristics match. It should be who chose to do this and why, and is it more important to protect them over your own children. These all have pretty simple straightforward answers.

The framework of reasoning being taught, is anything but, and follows circular paths that travel down a spiral of madness, and subjectivity without proper definition; in classic hegelian structure to abuse the contrast principle.

This is seen most recently in people who have contracted the mind virus, Woke-ism. When you adopt this 'critical consciousness', as they call it you blind yourself to the reality of things, and its a self-inflicted violation of your self. The things they do and say often are borderline delusional or insanely irrational, and not based in reality.

Marxist derivatives has not been about seizing collective ownership for quite some time, its been about interference, demoralization, and destabilization. They seized production by seizing the money, and are doing so through debasement as Lenin said in Keynes quote.

The currency allows control of the means of production as the root of all trade (exchange), and this has been seized already back in the 70s, by central planning bankers, and the ECP driven by money printing will be taking hold in a few short years once third stage ponzi is publicly visible. In other words, debt growth > GDP.

This sieving action of resources into fewer and fewer hands through debt is already driving legitimate producing businesses out of business (bankruptcy), or towards mergers, where they close shop which are funded by a money printer. The money printer swallows everything.

All debt issues with 0% fractional reserve is private money printing. This occurred in 2020 silently at the start of the pandemic. They replaced fractional reserve with an opaque capital reserve system (Basel III), which itself is based on fiat valuations that the banks loaning the money/printing the money decide. Carl Menger thoroughly proved how value is subjective. These structures neglect the simple fact that there are dynamics at work that determine value, so the associated banks will be fine until they suddenly aren't, without notice, or predictability (chaos).

Once concentrated, then everything can be seized and nationalized silently with cutout companies backed by the money printer, but in the process production grinds to a halt, shortage ensures, and stops and all value is lost since the store of value as a property of currency fails.

Order wanes, famine, slavery, and death, as occurs in every non-market socialist state to date; only this time it will be a global event and not an isolated nation event. That is the problem with parasites. Sometimes they kill the host, and by extension kill themselves.

> Research paper analyzing and defending the Black Panthers in high school.

Well I guess it would depend on what you wrote. The simple fact of the matter is, the dynamics of a successful protest or movement depend on largely two things.

The responsiveness of policymakers to listen and correct issues, and the inherent threat of violence or imposed cost.

If policy-makers fail to do their job by being unresponsive when their job is serving their constituency, violence holds them to account when the abuse is egregious enough. This once happened back in 1776, with colonists who were not considered british citizens or entitled to such protections without representation.

The politician's know this in theory too because they had to read the books covering these topics. Many of which are central to constitutional law, or social contract theory (Leviathan, Locke, Kant, Rosseau).

Absent the first, no non-violent movement can succeed in making change. You need appropriate political and judicial structures that are responsive to conflicts so they can be resolved non-violently. If they are not responsive (regardless of reason), the sole purpose of law fails, that purpose is non-violent conflict resolution equally under the law.

This used to be the courts, but they too have degraded to the point where if you don't have the money upfront to hire a lawyer, you don't have a seat at the table. A single civil suit today, even a slam dunk one, costs about a 50k retainer, from the lawyers I've spoken with. That's about the average median annual income for most people unspent (on things like food, necessities etc).

A rule of law requires certain elements, if you examine the law today and the associated costs, its largely only available to the select few with money. The 5 or so components have failed enough times to claim several decade long trends.

There is a psychological consistency pitfall in writing about things you don't care about because words alter your perception even if you don't believe it in the moment, the more often you write something the more it impacts you. They did this in the Korean Conflict to PoWs. It generally started with a choice; hard labor, or write an essay with the following prompt, "Why is the US not the best country in the world", to "Why does communism work better than capitalism", and then its read over a loudspeaker and celebrated among the captors, and prisoners.

Its subtle bias, but effective, proven, and documented.

If people can't organize and react to the reality of things being done to them, they implicitly are agreeing to their own destructive end, for themselves and anyone else they happen to manage to carry along with them.

It won't change the amount of political violence that's ahead of us, but I would recommend that you, at a personal level, question those associations.

No political side, no country, or race has the monopoly of evil, and if you believe otherwise you have some serious work to do.

You mistake this being political, and I did not assign these behaviors. These groups have done these acts. Its replete in the histories.

The acts have been littered throughout the historical record repeatedly and regularly starting with Marx and Engels taking from the Jesuits many of the practices that got the Jesuits expelled, and moving forward in time, the actions done by a majority of these people calling themselves such by various names, reflect what you call 'assigned'. They don't self-police and ignore destructive acts, if anything, these people's own actions assigned these to their movement.

I make a point of saying this too, because they change their group names to suit their groups purposes and to obscure their origins; misleadingly in a deceitful way, regularly. They do not want to be tied down by the same repeated failures that are associated with past groups. When you do the same exact things, and expect different results, this is a definition of insanity.

Marxists to Fabians to Bolsheviks, to Maoist, Communist, to Social Democracy, to Social Justice, to Wokeism, and I'm skipping quite a bit here.

There's been roughly a new name every 5-10 years going back to the 1920s, for the same Marxist-based doctrine that fails core components needed for rational objectivity. Failing such it shows the delusion, and fanaticism of those supporting it.

I would have nothing against these belief systems if they were consistent and rational, and in fact there would be no issues if that was met.

All they would have to do is conform to the basic principles inherent in rationalism, that is objective definition, unique meaning in language (no ambiguity of definition), Descartes Rules of Method, and logic. No improper use of the abuse of the contrast principle (hegel).

In other words, falsehoods get discarded.

They do not do this, and that is the core problem. They seek to unify through deceit and omission, that some of them, themselves, believe quite fallaciously, and by using language with multiple contradictory meanings, so no proper context can be made (newspeak). They use coercive methods to induct, following Cult structure as well. Seeming good at a cursory level, while sewing the seeds for evil through delusion, hallucination, and fallacy. These people also almost never happy.

Many leftist movements over the past hundred or so years seek to blur the line between politics, ideology, and economics, and state. This provides them cover to make unprovable false claims and create a power platform. You have part of the group which decries the abuses, while you have the other part pretending to be another group while inducing the same such abuses. Its about control of the resources, not ownership.

Its also beneficial to them to falsely call it political since politics is protected in open societies as is ideology, but this isn't religion, nor should any so called religion/ideology based in delusion or fallacy be protected or supported.

The important difference between real politics and this is in discerning rationally whether that type of ideology is a death cult, whose actions will result in unchecked destruction.

Mises wrote thoroughly about the 6 or so intractable problems of economics under such systems (by structure) because even back then they changed their names regularly (in the 1930s-1950s).

These movements we are talking about seek to make irrational dogma seeking power and control, they make broad nice sounding claims, while setting the stage for indirect but destructive outcomes. This has been demonstrated multiple times in their own policy and publications.

The Russian famine in 1921 for example, or the famines caused by Mao's Cultural Revolution, Maoist Re-education Camps (for the children), the massacres of Hue, Tienanmen Square, political dissident prisoners in Hong Kong, the ongoing acts of terrorism sponsored by the Stasi/KGB, the list goes on for miles.

They of course falsely claim its to make a better future, to get people to cede power to them, but the dynamics and the reality do not match up, and most don't resolve indirectly reference things that show it to be an unobtainable pipe dream, where the real outcome is destruction.

Eventually reality re-asserts when survival is on the line, and failing survival large numbers perish. Production may be continued through slavery, but overall eventually it shows itself to be a death cult.

If you've read any of the material published by the prominent people in these movements, you would see them talking about this, albeit in doublespeak to make it not sound as bad. They never question the viability of their premises.

Now that is frightening.

When you have a movement who abandons rational principles seeking a false utopia while in action only going for short term personal gain, this is destructive. People eventually die when this is unchecked.

Obviously, evil acts are any act that does not result in long term beneficial growth of self or others, and evil people are willfully blind to the consequence of their evil acts.

I'm well aware that there is no monopoly, I never claimed otherwise, but there are clusters or disease vectors where evil seeks to subvert from within until it can show its true face through action.

A group predominantly containing such is important to call out.

The Nazi's were evil, but they started off as the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

The Fabian's had similar origins, resulting in the economic collapse of the UK. They shared tactics, method, and history.

Bolsheviks had similar origins. Maoists had similar origins.

While they all claim to be new and independent groups, their structures show they've adopted core aspects of false or destructive ideology originally derived from Marxism in whole or part.

Political movements with core practices based in false ideology and method, resolving to destruction, are not valid political movements and do not deserve protection.

If you read nothing else, read this, it speaks unpleasant truth. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3263007/

The human brain is wonderful at seeing patterns but sometimes it sees them when there are none.

(assuming you are a real human as opposed to an AI with a funny prompt)

https://www.newsweek.com/real-lord-flies-true-story-boys-isl...

>The boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination

But I still am against home schooling. I still got social skills from going to public school that homeschooled kids lack. I still don't think your average parent is equipped to give their children a good education.

I have people I know who have homeschooled their kids. Without exception these people are narcissists with insane views who are using it as a way to indoctrinate their children into having the same worldview that they hold.

Homeschooling should be illegal. It is child abuse.

Come one.

My mum never punched me in my face, followed me around the playground trying to put dog shit in my backpack, steal my books and piss on them or make rumours about me to ensure I was ostracised by the other children. All the while the adults were helpless and continually told me to be a man- and worse, the adults leaning in on it being my problem. A true hopeless feeling.

You will never know how much I can despise you for your presumption that my home-life could possibly be correlated with my school life.

“by definition”. Honestly, go fuck yourself.

By your own words here you should be agreeing with me, that homeschooling should be a legal choice.

That making a policy decision based on an outlier (home abuse) that affects everyone is bad.

If I thought home schooling was a sure fire way to avoid violent abuse for any kids, maybe it would be worth the trade off. But we both know if anything abusive parents are also going to abuse their kids via home schooling.

I honestly think on the whole homeschooling is doing more damage to the kids being put through it and should be illegal. Obviously before actually doing that we should do scientific studies and surveys of adults who went through it and make a decision based on that rather than just my opinion. But right now we let parents do it just because extremist parents insist on it. And I think we are failing those kids.

> give an appreciable reason

You might not have succeeded at that. You did a very good job at denigrating school though :)

Let me try to tell you my view: both homeschooling and schools have risks. A child can suffer mistreatment both at school and at home.

School however offers something that homeschooling can't: options. If you have a bad teacher, you will have another 4 which are average, and 1 or 2 which are actually decent. There will be bullies, yes, but you also have opportunities to make friends.

At home, all you have is a single adult. If that adult happens to be a psycho, there's no escape.

I say this as someone who suffered at school. My ADHD got completely unnoticed, being of the inattentive kind. I didn't know how to relate with others, I had no friends. I would pick up a book and read in a corner during recess. I got bullied. For me school was something I "endured", not something I enjoyed.

I also happen to be the elder of 4 children. My younger brothers and sister went to the same school I went to. They had different teachers, different co-students. All of them were happy at school, and they turned up just alright.

Now, my parents. My mum is ok (for someone who has raised 4 people) but my dad is a self-absorbed narcissist. My brothers and sister stopped talking to him 20 years ago. He doesn't know his own grandchildren. I still talk with him, but out of pity. There's no love left.

So yeah. I suffered at school. It happens. My siblings didn't. I think homeschooling with my mum would have been ok, she's decent. But homeschooling with my dad? I would be way worse than I am now.

So, there. Options.

https://www.amazon.com/Bullying-Social-Destruction-Laura-Mar...

Bullies couldn't do what they do if they did not have the support of the other students, teachers, administration, etc. As late as college I was harassed by criminally minded person who led a criminal gang that was not held in check until they finally smashed somebody in the face with a rock in front of many witnesses. Two people were driven to suicide.

The leader has been to prison and if he got out and went straight I could forgive him, even celebrate him, because it is so hard to get out of being justice involved. I'm still angry at the college administrator who told me "my hands are tied" who many see as a hero because he really did a lot of great things for our school -- but I wonder who else was driven to suicide and I fantasize about going to his funeral and dumping over his casket. An apology from him would go a long way, I've asked for it, I never expect to get it.

If you're being bullied in elementary school you don't get friends. It could be that the bullying drives away friends, or if you had friends you wouldn't get bullied, or the same deficits that cause you to get bullied also cause you not to get friends. Just being in a safe environment is a basic human right.

Ironically, it was the jocks and the gang affiliated kids who always left me alone. I don't know exactly why, though I figured the jocks were popular enough to not waste their energy tormenting someone socially beneath them.

Anyway, I completely agree with what you've said. Whenever I experienced bullying, it was in close correlation to how callously indifferent the overall system was. The couple of schools I went to where I didn't experience trouble had empathetic teachers and administrators whom actually built trust with the students. The earlier schools I went to were mostly run by selfish teachers (whom I later learned were even more selfish than I realized at the time!) and administrators who would punish the bully and the victim equally out of laziness/callousness/stupidity; or look the other way entirely! Guess which ones I suffered under and which ones I didn't.

> If you're being bullied in elementary school you don't get friends. It could be that the bullying drives away friends, or if you had friends you wouldn't get bullied, or the same deficits that cause you to get bullied also cause you not to get friends. Just being in a safe environment is a basic human right.

I know you're referring to elementary school here, but I think this dynamic you're describing also explains why so many kids have a rotten time in middle school. Usually, middle school lasts only a few years, and can easily mean being separated from any sort of peer group you have for multiple reasons. If your friends are even slightly older or younger than you are, then one will have to face a year of middle school without them. Depending on where your friends live, they might end up in a different middle school even though you both went to the same elementary school.

Even though I did have one good friend in elementary school (we are still best friends today), he is a year older than I am, and even though we went to the same middle school I had to spend at least 1 year in elementary school without him and then another during my second year in middle school. And I know he had the same problem in reverse. When you're seen as having "no friends", even though you actually do, everyone treats you like you have the stink of death. Those were some of the worst years of my life.

There must be some bad apples but mostly they are focused on their sport and the team and don't have time or energy to make trouble, and if they do make trouble, they are off the team.

The time some people attacked me at my dorm I ducked into the room of the captain of the rugby team and that was the last time they came to my dorm. The captain of the football team at my high school was popular because he treated everybody well, I'd say the same about kids who were stars in youth soccer. In fact, even though I didn't feel terribly engaged with it at the time, youth soccer is a precious memory to me because it was one place where I was never mistreated (a group photo shows me standing next to the coach who probably gave me just a little extra attention because of my neurodivergence.)

Your analysis is on point. With some exceptions, popular people are usually popular for a valid reason.

There was this one guy I remember who wasn't exactly a jock, but sort of overlapped with them I guess. I'm pretty sure he played rugby. He had a great physique for a high schooler, was charming to everyone, and had the sort of look about him like he would become a "dreamboat doctor" as an adult. Anyway, I was doing miserably in chemistry class, not necessarily because I was bad at science but I was just having a tough time in school in general which made me unfocused. Without even asking him, he offered to help me study for my exams, and I took him up on it even though I did feel ashamed for needing help. With his help, I passed that class with what was the equivalent of a C grade in New Zealand. He became class president, and I know he was the one to deserve it. I'm grateful to this day that he was one of the few people during my school career who actually cared. And yeah, he was probably the most popular student there.

What you suffered was horrifying, I hope you have recovered. There's degrees in bullying. Mine was not that bad in comparison to yours. The kid who was a bane of my existence would not attack me every single day, at every single hour. I was not important enough or "fun enough to mess with", I suppose. It was more like a "once per week" kind of thing.

I was not very successful at making friends. But I did make a couple. The first one was the other guy who was also regularly bullied. He had clear developmental issues, I don't think teachers could turn a blind eye on them like they could on mine. We talked about videogames, almost exclusively. It helped, somewhat. Then he (I think) became romantically interested in me and I had to cut it off.

Then there was another kid who regularly came to my house. We played with legos, which I had many. Then he stopped liking Legos. (Children...)

My school did give me many more opportunities to make friends. Retrospectively, I know I could have made more. I just didn't know how to. In my case it would be "the same deficits that cause you to get bullied also cause you to not get friends". I only managed to make real friends in highschool (and even then it was just 2 or 3). And that was after I decided to make a conscious effort to understand the social rules that seemed to come naturally to others.

I think my problem was more a "me" issue. The bullying didn't help but I suspect I would have made very few friends independently of it.

> Just being in a safe environment is a basic human right.

I do agree. Unfortunately many children's homes are not safe environments. Homeschooling for them is worse than bullying can ever be at school. Imagine 24-7 with your bully, who is way bigger than you and from whom you also depend for food, water and shelter.

The problem is, when you allow homeschooling, a non-insignificant number of children will have to endure the same, just the wardens and torturers will be their own parents. There have been more than enough cults who actually promote that parents keep their children from "outside influence", and on top of that come the pedophiles, again especially in religious circles. Even private schools suffer from such issues, again mostly religious ones, but there also have been a fair share of scandals surrounding "ordinary" esoteric schools.

I would rather fight for government-run schools to have proper budgets for a high quality learning experience, adequate staff, modern curricula and teaching methods and actually sensible policies against bullying of all kinds than to allow systems to thrive that are even worse than what you went through.

I don't have any friend from my school times. Bullying was the norm back in late 80's and the 90's till I am in college on '99.

The real friends? the real education? started at college. School was a 12 years full of non sense useless stuff to someone's practical life and improvement (to me and many of people around me. The most I remember of these days were math and science lessons that were beneficial and my father alone was more than capable teaching me that... other than language lessons, religious teaching that were just a formality for us (we learn religion the best from home, our extended family) etc etc. At the end? We lost most of 12 years that are the best for internalizing more engineering and professional education. Yes we are capable of that at that age, I and my younger brother at the least built some robots and actual cars with suspension and steering etc although using old Lego collections (since we grew poor we couldn't afford actual tools) and that was ALL on our own at home and we didn't have internet or anything. We modified RC cars to go faster by soldering capacitors to give that boost to the motor (at the expense of battery life and potentially burning the motor) when we were in middle school.

Programming you say? my love for computers and computer games? all at home too, with some help from my older cousin (that I will visit in 30 minutes, he is 67 years old now and without him I wouldn't even dream of getting a PhD in CS, and of course my professors who I revere and respect).

Nearly all my useful skills, other than math and science as I mentioned), I and my brother learned on our own... at home. It all started at home. The school? was torture and a formality we had to go through or no one will hire us.

I am for minimal formal schooling with specialization starting from day 1, each one can choose a MUCH shorter path and more focused on what they want to do... switching between specializations and/or profession shouldn't be like collapsing a sky scraper we have built with hay (like it is now the case). wasting people's lives, causing them trauma for whatever miss function (e.g. students being beaten for silly missed homeworks etc). This system is age old and not effective, and there are more effective ways. Most of those who changed the world were school drop outs for a reason... they focused on what really matters and connected it to reality.

Exit is probably the most powerful strategy to dealing with certain kinds of situations, and schools deny you that.

I've chosen not to have kids (my childhood experience of other kids being one contributing factor) but if I did I would not want them to be anywhere near a UK state school.

There’s so many classes that I want a refund on my wasted childhood time. Reading the “classics” in English, studying foreign language, Theology (Catholic schools), History (yes, History). I hated all these classes, didn’t learn much from them beyond what it took to pass the tests, then quickly forgot what they taught. Anything useful that would have come from those subjects I learned later, through alternate more enjoyable means (e.g. Assassin’s Creed was way more effective in teaching me the history those games covered).

I hear your overall point, but treating this issue as a dichotomy undermines your point. Critics of homeschooling aren't claiming that schools are perfect, or that schools educate ideally. The claim is that, as poorly as our teachers are equipped to educate students, parents are, on average, worse equipped.

You're insinuating here that you were not educated in school. You're making that claim in a text-based format. How did you learn to read and write? Are you making the claim that your mother taught you how to read and write, and the school had nothing to do with it?

Here's the problem with what you're saying: a lot of homeschooled children don't know how to read and write. Or add, subtract, multiply, and divide. And contrary to your theory of education, memorisation is useful in learning these skills. A kid who has memorized how to do addition and subtraction can make change at a cash register, and a lot of homeschooled adults can't do that.

There are outliers in both schoolchild and homeschooled child experiences. I am one myself: my mom homeschooled me for kindergarten and first grade, and did a great job, but she had the advantage that she was a schoolteacher. And maybe your experience was an outlier in that you really did learn nothing in school. But the averages, at a systemic level, are that homeschooled children are at a large disadvantage compared to children educated in a school.

Institutional childcare in general is mostly this; a necessity driven by an economic imperative. Both parents must work. School is a continuation of that logic, although as the kids get older and more independent this becomes less important.

> It took becoming an adult to learn for myself that I enjoyed learning. My school was not learning

This is why I stuck with home educating up to GCSEs. I wanted my kids to enjoy learning and they do. They have a very wide range of interests and good academic results and IMO are better prepared for A levels and university than they would have been at school (even really good schools).

> find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work,

This is why we have so much after school stuff and breakfast clubs. Yes, it means some kids get fed in the morning, but a lot of them seem to get given junk food.

> for those saying it was good for socialisation with other children

IMO home education is better for socialisation. What skills do you learn from meeting the same group of people your own age in the same place everyday? My kids had more time to do things by themselves (anything from going to a shop to taking a bus to meet up with a friend). They did (between them) guides, dance, sea cadets, sailing, D & D, art classes, singing classes piano classes, drama, stage fighting and more. They had both remote (which develops a useful skill set these days) and face to face tutors at for some GCSE subjects. it would be really hard for kids tied by school hours plus home work to do as much.

> the endless chasing of metrics has made even the tiniest amount of joy that could exist in school- Non-existent.

The chasing of metrics has been a disaster. My younger daughter is at sixth form college for A levels and it has deteriorated since her older sister went there. it is still good but they have become a lot more rigid and I feel they are less focused on students best interests and more on the metrics.

I went to one of the best schools in the UK (consistently top 10 academically), with no bullying problems, no corporal punishment (it had abolished it in Victorian times IIRC), excellent facilities - and I still think my kids had a better education than I did

Now imagine that all that is true, except it's your home.

If you're interested in some content that really helped me understand why I hated school so completely, I recommend "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" by John Taylor Gatto, and "Free to Learn" by Peter Gray. Peter Gray also has a very nice blog called "Play Makes Us Human" at https://petergray.substack.com/

As a parent of a toddler, deciding on schooling options is one of the most serious decisions I'll have to make with my partner over the coming years and it terrifies me. Home schooling is a very attractive option from my perspective, but only due to lack of alternatives that offer the sort of nurturing and positive environment that I want my child to have.

Funny enough, in the US, most states changed their methods of teaching (especially math) 10-20 years ago. And facebook is still filled with parents (although probably mostly grandparents) bitching about not understanding "common core math" without trying to understand it, and expressing how they learned via rote memorization and that is what we should use instead.

Also there is no other way for people to learn mathematics then without doing the work to learn. This utopian idea that's bled into the education stream that we can teach math without significant amount of problems to practice on is kind of nuts.

Hey this is more or less the universal experience world over. Be suspicious of anyone who says otherwise.

That self-learning approach served me well in school, work, and life to the present.

The plane geometry teacher was one of the worst. We had a disagreement: She thought that in her subject she was superior, a lot better than the students were (actually, not for long!), regarded the students as subordinates, and tried to intimidate us. So, I communicated with her only a few times but then was showing that I was better in the subject than she was. I.e., one reason I worked hard and DID learn well was to show up the teachers, show that they were NOT better, even in their own subject, and keep them from being nasty to me, trying to subordinate me.

Since my brother wanted me to go for the football team, I did. The coach was no help at all and treated me with contempt. I was not any good at football, didn't try self-learning, but the coach was no help. As part of dumping on me, the coach gave me an old helmet, not effective, unique on the team. One day another player gave his elbow to my head, and I hit the ground maybe a little hurt. In one word, the coach was a bully. To heck with that: I quit the team.

My experience in school contrasts dramatically with my experience going through the scout movement. We had an active and healthy group. we would do 10 weekend camps a year and on those weekends I would hit the ground running when we arrived on friday evening and wouldn't stop until I was back in the van to go home on Sunday afternoon. I rose to the rank of troop leader, I won the youth of the year award, I would lead the campfires on the group weekends for 150 kids and their parents. I'm 49 and still in touch with the core group I went through the scout movement with, we're all lifelong friends. I probably would have killed myself if I didn't have Scouts.

I also learned how different fathers can be: some with few friends, some with many, each having different abilities, etc. All were wonderful people ready to help us learn.

I was never bullied (in school or out) and I can think of only a few instances where I saw it. So I am always disappointed to see numerous claims of bullying "pile up" online whenever there is a discussion of school. One gets the impression that everyone has been bullied always and that school was/is hell. But my experience was that bullying was truly rare: rarer than snakebite, rarer than black widow spider bite, indeed, rarer than actual death! My conversations with others with whom I associate indicate similar experiences. School was fun and rarely boring.

But I think being blind to the other kids being bullied is probably a common thing, you’re likely better adjusted as an adult and can’t possibly comprehend how common or how helpless kids can be to being bullied.

You can imagine then, a person like you becoming a teacher might not be looking for signs that kids are being bullied, because its rarer than death after all- and all you’d see is the built-up backlash of the bullied kid finally hitting the bully back (because, being a bullied kid fighting back for once is dramatic).

This is a large part of why the the bullied kids end up being punished when finally acting out in zero-tolerance scenarios.

Bullying is definitely more common than death.

I believe in homeschooling but it isn't very fashionable here.

School for me was a gladiator academy. Useful for producing gladiators I suppose but at the expense of any genuine intellectual curiosity or love of learning. Thankfully I had an informal opportunity to stay after school when the budding gladiators all went home to torment small animals or whatever it was they did, when I could sit in peace and play on the school’s Apple II. That opened my eyes to an entirely different world, which I now have the privilege of inhabiting.

Some of my siblings liked school, and my parents were wise enough to make the homeschool/government school decision on a child by child basis. I’m very grateful that they had the courage to make that decision in my case against fierce opposition by all of polite society.