Cat Poop Cookies and the State of Our Educational System

[queerbychoice]

Anyone who hasn't read An Open Letter To Superintendent Grimmel by Robert Alter should definitely read it. This kind of thing is the reason I've lost my former conviction that I wanted to have kids. I'm not sure I could handle being so much responsible for the tragedy of a kid being, inevitably, socialized into the disgusting culture that is our own.

I forwarded it to my friend Megan, who is a fifth grade teacher and therefore stands accused by it. I never had a single elementary teacher ever who, looking back, I approve of at all. But I like to think that Megan is better. Not that I'd really know; I haven't seen her teach.

I bought myself a chair today. An office-style ergonomically correct $40 chair with adjustable height and such. The idea is to use it with my desk that I got free from work last year (they had an extra desk which for some reason they didn't want anymore, so they sent a mass email saying "anybody want a desk?" and I was the first to write back "yes" so I got the desk) and which has been sitting around unused for the past year since I never got around to buying a chair the right height for it. My current typing arrangement involves a tiny short easy-chair and a weird short little wooden computer stand. It's not really that bad but the desk would allow me a lot more desk space to work with. So anyway, I bought a chair. Then I called Megan and told her that I bought a chair, and that I hadn't put it together yet, it was still in pieces in a big cardboard box.

Megan: When you put things together, do you read the instructions?
Me: Yeah, I usually do.
Megan: Oh, I don't. I just look at the parts and explore how they might fit together.
Me: And then after a few minutes fiddling around with the chair-making kit, voila! You've created a desk!
Megan: A desk would be cool. I wouldn't mind a desk.
Me: Well, it would be interesting if you could really make a desk out of a chair-making kit.
Megan: But you could!
Me: No, my chair-making kit has parts that are quite distinctly shaped like a chair seat and a chair back.
Megan: But you could make a kind of desk . . .
Me: A modern art interpretation of a desk!

But I did read the instructions, and followed them, and created a chair instead. Even though Robert Alter would certainly prefer Megan's approach.

And Megan and I decided to go out to dinner tomorrow evening, though where on earth we'll eat is anybody's guess since there's not a single food category that either one of us likes which the other one doesn't abhor. A few years ago we went on a road trip to San Diego together for two weeks, and when attempting to eat together, we more than once resorted to finding to restaurants next door to one another that both had outdoor eating areas so we could get our food separately and still manage to eat together.

Which reminds me, I've gotten a surprising number of responses to my potato candy recipe, though Morgan is the only respondent who's actually eaten potato candy, and all the people who've never eaten it have the arrogance to assume they wouldn't like it. Well, if you like any candy bearing the Reese's label I assure you that you'd like potato candy: it doesn't taste like potatoes in the least, silly. You can't judge a candy by a list of its ingredients on paper.

But anyway, since candy recipes apparently get a big response, I can't resist mentioning that Andre recently linked to a recipe for cat poop cookies which has to be seen to be believed.

Comments

Re: An Open Letter To Superintendent Grimmel

[embryomystic.livejournal.com]

Just... wow.

Re: An Open Letter To Superintendent Grimmel

[grecianurn.livejournal.com]

My sentiments exactly.

[veggisaurusrex.livejournal.com]

That is amazing... although that whole religious aspect of it kind of scared me... but he brings up some perfect points. If I ever choose to have a child (or I'd adopt... I'd most likely adopt) ...Theres no way in hell I'd send my child to school, after reading this letter.

[aliendreamer.livejournal.com]

Now *that's* interesting - that's the first time I've heard you mention friends you see in real life. I was beginning to wonder if you actually had them. I mean I was sure you must have, I guess...but wow, now I know :p

_Imp

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

I've definitely mentioned Megan to you before. But seriously, I don't see any friends face to face more than two or three times a year, so it's not surprising you don't hear me talk about it.

The face-to-face/online distinction is not very important to me. They're all real people and that makes them real life and I don't feel that I'm missing out on anything by having most of my frienships online.

[aliendreamer.livejournal.com]

Re: that guy not wanting his kid to go to school

I think it's wonderful how much this guy loves his kid, but I think he's all messed up and I would dearly like to know which school he went to, because my experience has been nothing like this. And I certainly don't "talk softly, think small, and write like a corpse." I understand that he just wants to keep his little girl innocent and carefree but at some point she's going to have to function in the world, and are American schools really so soul-destroying? How depressing. Honestly, I really hate to think what's going to happen when Greta hits sixteen, he's not going to think it's cute when she fights with everyone and calls them "piss-asses" then. The purpose of schools is not only to educate but to prepare kids for life, in a way only being around other kids and adults and learning that actually sticking fingers in oneself in public is not socially acceptable. Nor is it particularly hygenic. Really, I think he's just afraid of her growing up and becoming another adult. A lot of kids probably do lose their gleam but I don't think it's anything to do with the school. I've spent the last 13 years of my life in full-time education, and all my confidence and all my lust for life have come largely out of my experiences in school. And the President of Ethiopia may not be vitally important but if you decide to run for President of America the whole world's gunna laugh at you for not knowing :p Learning how to read early certainly *is* important, I think the earlier in life kids start reading books the better. One of my teachers went to a school where they believed grammer was oppressive and the kids should be allowed to write how they liked. He's rather bitter about the whole thing because he had to teach himself how to string a sentence together legibly.

We shouldn't forget that compulsory education was introduced because in the early 20th Century it was more profitable to send kids down the mines to make money for the family to live on, than it was to send them to school. Schools were invented to give kids freedom and choice in life, and they were really the beginning of the whole concept of "childhood" which did not exist until alarmingly recently. Previously they were merely thought of as very small adults who had to work and be miserable like everyone else.

So yeah, sorry to rant long-windedly but I don't like this guy, I think he's denying his kid an awful lot of positive, life-enriching experiences because he had a bad time at his school. It is a choice to allow yourself to grow lazy and apathetic. And maybe schools are competitive but I never wanted my friends to do less well as me in grades, my friends getting As never devalued my own achievements. A little friendly competition is a good thing, surely, because it makes you want to do well.

I mean, maybe it's just the difference between British private schools and American public schools, but I really believe in schools as institutions, if you do them right and if you have parents at home to remind you that you're still an individual and that there are many more important things in the world. I don't believe schools prevent you from finding these things out for yourself.

_Imp

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Imp, I did find some of his attitudes scary because, of course, regardless of whether Greta gets educated at school or at home she's still being brainwashed by an authority figure and obviously the authority figure himself, the parent, is not in a position to judge fairly whether he's making her too dependent on him and unable to deal with the rest of the world. That's always going to be a risk with home-schooling.

At the same time, however, you need to admit that the government has its own propagandistic agenda in teaching children, and that a home-schooled child (though she may well be harmed in other ways, perhaps more severe ways or perhaps not, depending on the integrity of the particular parent who home-schools her) is less likely to be brainwashed into agreeing with the government's agenda - which includes, among other things: patriotism, blind obedience, a tendency not to question certain prevailing gender, race, class, sexual preference, and other prejudices. In American history classes, for example, children invariably learn "their" history starting with Europe, and Columbus "discovering" America (as though there hadn't been millions of people well aware of america's existence and living there in it already!), and the Pilgrims coming over to colonize America and what a great amazing accomplishment that was, and oh by the way sorry we had to commit genocide on the Native Americans *shrug* but that whole manifest destiny thing really turned out cool, didn't it? We're so proud of ourselves! Oh yes, and along the way we enslaved some black people, sorry about that, but to make up for it we'll put a little extra paragraph at the end of each chapter full of white men's achievements, and devote that little extra paragraph to mentioning that by the way black people exist too and we should be careful not to be mean to them and by the way one or two of them might even be considered to have done something sort of historically relevant, I think one of them invented something or other, yeah.

A very very large percentage of the children in American schools are not of European ancestry (slightly over half, in California schools) and it's just evil to teach this kind of propagandistic history to them and say "we're studying the history of Americans here, so naturally we'll study it all from the Pilgrims' point of view and only mention your Native American or African or Asian ancestors in passing and from an outside perspective, always phrased as "we won the war against the Native Americans and killed them all, they were in our way but we should probably be sorry about it now and give them a reservation or two with a casino on it . . ."

"Honestly, I really hate to think what's going to happen when Greta hits sixteen, he's not going to think it's cute when she fights with everyone and calls them 'piss-asses' then."

How do you know he won't? I rather think he will.

(continued)

Re:

[aliendreamer.livejournal.com]

You keep talking about the government. Why can't he just send his daughter to a private school? School curriculum isn't mapped out by the government (in Britain, at least) - it comes from an independent body.

Patriotism forms no part of my education, I have never been influenced in any way to love Britain. Blind obedience is a part of childhood I have a lot of problems with, but it's certainly not confined to schools. Parents, teachers, and authority figures of any sort expect you to obey without question until you hit puberty, then it's not so much that they don't expect you to anymore, it's more that you start refusing and they get pissed off you and you have huge wars until you leave home. Ahem. I'm not sure about the tendency not to question...but up until very recently schools in Britain weren't allowed to teach us about homosexuality because there was this horrible fascist piece of legislation called Section 28 (I'm sure you've heard of it). There was a huge national campaign for it to be scrapped, and of course this nasty right-wing campaign decorated with billboard ads insinuating that all Britain's children would become screaming queers if they were taught about alternative lifestyles in schools. Eventually the conservatives won out and the bill stayed, but EU kicked up a fuss because it was a contravention of some European law. I assume they got rid of it after that, nobody's said much about it. History classes over here are not like that at all...We very briefly did Scottish history and we're doing Germany this year...we did a bit about the growth of industrialisation last year which was boring as hell. We learned that whole pilgrim thing about 7 years ago (I don't know what grade that translates to)...there was mention of the plains indians, we did a whole section on them after spending months learning about the pilgrims (nobody used that word actually...) traipsing across deserts and getting cholera, it was really depressing. Anyway, so I'm really not with you on the state trying to force its agenda down our throats. I really don't agree that any kind of brainwashing is taking place.

_Imp

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

(continued)

"The purpose of schools is not only to educate but to prepare kids for life, in a way only being around other kids and adults and learning that actually sticking fingers in oneself in public is not socially acceptable. Nor is it particularly hygenic."

It's no more unhygienic than kids sucking their thumbs in public. The vagina is a highly acidic environment very unconducive to germ growth; it's really rather safer, in fact, to stick your fingers in your vagina than to stick them in your mouth. Admittedly it would be unhygienic if kids started sticking their fingers into other kids' vaginas and into their own and mixing their body fluids together (although actually, since kids don't have any vaginal fluids to be mixed, it would really be a lot safer for them than for adults - it would probably be impossible for them to spread AIDS to each other that way); but then, it would also be very unhygienic if kids started sucking other kids' thumbs just after the other kids had sucked them and mixing their saliva together. Point being: kids don't usually suck other kids' thumbs. You tell them it's unhygienic to do that and they don't do it. And especially since kids aren't generally under the influence of raging adult passions, I think that any nightmares you might be having of kindergarten kids suddenly organizing mass orgies upon being corrupted by the likes of Greta are not terribly realistic. Kids who are allowed to put their fingers in their mouths and vaginas are not thereby made incapable of learning that putting them into other people's mouths and vaginas is not such a good idea.

The purpose of the article was to point out that our society wouldn't have the rules and taboos that it has if schools didn't inculcate them in everyone. If Greta's entire generation, or a majority of it, were home-schooled, with all different individual notions of how to behave and where it is or isn't appropriate to put one's fingers in public, then society as a whole would have to learn to accommodate much greater differences and varieties in personal behavior, and that would be extremely beneficial to those who are currently made miserable by society's continually trying to force them into ever more restrictive behavioral norms, gender roles and other nonsense.

(continued)

Re:

[aliendreamer.livejournal.com]

I think you missed my point ever so slightly on the finger issue, what I meant was merely that there are some ways in which children *do* need to be taught how to behave. I agree with you to a certain extent on the last point though.

_IMp

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

(continued)

"We shouldn't forget that compulsory education was introduced because in the early 20th Century it was more profitable to send kids down the mines to make money for the family to live on, than it was to send them to school."

I think you should read some other historical interpretations of how compulsory education got introduced into various different countries. Generally, whatever is more profitable is what gets introduced, and when compulsory education has been introduced it has generally coincided with a change in job industries which has caused the corporations to need workers with a little better literacy and math skills. For example, I just read this excellent essay earlier today, written by a Queerchoice list member who taught English in a Nepali village that had no roads or cars and where government-run education (as opposed to the traditional home schooling) was just being introduced for the first time. Read that, and don't be in so much of a rush to deny that your own schools had an unspoken agenda incorporated into your lessons.

"Schools were invented to give kids freedom and choice in life, and they were really the beginning of the whole concept of 'childhood' which did not exist until alarmingly recently. Previously they were merely thought of as very small adults who had to work and be miserable like everyone else."

I'm not very fond of the concept of "childhood." You speak of it like it functions to give kids the option of not working. In fact, it forces them into complete economic dependence on their parents for a much longer time period than is preferable for many of them, such as abused children or queer children who are forced into dependence on homophobic parents. I think western society has ridiculously extended the concept of childhood simply to deprive teenagers of any opportunity for independence. In Nepal, for example, even now that mandatory government-funded formal education is being introduced, the children move out and live in huts of their own away from their parents by the time they turn 14. They go home on weekends, but during the week they live in their huts because it's believed in Nepal that teenagers should be allowed that kind of privacy to study in. And I think that's a healthy thing. I think that my own teenagehood would have been much healthier and happier if I'd had the means to escape my homophobic parents and subsist on a meager income of my own, working summer vacations and weekends and such.

[brokenboi.livejournal.com]

i think this man is brilliant...the school system is so destructive...i don't know that home-schooling as an institution is any better, but it's incredibly important that people make it known that they are unwilling to accept the current child-rearing paradigm...

[aliendreamer.livejournal.com]

I accept the current child-rearing paradigm. It's done me alright. I'd send my kids (if I ever have any) to my school for sure. I'm not sure I'd want to send them to an American school after hearing how all of you reacted to that letter though :p

_Imp