Unquestioning Morons

My wife recently spend a long afternoon with one of her old *friends*.

Afterwards she remarked that her pal, whom she hadn't seen in ages, didn't ask a single question about what was going on with my wife and her family - this was over a period of something like 6 hours.

As far as I'm concerned, that's not exactly a *friend* or someone worthy of spending any scarce personal time with. When one half of a relationship becomes acutely aware of this kind of imbalance....I say it's definitely time to short that friendship.

We all have acquaintances that, well, don't ever initiate getting together or even make any efforts in that regard. And there is certainly some real value in maintaining skeletal relationships with old friends.  (Of course, some of these clowns need to be severed too!)

But *not asking you any questions* is a clear warning sign and not just with friends; it also applies to strangers and random people that you meet. If you're sitting there at a party or something and some self-orbiting Moron doesn't express any interest in the basics (like where you're from!)....well, I quickly cross them off my list.

I submit that it's beyond merely a sign of vanity or social retardation.

People who aren't genuinely interested in the lives of others may very well be intellectually retarded to boot. Have any of y'all ever met an incurious, closed-minded genius?

I'd like to suggest a new metric for assessing IQ.

How often do you Google?

Seriously. It's sort of a corollary to that old maxim *there's no such thing as a stupid question* which casts the kid who's afraid to raise his hand in a government school classroom.

Think about it. The WWW holds the answers to almost every basic question imaginable. Only a certified Moron would not want to tap that resource, again and again.

Plus....I myself Google stuff all day long! Ergo I'm clearly very...

Marginalizing The Best Friend?

Hah! Where else but in the New York Times?

But increasingly, some educators and other professionals who work with children are asking a question that might surprise their parents: Should a child really have a best friend?

Most children naturally seek close friends. In a survey of nearly 3,000 Americans ages 8 to 24 conducted last year by Harris Interactive, 94 percent said they had at least one close friend. But the classic best-friend bond — the two special pals who share secrets and exploits, who gravitate to each other on the playground and who head out the door together every day after school — signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques and bullying.

As the calendar moves into summer, efforts to manage friendships don’t stop with the closing of school. In recent years Timber Lake Camp, a co-ed sleep-away camp in Phoenicia, N.Y., has started employing "friendship coaches" to work with campers to help every child become friends with everyone else. If two children seem to be too focused on each other, the camp will make sure to put them on different sports teams, seat them at different ends of the dining table or, perhaps, have a counselor invite one of them to participate in an activity with another child whom they haven’t yet gotten to know.

Still, school officials admit they watch close friendships carefully for adverse effects. “When two children discover a special bond between them, we honor that bond, provided that neither child overtly or covertly excludes or rejects others,” said Jan Mooney, a psychologist at the Town School, a nursery through eighth grade private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. "However, the bottom line is that if we find a best friend pairing to be destructive to either child, or to others in the classroom, we will not hesitate to separate children and to work with the children and their parents to ensure healthier relationships in the future."

I snapped that pic of the ridiculous and no-doubt highly persuasive poster at the local government elementary school this summer. I was busting a gut while shooting the shot and some male teacher/administrator who was walking buy stopped, glared at me, and walked past shaking his head most disapprovingly. It's too bad he didn't say anything to me....I could have responded, "GET AWAY FROM ME YOU BULLY!"

Do I think it healthy for kids (or adults) to have close friends to the point of exclusivity?

No, I most certainly don't.

But I sure as heck don't think childhood friendships the province of government agents/experts.

So why do kids need or seek out *best friends*?

Well, I've covered this before in - Complete Book Review - Hold Onto Your Kids.

Essentially, children, on some levels, are not old enough to cope with parental separation. So they seek what they would naturally have in that relationship: security, intimacy, etc. - elsewhere. The problem, obviously, is that other children aren't mature enough to fill that void.

Definitely visit that prior post as it's filled with great insights and bang-bang excerpts.

Getting back to *bullying*...

Here we see it yet again. Schools create a problem - by disrupting millennia-tested family structures - and then stand up and say they are going to solve/manage the resultant problems.

Thanks to reader BrianC who brought this to my attention via Mark Steyn's remarks.

(Note to Taylor - You have to stop signing your emails "BFF".  Thanks.)

Surreal Stupidity

Remember without Big threats....there's no need for Big Government.

Thanks to David K. Fuller for compiling those clips - even if watching that 10 minute reel felt like 4 hours in the dentist's chair!

Anti-Socialization And Classical Schooling

Regular readers of this blog are well aware of my scorn for "socializing" propaganda. I've slammed Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick's push for all-day kindergarten which was justified as a boost to 5 year-olds' social skills. I also have posted that inane commercial that insists playing with blocks will put your toddler on the social fast track. I've even Marginalized a friend who day-cared their dog to improve its "social skills".

So perhaps you'd like to read someone else's articulation on this subject:



In September 1974, the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott delivered the Abbott Memorial Lecture at Colorado College. Entitled "A Place for Learning," Oakeshott’s lecture attacked the dominant model of education, a model predicated on the theories of the American educationist John Dewey. Learning, Oakeshott observed, should take place under "conditions of direction and restraint designed to provoke habits of attention, concentration, exactness, courage, patience, and discrimination"; but schools shaped by Dewey had instead become arenas of "childish self-indulgence," "experimental activity," "discovery," and "group discussions." Oakeshott was especially scornful of the notion that education’s purpose was "socialization," which could only turn the child into a compliant little cog in the machine of commerce and industry. "The design to substitute ‘socialization’ for education," he argued, was "the momentous occurrence of this century, the greatest of the adversaries to have overtaken our culture, the beginning of a dark age devoted to barbaric affluence."

In other lectures and writings, Oakeshott elaborated a positive vision of education. Education should initiate the student into a "historic inheritance or 'culture,'" which Oakeshott imagined as a multi-voiced conversation. Scientific, historical, philosophical, and poetic voices contribute, each voice expressing "a distinct . . . understanding of the world and a distinct idiom of human self-understanding." Education enables the student to participate in the "endless unrehearsed intellectual adventure" of that conversation. Liberal education is "above all else, an education in imagination, an initiation into the art of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the different modes of utterance, to acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to this conversational relationship, and thus to make our debut dans la vie humaine." Since education is the "distinguishing mark of a human being," replacing education with "socialization" is fundamentally dehumanizing. True education is an initiation into our full humanity. It is not so much a leading-out as a passing-on of the skills necessary to participate in culture. True education is really traducation.



Here's the link to the rest of the article. What I've posted above is most of what's said on "socialization". The rest of the article is more focused on the particulars of a classical education. Make sure you read the whole article. Remember, learning, if it began at all, shouldn't end at age 22. It's a lifelong process.

Retired learners can still function in society, BUT soon enough they'll be discombulated by something as simple as a remote control, a cell phone, or whatever the future analogues may be.

The reason these 'old coots' can't deal with technology is NOT their age - it's their so-called education and their status as lapsed-learners.

Social Skills for Blockheads

The video is a little messed up. If I happen upon the commercial again I will re-upload it. All you need to know is that it's a television ad for Magtastik where Dr. Paul Poumeliotis unleashes this doozy,

Playing with blocks or similar building activities really enhances your child's interactive skills and later on, social skills...

What the bleep?

Playing with blocks will enhance your kid's social skills?

Will it guarantee a date for the prom as well? If not, can I sue the quack doctor?

Apparently all of those weirdos in my class mustn't of had enough block time as toddlers.

Invoking "social skills" is one of the best ways to market to dumb parents these days.

...Daycare will improve kids' social skills.

...Deval's Patrick's all-day kindergarten will improve children's social skills.

...Playing with Magtastik blocks will improve social skills.

Personally, lower taxes would improve my coefficient of socialization. Somehow I need to work that "social skills" shibboleth into my own propaganda.