Peter Greene continues the debate about reform, civility, and honesty.
Have critics of the reformers corrupted the debate by being snarky?
Or have reformers corrupted the debate by calling themselves reformers as they seek to strip teachers of job rights and taking money from public schools for religious and private schools?
Greene writes:
.
“We play a lot of games with defining what qualifies as a lie (it depends one what the meaning of “is” is). I say, any time you shade or misrepresent the truth in order to influence, shape or control the behavior of other people, that’s a lie. For me, that also explains what’s wrong with lying– it’s an attempt to take away another person’s ability to make their own informed decision. Lying is destructive because it breaks relationships. It’s wrong because it’s about stealing another person’s freedom to choose.
“How do we react to being lied to?
“Well, when someone lies to you, they are sending some of the following messages:
* I don’t care about you enough to actually show up for this conversation
* I think you’re stupid
* We both know I’m lying, but you’re powerless to do anything about it, so neener neener
* You don’t matter; I’m in charge here
* This is not a real conversation
“Lies, depending on how much power you have in the situation, are somewhere between angering and funny. Depending on how much power you have and your temperament and the history of the relationship involved, you will choose something somewhere between playing along and fighting back. Playing along can either be about resignation or the hope that playing along will eventually lead to real dialogue. Fighting back can be about open aggression, or about snark and sass and sarcasm.
But here’s the most important thing I know about lying.
Lying closes the door to real dialogue. Closes it absolutely and completely.
So maybe snark and sass are a way of breaking that down. Maybe, for me, it’s a way of saying, “Look. I want you to know that I don’t believe that bullshit at all and you can stop shoveling it so we can move on to something else.”
In the education debates, sorting out the players is hard as hell. There are reformsters who I believe are being honest– they just don’t know what they’re talking about. I believe there are others who are looking for good faith ways to improve education. And I believe that there are some who haven’t had an honest word to say about education in years.
“They are not always easy to sort out. New NEA president Lily Eskelson Garcia seems to believe that Arne Duncan is sincere but just wrong. I’m not so sure, but she’s met him face to face, and I have not. like the majority of teachers, I’ve got to make these judgments from home, from words on a screen. And not everyone is so obviously full of it as She Who Will Not Be Named or the various lying hucksters pushing charters to make a buck…..
“Sometimes a lie is so outlandish that the truth sounds like mockery, and I think many parts of the conversation have sailed way past that point. There’s no way to respond to something like “We will get better teachers in classrooms by removing job security for the profession” that doesn’t sound like snark. There’s no way to inject honesty and truth into a discussion of using testing to measure teacher effectiveness without making proponents of VAM sound foolish. If the emperor has no clothes on, there’s no way to have an honest conversation of his wardrobe that doesn’t leave him feeling naked.
“To move forward, we need honesty more than we need niceness. The people who have injected large lies into the conversation have raised the bar for how tough honesty is going to be (which is often the point of making the big lie), but we can’t be afraid to go there. We can’t make the mistake of matching lies with lies; reformsters are not brain-damaged fiends who drink the blood of children under a full moon. But if pointing out the truth is going to feel ugly and snarky and sassy, we can’t be afraid to do it. Honesty is an essential navigating tool for finding our way out of this sea of strife and confusion.
A civil conversation requires honesty. And the conversation these days about charter schools — and, indeed, about tenure and test-based teacher evaluation and seniority and vouchers and standards and just about every other education policy on the table today — is anything but honest.”.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Effective snark requires a combination of knowledge anger and hope. If we had no hope we would just be silent. Thank you for this Peter Greene and Diane Ravitch.
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In theory, I am as much for civil conversation as the next person. In reality, how much civil conversation can I be expected to hold as the rug is pulled out from under me at the time I approach retirement? There is no time in my life for course corrections. The sincerity or insincerity of the reformers is an issue that has little interest for me. I have invested twenty five years of my life to teaching ESL to immigrant children and adults. Is the ROI for me a life of poverty and no pension?
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The United States actually attempted to legislate honest conversations, debates and arguments through the media with the Fairness Doctrine that required the media to allow both sides of an issue the same media source to state their case.
The Fairness Doctrine was introduced in 1949 and survived until it was eliminated in 1987. It was President Reagan who declared war on this method that mandated an honest and balanced debate where the public could hear both sides of an important issue and then decide for themselves how to vote or to protest. The Fairness Doctrine was not censorship in any way.
But in 1985, under FCC Chairman Mark S. Fowler, a communications attorney who had served on Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign staff in 1976 and 1980, the FCC released a report stating that the doctrine hurt the public interest and violated free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.
This was when free speech became defined as—not an honest flow of information, but the freedom to mislead with lies and cherry picked facts without fear of being discovered.
It was after the death of the Fairness Doctrine that Conservative talk radio exploded and Rush Limbaugh became a household name—and worth hundreds of millions of dollars— as he fooled millions of Americans with his cherry-picked facts and lies. Soon, there were Limbaugh clones crawling out of the woodwork like termites, and the war to deceive the public was well underway.
This era was when the far right learned how to mislead the public to achieve agendas that often hurt the true spirit of democracy.
The far left liberal opposition in the talk radio world has struggled to compete and many have failed because those idealists tend to think that truth supported by facts is important, but it’s arguable that honesty is losing the war against the onslaught of lies and misinformation from a traditional national media that has become controlled by a few billionaire oligarchs who are the now the gate keepers of what the public doesn’t hear.
This minefield of confusing lies and misinformation eventually gave birth to nonprofits like Vote Smart and Fact Check.org—where concerned regular voters could turn to discover reality based on facts, if possible.
http://www.factcheck.org/
I often turn to both Vote Smart and Fact Check.org (in addition to two or three other sites) to figure out who is lying the most and who represents my values and thinking.
Both sides of any issue have to lie today, becasue there is no room for an honest candidate to survive in politics. The honest candidate will not survive in the long run. They will either be corrupted or lose an election to a candidate willing to lie for people like Bill Gates, the Koch brothers of the Walton family who use their money like nuclear bombs to push their own agendas.
In conclusion, those who have to lie to achieve their agendas do not serve democracy and freedom. They serve special interests and the agendas of crackpots and extremists who have too much money.
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“They serve special interests and the agendas of crackpots and extremists who have too much money.”
Come on Lloyd the theme of the day is that we’re supposed to be civil in our diatribes even when calling out the avaricious bastards who will never have too much money.
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:o)
“the theme of the day is that we’re supposed to be civil in our diatribes”
The script for behaving properly was written by the same “avaricious bastards”. In the script, they are allowed to use all the logical fallacies possible without being called out. When we call them out, they will change the topic and ignore our accusation. But if we to what they are doing, they are all over us as if we are pond scum and not to be trusted.
It’s one of their tactics. I’m sure they were taught how to deal with the truth based on evidence/facts in workshops that teach how to lie and deceive and boost the odds of succeeding at fooling as many people as possible.
If someone—for instance, Bill Gates or The Koch brothers—is a fool and we call them a fool or something else, that isn’t an ad hominem attack. It’s a fact based on evidence. Are you reading this, TE?
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https://www.youtube.com/user/ProjectVoteSmart
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Dishonesty and lying (esp manipulating the masses via propaganda) is just one example of Narcissistic behaviors that can be observed in the wealthy corporate education reformers and their political supporters.
Unfortunately, the primitive coping mechanisms used by Narcissists ( Avoidance, Denial, and Dissociation) keeps them “emotionally numb”, unable to make empathic connections to others, unable to experience guilt, and unable to recognize the impact of their behaviors on others. Their repressed social and emotional development, as well as their sophisticated cognitive skills of manipulation, are part of their “identity” and permanent personality traits. They relate to others in adulthood using the same mechanisms that were conditioned in childhood. Lying for them is “normal” behavior that comes from distorted perceptions of “entitlement” and unhealthy ways of meeting their needs for power in “their world”.
Their regressed social and emotional development, codependency, and “childlike” impulsive and compulsive behaviors, are now recognized as “adult children’. (ACoA).
Adult “Lying” is characteristic of “The Dark Triad” (personality that includes: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sociopathy(psychopathy) that has become too “normal” in many US social systems: corporations, government, churches, families, and now education dysfunction via Common Core …..Where does this lead?
http://m.us.wsj.com/articles/what-corporate-climbers-can-teach-us-1404862389?mobile=y
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Excellent explanation
Sad, but true
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“They relate to others in adulthood using the same mechanisms that were conditioned in childhood. ”
Is it not true that many if not most of the edudeformers come out of elitist private k-12 and then elitist univeristies??? Hmmmm!!!!
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Right…maybe a sign of “conditioned entitlement”?….they were “trophy children”… conditioned with attitudes of superiority and entitlement, and most likely emotional neglect from Narcissistic parents, leading to continued need for power and wealth as a measure of their success…they perceive themselves as “winners” in our increasingly dysfunctional “winner/loser” society….
The dysfunctional Common Core environment of Authoritarian Behaviorism that has resulted from an obsession with testing and performance data is perpetuating the “winner/loser” behaviors of Narcissism (superiority) and Borderline (inferiority) behaviors in mainstream society….”black and white thinking”….Since children’s social and emotional developmental needs are being neglected, what else can we expect from the CCSS abuse ?
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In any noble battle the raw truth is the best weapon. Secrecy is almost always the enemy outside a criminal atmosphere where it may be sadly needed. Education “reform” is walking that fence between civil discourse and criminal enterprise, too often falling into the criminal chaos of misleading data for questionable purposes.
Data that is honest and open to public review and audit remains our most powerful weapon in this critical battle. Any school district in crisis has a history of secrecy. Dallas ISD is becoming one of those districts with data like this being hidden and/or ignored: http://schoolarchiveproject.blogspot.com/2014/07/academic-loss-graduation-numbers.html
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Peter Greene hits the nail squarely on the head: “We can’t make the mistake of matching lies with lies.”
Just look at the difference between the numbers/stats folks for a “better education for all”—e.g., Mercedes Schneider, Gary Rubinstein, Bruce Baker, GF Brandenburg, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley and the inimitable Jersey Jazzman (profuse apologies for all those I left out)—and the accountabully underlings that turn 30% and 40% attrition from 9th grade to 12th grade in a charter to 100% graduation rates.
Honesty, yes, no matter the cost. For example, just to judge by the first person I mentioned above, consider that most KrazyMathLady herself, Dr. Mercedes Schneider aka deutsch29, who practices ethical restraint even when the data might justify a wild accusation or hurtful half-truth.
Honesty doesn’t mean anything goes. And it doesn’t mean that there aren’t many conversations going on at once. For some conversations, let’s go with an old dead French guy:
“No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.” [Voltaire]
But then there are times when we need to go with a not-so-very-long-ago American:
“Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.” [Mark Twain]
And sometimes nothing more useful than a very dead, very old and very Greek guy:
“Words empty as the wind are best left unsaid.” [Homer]
Those for a “better education for all” take this as an admonition. Those in mad dog pursuit of $tudent $ucce$$ take it as a prompt to turn up their Rheeality Distortion Fields.
That’s the difference between those arguing and struggling for excellence in an “education model” and those promoting and rigging the system in support of a business plan.
Just my dos centavitos worth…
😎
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Peter Greene advocates that we respond to ed reformer lies with honesty and civility. He points out that at least some ed reformers truly believe that corporate ed reform and privatizing public schools will actually benefit children. Peter claims that these folks are well meaning but simply misinformed.
Mahatma Gandhi ran into a similar problem in trying to get the British out of India. There were some who truly believed that India was filled with savages who could not govern themselves and therefore needed the British billionaires to come in and rule the country for them. Gandhi tried to show these well meaning but misinformed people that they were wrong.
However, he also noted that many of those in favor of British rule over India could not be persuaded by any evidence – no matter how rational or logical. Their “paycheck” depended on remaining blind to injustice. For such people, Gandhi had different advice. Gandhi said that we cannot resolve conflicts with people who lack what he called Goodwill.
Today, there are many in the Corporate Ed Reform camp who lack good will. They simply are motivated by the desire for greed and control. In their arrogance, they believe that it is better for them to control the education of children than to have a locally elected school board control local schools.
The danger in projecting our values of good will and honesty onto corporate raiders is that it has already led to severe harm being inflicted on millions of children in the US. Because the billionaires control both the media and the government, it requires a stronger response from parents and teachers if we are to save what remains of our public schools.
We need to recognize that many so-called ed reformers have an agenda. That agenda includes gaining control over the $700 billion annually that is spent on public school in America. It includes destroying the teachers unions that are the biggest defenders of public schools and the most dangerous opponents to corporate ed reformers.
We also need to recognize that we are not having a civil debate with a level playing field. The ed reformers will not even give parents or teachers a seat at the table to have the debate. Instead, what is really going on is a well financed “war” against our public schools. The first casualty of this war is our children. But the second casualty is the truth.
In educating the public, it is crucial that we recognize that they have been and will continue to be subjected to the never ending stream of lies of corrupt corporate ed reformers. Merely pointing out that the ed reformers are lying is not an effective strategy when the ed reformers have control of the media and the government and can promote the lie much more often than we can promote the truth. Instead, we need to re-frame our message in terms that will make it easier for parents and teachers who are not yet awake to better understand. This is not a civil debate among equal respectful parties. This is a war for the future of our children! We are at a huge disadvantage if we spend all of our time preaching to the converted. Instead, we need to create more effective simple messages and better slogans that will appeal to the masses and convert the undecided.
The corporate ed reformers understand the power of slogans. We need to learn from them how to fight fire with fire. I am not advocated responding to lies with our own lies. I am simply saying we need to re-frame the debate on our terms and using our own slogans rather than the carefully crafted slogans of the corporate ed reformers. Words have power and we need to more carefully craft our own words.
When one is engaged in a war with a dishonest and immoral opponent, the solution is not to beg the opponent to stop attacking our kids and destroying our schools. We cannot reason with unreasonable people. Instead, the solution is to educate those who do not yet know there is a war going on and then organize those who do into an effective force capable of defending our schools and our kids.
As just one example, rather than writing letters to corrupt members of the legislature who were elected by the billionaires and are owned by the billionaires, a more effective solution is to boot corrupt politicans out of office by running against them and/or promoting the campaigns of honest folks who are willing to challenge the corrupt incumbents.
Even here we need to recognize that we are not playing on a level playing field. Corrupt candidates, backed by billionaires, are able to outspend honest challengers often by a margin of 25 to 1. However, as a person who has defeated a well financed corrupt opponent (who outspent me by a margin of 25 to 1), I can say that it is possible to prevail even when greatly outspent. It simply requires being willing to spend more time educating your neighbors and organizing, motivating and empowering your supporters.
My ed reform opponent spent over $100,000 in a primary – a record amount for a legislative race primary in our area at the time. He also had the support of all of the local billionaire owned papers. He mailed out over 100,000 fliers to every voter in the district and made over 100,000 computerized robo-calls. Despite the propaganda onslaught, I and my rag tag group of supporters defeated him by thousands of votes. We did this without lying – but with simple and effective messaging.
There is power in numbers. The billionaires and their cronies may have the money. But we have the numbers. All we need now is to craft better messages – simple and effective slogans that will make it harder for the corporate ed reformers to deceive the public.
Regards,
David Spring M.Ed.
Restoregedfairness.org
springforhouse.org
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Excellent insight and right on target David! Keep it up! To what office were you elected that you mentioned in your comment ?
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Madison,
As I pointed out in the comment above, I defeated a corporate backed opponent in a primary election. In other words, this was an election to determine the top two to move on to the general election. This primary win was on of the biggest political upsets in the history of Washington State legislative races. Not even my mom thought I would prevail! Unfortunately, I lost the general election to a Republican incumbent in a heavily Republican district -during the Republican sweep election of 2010. But I am running against this year against one of Bill Gates assistants – a person from the billionaire backed group Stand for Children. So the fight goes on. We will eventually win as parents will some day wake up to the fact that billionaires are not on the side of their children.
Regards,
David
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David Spring,
Please contact The Network for Public Education to apply for endorsement. We have a review process that includes all candidates, and we endorse friends of public education.
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Reformers will turn public education into Potterville. For profit greed and the public good are not aligned forces. Where’s the reform blog where there are 12 million hits of unpaid people? Show me the millions of reformers who have nothing financially to gain from their agenda? They don’t exist. There is no goodwill or civic duty in reform free from greed.
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Potterville was a pretty swinging town, as I recall.
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FLERP,
So was Soddam and Ghormorah, or whatever the hell that evil city was called…The billionaire bad boys are taking us there in the fast lane!
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Thank you Diane. I will. And I am thrilled about Valerie’s big win in Georgia.
Regards,
David
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I agree David….let the brainstorming begin! Here are some of my protest slogans against corporate ed reformers:
Propaganda never changes, it just gets better hairstyles and more expensive suits!
Teaching is not Preaching!
CCSS Industrial Education is to children, what Industrial Farming is to animals.
Common Core is the processed food of education. Real Children need to be organically grown.
Teaching conformity is cruel and inhumane treatment that does not honor children’s diverse learning needs.
Turning Children into Robots is not a good thing.
Common Core should be considered a crime against nature.
Here is my Common Core Protest Poster that anyone is free to share:
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Civil conversation/dialogue, eh? Built on honesty? Seems fair enough…. except for the fact that I like to be treated with respect, as a major player in the game, one with a vested interest, skin at stake; I don’t like to be lied to, manipulated, deceived, diverted, distracted, misdirected. I’m quite bright – I don’t like to be treated like a fool or have someone try to scam me. I’m a fairly direct person – I don’t like to speak in euphemisms or high falutin’ vocab that acts as a gatekeeper/an excluder and is part of the ‘power over’ tool kit… a spade is a spade… and a pile of ed-reform BS is a pile of ed-deform BS… and I call it how I see it…
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I understand and share your anger! When I help young children learn to recognize the dynamics of “bullying” behavior, anger always plays a leading role! It is our natural and appropriate response to mistreatment or disrespect….. And we need to be able to express it and process it in a healthy and productive way.
Diane’s blog serves as a good outlet for us to express and process some anger, and to validate others who are distressed by CCSS; but, I agree that we need to think of positive ways to convert it into meaningful action. At this point, I think one good option that is increasing our power is to educate more parent groups about the impact of chronic stress in the CCSS environment, and encourage the Opt Out Movement. Especially encourage Opt Out for elementary age, since they are the ones being most permanently damaged by this toxic environment of chronic stress. We also need to get more media opportunities for national experts like Diane and others to help educate the parents and public.
I think it would help promote our cause and show solidarity by wearing a national symbol. My recommendation to protest Common Core is to wear a feather. It could be simply attached on jacket, hat or hair. I think a simple feather represents several things: it represents how the corporate reformers and politicians are
“feathering their nest” with our tax money, it represents CCSS breaking the “spirit” of children, it represents our determined “spirit” to promote the authentic learning environment as the natural way children learn, it represents the oppression and “dehumanizing”of Native Americans by our greedy ancestors that is similar to the oppression of children by greedy corporate reformers …The feather needs to be one you find yourself as a gift from nature, and not a fake feather or one that is store bought. A gift from nature will make it more meaningful and help keep our “spirits “inspired. For example, last week when I was walking a trail in the woods of rural NC where I grew up, I found a wild Turkey feather. This morning, while back in Cali and walking to my favorite coffee shop in the hills of Berkeley, I found a pigeon or dove feather ( I can’t tell them apart?) So now, I have a special attachment to these two feathers and wear them in my walking hat. If anyone asks about them, I explain that my feathers are to protest CCSS because it is destroying the spirit of our children, our most precious resource, and it can only be stopped if they and others get involved.
So what do you all think? Can a feather inspire a nation to marching?….Yankee Doodle certainly did!
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I just posted the previous comment from my iPhone, which apparently forgot how to connect to FB….so here is my laptop comment to confirm that I would like to propose a simple “feather” as our national symptom to protest CCSS.
I think our message represented by a simple feather could inspire others to join our movement, stop greedy intrusion from educational impostors, and help take back public education.
I would also like to recommend that everyone use their authentic identity when posting comments on this blog, since we need credibility if we are discussing “honesty”.
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I like your feather idea/symbology very much…. for multiple reasons…
as to the rest of what you write – I think, as I have said before, that what is going on in public education is merely the reflection of something much bigger going on in the rest of western ‘civilisation’…
and I think its too late for talk and being nice to turn it around….
we need revolution and we need it now… revolution actually is a much more deliberate/contained action than it might appear at first glance, superficially… IF we dont act to take back control of our world, very soon the system will complete its implosion and/also climate change and its effects will tear everything down around our ears anyway…
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Thanks Joyce. I love your slogans. I will add some of them to my campaign website, fliers and speeches. I especially like the one “Real children need to be organically grown.” Too often, the ed reformers treat our kids like they are cogs in a machine rather than real human beings with real human rights and real human needs.
Regards,
David
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Thanks David, I hope the slogans help and good luck with your campaign. Maybe something can be said about this paradox:
Social and emotional developmental needs of children are being totally neglected, even though science tells us that “adaptability” is the best determination for future success.
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Sahila, I agree with your comment: “education is merely the reflection of something much bigger going on in the rest of western ‘civilization’…
The dysfunction in society looks dystrophic and Orwellian …since we are returning to a Modern Medieval Psychological Era. Intellect is soaring while social and emotional development is regressing…like two horses pulling a rope from opposite ends. Psychologists measure the discrepancy between intellectual functioning and emotional functioning in order to determine emotional “disturbance”.
Either type, acute trauma or chronic “traumatic stress”, causes regression in a person, and it also causes social regression in mainstream society.
I think the social regression is coming from “traumatic stress disorder” of our mainstream society…a result of high levels of chronic fear and traumatic grief…
massive insecurity from loss of trust in leaders, black and white thinking, social isolation, economic hardship, anxiety and depression,
lack of mutual respect, loss of dignity, codependency, Narcissistic and Borderline behaviors that were conditioned in childhood from an “invalidating environment” in an increasing “authoritarian” society.
Our country now functions like a “covert Narcissistic family” (as do many other countries).
People functioning in their survival mode are self absorbed…distrusting others and motivated by fear..they are isolated without emotional connections..using their more primitive brain….becoming ‘reactors” rather than using cognitive thinking…They will behave more “uncivilized”…greedy…possessive….like children internally, with greater need to control their external environment (and others in it)….”keeping up appearances”…If this continues, we will eventually become a society of barbarians? (Think: The Wolf of Wall Street.) Morals are repressed when social and emotional development is repressed.
As a result, our schools are becoming more punitive, and using Authoritarian Behaviorism that develops children’s intellect, while repressing their social and emotional development.
In nature, when a mother wolf (and numerous other animals) have instinctive fear of environmental dangers that would not allow the new borns to survive, she devours them. Infanticide is often natures way of protecting them from a lifetime to cruelty.
We can see a relationship now with an increase in “smother mothers”
who dominate, isolate, and possess their children in ways that stifle their social and emotional development, and keep them “adult children” in adulthood via personality disorders. We can see the same “smothering” authoritarian “control” in schools.
Where are our social scientists and “best and brightest” scientists who need to be pointing out these dysfunctions and how to intervene with social regression? Ivory Towers?
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