Permanently Deleted
Twitter be like:
here’s why criminalizing drunk driving is problematic a thread🧵
reason.com literally had an article defending it that basically boiled down to "it's crashing that causes problems not just driving while happening to be drunk"
similar logic could be applied to legalize shooting a gun at someone as long as you don't actually hit em
Driving drunk may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so who can say if it’s good or bad
Murdering someone isn't the problem, it's when they actually die is the real issue
I thought this was the pro-drunk driving forum, was that back on chapo.chat?
this site is full of cishet dudes with good relationships with their family and a non-zero amount of generational wealth, and those people also tend to have good relationships with our current education system
:10000-com:
schooling is a synonym for education. this is a distinction that's coming out of nowhere to make this take seem less stupid.
you take a group of children doing perfect intersectional communist education and put them under the same roof its a fucking school. and people are allowed to argue against de-centralised homeschooling, it's not reactionary to want professionals to handle education.
Professionalized education fosters a division of labor, since it requires professional (at least) teachers, if not also custodians, counselors, cops, disciplinarians, principles, curriculum directors, etc.
Communists are opposed to this, of course. Not just Marx with his famous quote
in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
Similarly, Stalin wanted to give every soviet citizen a multi-trade technical education allowing them to move between jobs freely.
On the anarchists' side, Perlman argued against the professionalization of life,
A time-and-motion engineer watching a bear near a berry patch would not know when to punch his clock. Does the bear start working when he walks to the berry patch, when he picks the berry, when he opens his jaws? If the engineer has half a brain he might say the bear makes no distinction between work and play. If the engineer has an imagination he might say that the bear experiences joy from the moment the berries turn deep red, and that none of the bear’s motions are work.
So a communist school would not have teachers. People in the community would learn pedagogical strategies as they were interested. Pupils would study as apprentices, students, and book club members as they wanted or as the need arose. As communists, we cannot just hope this will happen, instead we need to oppose professionalism and build non-commodified institutions.
Even in a communist society there will be specialisation. There is no such thing as unskilled labour and everything from baking a loaf of bread or laying bricks to brain surgery takes training and experience to be done well. The thing about fishing in the afternoon and being an art critic after dinner doesn't mean that everyone will be capable of doing everything, it means that the individual will be free to develop their skills according to their talents and interests without being forced into a rigid system where you are locked into a discrete career path from an early age where some paths available to only the select few brings wealth and social status and others brings nothing but toil.
Teaching is a skill that you have to learn to do well. In a communist society there would still be people who spend more time teaching and studying didactics, developmental psychology, pedagogical methods etc. than most other people. You could call them teachers although they would also do other types of work to the benefit of society.
I think we mostly agree. I was arguing against people only being teachers, and being paid to be teachers, as opposed to being given the resources to exist and thrive no matter what. In universities, people are often researchers and teachers, or accountants and teachers, or lawyers and teachers. This is one way you could do that. Socializing people into social roles through other institutions like apprenticeship, or in the family (as rich people and many tradesmen already do) is another.
So my objection isn't to "being locked into a discrete career path from an early age," but simply being locked into a career path. I believe that would have downstream effects such as the dissolution of boundaries between roles like teacher, parent, tradesman, or scientist
am I missing some context here? I’m reading that the original twitter thread wants to replace education with “look things up on the internet” and obviously that’s bad but I don’t see it in the screenshot.
Yeah, but you could kind of tell the take wasn't going to be good because if they simply meant "abolish schools not education" they would have said so when the Mason dude was confused.
Left twitter: *says insane-sounding thing that's technically correct but requires you to already know what they're talking about*
Some rando: "Wait, do you actually think *insane-sounding thing*?
Left twitter: :yes-chad:
*like twenty evasive comments*
Left twitter: "Actually, I meant *way more reasonable position that any normal person would have clarified like a million comments ago*"
Why does this happen so much?
"It only happens when you view things in bad faith, you fucking piece of shit liberal"
Yeah generally posting just a hot take without like explanation seems bad and inflammatory
What sounds insane about "abolish the schools"? Do you think "abolish the police" sounds insane?
Most people ask what to do about rapists, current or future, and then the anarchists' suitcase full of jellybeans explodes all over the floor as they try to describe communal law officers without calling them police.
I'm not sure which is more lib: thinking that the police have done anything significant to end rape, or thinking that semantics is an epic gotcha moment.
That's not semantics, it's describing literally what structures will exist to help people in need and anarchists do the "ho ho ho, dear lib, I'll never taint myself with a material description of the system I hope to replace." Literally worthless rhetoric.
So now we're on the "shapiro-tier strawman from somebody who has never genuinely asked an anarchist about police" level of posting I see.
Just fuckin' describe the system you want to replace the current with to people. It's all I'm asking. Arrogant "dunks" do literally nothing for anyone.
Meanwhile complaining about "the anarchists" using such horrid terminology as "abolish the police" on a bear themed podcast site in the middle of the night is definitely doing everything for everyone. :shrug-outta-hecks:
The police you live under right now are not what police have to be.
No, but I literally want to abolish the state lol. Normal people do tend to think it sounds insane, because they have been taught to conflate abstract quantities like education and security with specific capitalist institutions. You gotta point out the distinction to them or they will be insanely confused.
yeah, i guess you kinda have to answer silent but obvious questions the twitter reply guys aren't going to say out loud
i guess ultimately what i'm getting at here is that i lacked the vision to imagine the average person going through school and then not being interested in the topic of abolishing schools so i interpreted the "insane-sounding thing" part wrong, sorry
imagine the average person going through school and then not being interested in the topic of abolishing schools
Tbh that's a great point that I hadn't thought of. My mind went to the STEM-worshiping types of liberals who think the answer to everything is more school funding
Very few people are familiar with leftist thinking and the average person have a hard time imagining radical change. They have been brought up assuming politics is just about making small adjustments to the status quo and presuppose that everything else will be left in place exactly as it is now when they hear a proposal.
When someone talks about abolishing schools and police most people hear "abolish schools and police and leave the rest of the capitalist system intact", which would be an insane proposal, not "abolish schools and police as part of a radical change of society".
Because the modern left sucks at communication and propaganda. The capitalists have billion dollar industries dedicated to manipulate people's minds using scientific methods while we're still a bunch of amateurs stabbing in the dark.
Except the insane-sounding thing here was meant as way more reasonable position that any normal person would have clarified like a million comments ago for the first time and it's clear to anyone who read even one paragraph of anarchist pedagogy, which promotes insane-sounding thing since the start.
Link where they say you can teach people in some sort of collectivized fashion that isn't going to happen in some form that one could describe as a school.
So you admit this anarcho-whatever is literally just making a pointless argument of semantics then to sound radical.
school is an invention of the ruling class designed to brainwash workers into believing fucked up malarkey such as "dangling participle" and "square root"
Twitter anarchists and reddit anarchists are annoying for different reasons. On reddit it’s radlibs pretending to be anarchists because it’s the most socially acceptable form of radical leftism. On Twitter it’s this. Here we have some fine anarchist folk and irl I’ve met some amazing anarchists. But online... ehhh
Sometimes I feel like Zizek at the Peterson debate "Who are these real anarchists sniffs"
School is just a word for an institute for education, it doesn't matter how much you reform education, a school will be called a school. Discourse over language is the dumbest thing but so are people pretending that words can mean whatever they want them to mean.
it doesn’t matter how much you reform education, a school will be called a school
Same thing with concepts like police, prison, state, etc. This is why many non-chuds get confused when we talk about "abolition" or "withering away."
Police maybe, but it's not exactly the same with prison and state. Not even all detention today is called "prison".
Comrades, we must also abolish roads. After all, have they ever led to anything good?
I hear they all lead to the capital of an ancient genocidal empire. Roads, they're no good folks
Nice try, rails have historically been a tool of imperialism for American elites.
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Current school situation now: Training center that is a microcosm for the workforce. Cheating is basically allowed and part of the ritual, but only the privileged kids (white males) will get a slap on the wrist for cheating incorrectly. Are you a person of color? Our white social workers with white savior complexes will give your young Brown kid Oppositional Defiant Disorder, and they'll be in jail quickly. Teacher is authoritarian. Be there at 8:00 AM or else. Plagiarism is bad, but rape accusations? Yeah we don't talk about rape. Everyone stand for the flag and recite the pledge of allegiance. Recess and lunch are at 12:00 and 10:00, do not even think about getting out of your seat during those times.
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School after capitalism: Walkable community center for kids, project based education instead of grades and SATs which actually encourage cheating. PHDs use notes and an open book for their published work, so why can't kids do this? The testing system is gone int this version of school. What's a school to prison pipeline in this system? School starts at 10 AM but kids aren't marked late for being there at 11 AM cause fuck rigid schedules, you get off at 3pm and there are social activities for kids for the ones who like it there. Who the hell is the teacher here? Oh look, a kid is telling his teacher about his community's teaching and learning style and the teacher learns something and adjusts their teaching style for said kids in the community, and while there is a teacher in school, the line is definitely blurred since students are part of a democracy too since this is what a socialist society encourages. Teachers are the students and students are the teachers and everyone gasps in horror at the fact that administration had so much control over the education system in capitalist America.
So when does school stop being school here? Nothing wrong with abolishing school, school doesn't even look like school in the second example and I think people disagreeing with abolishing school aren't wrong. It's just that twitter is horrible for expressing ideas as opposed to sites like Hexbear. The twitter OP should've described what school is now and what education or school looks after capitalism but here we are arguing.
Like the ship of Theseus; if you change the parts it is still the same ship, if you change the structure and function it a new ship. Changing the propaganda from communism bad to communism good does not meaningfully change what a school is but changing it's purpose from indoctrination to emancipation does.
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This whole point just makes it sound like you were upset that you got caught cheating and plagiarizing and that everyone else was cheating too (they weren't). Like seriously how else are we supposed to interpret you shrugging off plagiarism by saying "at least it isn't rape". Good lord that sounds like a Cumtown bit. You understand why cheating is bad right? Also what's wrong with making kids be in class on time? Its really easy to do and if you are consistently late you start to fall behind the rest of the class. Its a basic skill you will need to function in all forms of society including communist ones.
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First off school officially starts at 10 am, but the teachers dont start teaching until 11 am because no one shows up until then. The little kids all have a shared community teaching and learning style that they all learn best from? What are you talking about, that isn't real thing. Do you actually think schools suck because the teachers had too much control? Students are teachers? What?! Teaching is really, really hard. Students don't know how to do it. This isn't a hallmark movie where the kids are pure and wise.
I think the second version of school would at best cover 1/4th of the material in the same timeframe, with the majority of kids not bothering to learn anything that didn't immediately interest them.
Why would you want kids to learn things that don't immediately interest them? Sounds pretty authoritarian to me...
You are right, the first point does make it sound like I'm excusing the most reprehensible acts next to plagiarism. What I'm trying to say here is that systemic rape culture isn't even taken seriously in college campuses but they will absolutely attack plagiarism despite rape being WAY worse. Sorry if I did not clarify it. I would say that cheating is definitely widespread in education because of the grading and is definitely part of the hidden curriculum in capitalist education. There are definitely failsons who got into top-tier schools partially cheating their way there, and there are definitely young kids who went to a HBCU who did everything the honest way and cut fewer corners than their white counterparts, but they end up in jobs that aren't equivalent to their white counterparts. Note that Black kids must play the rules or they'll be threatened with jail edit: and this 'playing by the book' actually segregates them into rigid manual labor, and low-level admin work which is what detention socializes them to do anyways. So even playing by the rules forces them into what dominant culture sees as low-status work. Meanwhile, white kids will end up in so-called innovative skunkworks projects.
As for schools starting later and some kids not showing up later, I was trying to demonstrate time as a social construct which was used as a way to assemble us into working schedules. Even medieval peasants didn't have such rigid schedules, so why can't a socialist society work without such rigid schedules? We don't even know what post-capitalist culture would look like after dismantling the Fordism in our head. You noticed what was wrong in my examples, just imagine the long sessions of what must be done to make socialist education a reality. We aren't even close to a post-school/school abolitionist model of thinking unless we get Fordism out of our heads!
I'm gonna contest your cheating culture. Look I went to high school with some kids who got into THE top tier schools. Cornell, Harvard, Columbia. None of those kids were cutting corners and they werent just white kids. Everyone in the school knew they worked hard, and that they deserved it. In my school, you could cheat on homework, the tests it was impossible outside of one really lazy chemistry teacher. Several people were busted for trying. I'm sure in other schools cheating is widespread but if your teachers give a shit they can squash it easily. The failsons who cheated whenever possible all went to low level state schools because, lo and behold, they sucked at SAT/ACTs. If you were a kid who didn't cheat and got good test scores you could get accepted into a decent school. Its not hard to do well in high school, the only kids who didn't do well were the ones who clearly didn't give a crap about school. Giving a shit and actually spending time on the assignments is all you need do well. Also, I've read about some bad highschools, remember that even the laziest failsons aren't truants. People who don't show up are screwed.
At my college (which wasnt a top tier one), basically the same thing. You could get away with cheating on assignments, and certain electives. But on tests in 2000+ level class? It was impossible. Multiple TAs patrolling the classroom watching students. They timed the tests in a way that you weren't going to get test questions ahead of time from peeps in other sections either. Past tests weren't a help since they were completely redone every semester. In fact teachers would usually give out past tests as practice.
If you really believe that everyone at the top is a fraud that doesn't know anything and that they cheated their way there, I'm here to say that's not true. If you think that, you went to bad schools with teachers who didn't care enough to stop the cheating. The work socialists do would help make it so there fewer bad schools.
Peasants didn't have a rigid schedule cause plants don't and looking at the sun is a shitty way to measure time so they measured time bad. We're industrialized and have been for a while, better just get used to it cause electricity rules
Because time is a social construct that is extremely useful for organizing people. There is absolutely nothing to be gained from making time less strict. Not measuring the hours doesn't make them disappear. Recreating ways of thinking about the day won't actually change the way you live your life.
Just because I imagine it different doesn't mean I can't imagine it. Monks also related to society by being fucking parasites. It's pretty cool making a living praying for the souls of novels so it's okay if they wage war. Those medieval chunks of time also sound a lot like a work schedule but without an accurate means of measuring time.
I don't disagree with you at all on any point but I would say that sort of because of that we don't really need to conciously give a shit about how we measure time because of that. Like it's true but I don't think it matters.
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I don't personally prefer it but get there at 10, otherwise are teachers and students just supposed to wait around and waste an hour of their life every day waiting for people to show up or should lessons just continue and late people can catch up of fall behind? Punctuality under communism is about being considerate.
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so peeps are okay with "abolish the police" implicitly meaning to eradicate violent state enforcement and replace it with an actual system of community protection, but libs can't parse "abolish the schools" implicitly meaning to eradicate state grooming and replace it with community education that actually focuses on educating children?
y'all libs lmao
Schools have been a tool of oppression of ethnic, sexual minorities and neurodivergent people. Another of their purposes is to legitimise keeping the oppressed away from the instruments of power under the guise of meritocracy.
To be honest I don't see much reason for schools to exist after the anarchist revolution. What's the point? If you don't know something just look it up on the internet, lmao.
The lack of imagination on the issue on this site is surprising. What's next? You are going start asking who's going to stop crime if we abolish police?
I mean, people were teaching each other for millions of years before schools were a thing.
This seems like an issue solved by democratic control of production. If the workers at the People's Boeing factory figured that the graduate of the Uncle School of Engineering designed the best plane around, it's probably a good plane.
Also having an degree doesn't stop a person from being a crank. There are a lot of crank engineers and scientists running around.
Assuming we still have a complex society, we'll have a society still in need of engineers and lots of other professions. Without some sort of formalized or semi-formalized structure your way of gaining knowledge or seeking apprenticeship will largely be restricted to your immediate social circle, which might mean keeping certain domains of knowledge closed off to certain social groups. Schools my currently keep the power structures in tact, but getting rid of schools entirely will just replicate the same power structures within a few generations.
Isn't that the basic question of anarchism? If the workers are not bound by formal structure and have no boss that forces them to do their work, what stops the workers from telling some marginalized group to fuck off when those marginalized people need some sort of service?
Some people teach themselves to do things.
EDIT: I taught myself to read the clouds.
Indeed. I like the Cheka, but I won't pretend that they're not cops.
So shouldn't the people that know shit and can teach maybe do so on one place so people don't have to go from house to house learning shit? Centralized education is cool and good.
Wouldn't it be easier to just make schools better than to start from ground level? I'd also argue that for quite a bit anti capitalism will need to be taught, it takes a while to remove the material incentives, especially when the world is ruled by capitalists.
Okay, you're talking full list capitalist and scarcity. That's like Star Trek times. I'm thinking here and now
That would be neat but you can't just flick the "fully automated post scarcity gay communism" switch. There's many many many steps in between
Are we talking about Revolutionary Catalonia here? Just press the microphone button and ask the computer, it'll talk back.
Reading is as obsolete of a skill as clipping flint knifes with a rock.
Sorry you are communicating in an obselete form please use a voice message
Sorry you are communicating in an obselete form
Such is the life under capitalism...
please use a voice message
Isn't the cool new social network, Clubhouse or something, voice only? The future is now, baby!
Voice or video only seems like a really inefficient way to actually do anything. Have you never had to pick out an individual piece of information ever? Would you prefer skimming or skipping back and forth through audio?
Me, personally, I prefer text, but I know a share of people who fave no problems with searching videos and audio. I guess it's something you can get used to. Also current tech is pretty close to basically be able to ctrl-f a video lecture.
I just can't imagine science or engineering getting done in an illiterate world. You'd need to have equations dictated to you repeatedly as you try to figure out a way to proceed.
I can imagine it. Not every field makes heavy use of equations and there are blind people who use screen readers and are very competent software engineers.
Either way those are specialized skills. Theoretical physicists or whatever can learn reading and writing if they want to.
I dunno. I don't see anything wrong with people not being forced to learn to read to participate in the society. We already have the technology.
I dunno. Providing everyone with at least access to a place where they can use the computer to google shit, don't seem like too high of a mark to clear.
How true is the part of some students needing structure? There's been a lot of success with homeschooling and unschooling and all that jazz.
I have significant ADHD that effects all parts of my life. Despite my love of learning without the structure of a school I would never have been able to study philosophy or history to the extent that I did. Additionally creating social connections and communities is essential for all humans, but especially people of developing ages. Having a place where kids and young adults can go and spend time with peers, pursue hobbies/extra curriculars, do some physical activity, and engage in learning they are invested in is essential to a functioning society and a healthy childhood. Just because school is shit now doesn't mean that we can't make it better.
Think of it less as a prussian model of indoctrination and more of a community center for kids that helps with their growth and to engage with society in a way that is satisfying for them.
Huh. I thought a person with ADHD would benefit from having a personal tutor that helps them learn at the pace they are most comfortable with, instead of rigid classes, but then again, I don't know shit about ADHD.
I can't really argue against youth community centers where kids can hang out and maybe learn something from someone, but that might be to school what community self-defence is to cops.
I would definitely benefit from having a personal tutor lmao, the only info I learn in school with ADHD is how to pass tests/the next homework assignment. With the way classes are paced and graded I don't have time to care about the content, just how to pass that content from one end of my brain to the other efficiently. If I happen to learn stuff along the way, cool. Mostly it just gets stored in temporary info for the test and thrown the fuck away right after.
I do my best learning over the internet/in books at my own pace, when I feel calm enough to actually parse the information rather than use it as a survival tool.
You mean like it's cumbersome compared to teaching an entire class the whole day instead? Why is that?
Personal tutors are great but honestly the only times that I ever studied in college were in study groups. Tutors are great for mastering more specific skills but I think that the classroom environment and collaborative learning that is possible there can be beneficial when it comes to forming relationships, teaching kids to work together and cooperate to solve problems, ect. Additionally slightly higher student to teacher ratios allows teachers to be more knowledgable about specific subjects which has all kinds of benefits. One of them is that when teachers actually know things about history they are less likely to just regurgitate the propaganda they are encouraged to teach. A huge amount of the propaganda that gets taught throughout all education is because it's hard to get changes to curriculums approved, and because teachers are overworked as it is, so as much as teachers might want to be teaching more up to date or more interdisciplinary history, they are just too overworked to make huge changes to their lesson plans.
Probably every teacher in my high school was a huge lib but because they got to have complete freedom to design their own lesson plans I learned about most American atrocities, both foreign policy wise and domestically, tulsa, rodney king, ect, and a lot of other things most high schoolers weren't taught. One of the reasons that I radicalized so quickly after bernie lost was because my lib teachers had accidentally given me a decent education. They all provided lib justifications for the events but even so it made it easier to connect the dots after the 2016 primaries. If singular teachers were expected to give most of the education to a single student then these sorts of higher level things wouldn't have been taught to me.
I think that we both agree that personalized learning and student self determination are incredibly important, at all ages and levels, not just college, but to me a brick and mortar school will always be an irreplaceable, essential, part of childhood.
I should note though that I went to a small private high school with low homework and tiny teacher:student ratios. Going from a public middle school that I did horribly in to there gave me a pretty unique look at just how much better, more freeing, and more stimulating school can be. I got huge freedom in terms of what i wrote papers on and everything. In English I gave a presentation on how the popularity of LOTR in a post WWII world reflects such a different social climate than the popularity of GOT in a post 9/11 world. I compared Petr Baelish to Gandalf, and Aragorn to Ned Stark among other things. And that is so fucking cool for a high school paper. We were always encouraged to make everything that we did something individual and expressive.
It is important to note that I am somewhat academically talented, I had an easier time with most things than almost all of my peers in high school and college. It's why I was diagnosed with ADHD later in life than most. There is a huge difference in experience between, for lack of a better term, low and high IQ ADHD. So a pretty high percentage of other ADHD people that you meet will probably be much more willing to burn it all down than I am. Because many people with ADHD literally have never had a positive experience with learning in any kind of structured environment. Although if I stayed in the public school system I might not have "blossomed" much at all. I was a shit student in middle school.
tldr: Yeah this is the education equivalent of abolish the police. I just think that we need to replace it with something at least reminiscent of our current system. And even if ADHD kids don't need it, kids with more severe disabilities certainly will.
Maybe this is a way the students who prefer structure in education can be provided said structure without need for a school.
I bet all of those can be learned without formal school structure. People have learned all sorts of professions by themselves for ages and it's could be easier than ever with modern technology.
You know what data says. Most people with higher education say they would rather not go to a university if they decided they wanted to learn something else.
I look forward to your society of self taught engineers and their collapsing buildings. What's wrong with the formal structure?
I say much about other fields but many of the best software engineers are self-taught.
The problem with formal structure is power hierarchies, something you'd want to avoid when possible.
Either way abolishing school and abolishing universities are different questions. Schools are much more oppressive, but arguably someone needs to look for the kids when parents are at work and a child unlikely to be able to teach themselves counting as opposed to an adult who can learn any academic discipline by themselves with access to internet.
We have to be very careful not to get so online that we lose touch with what ordinary people will laugh off as ridiculous.
Eh. Talking about police abolition would make you a laughing stock to ordinary people a year ago before BLM brought the concept to media's attention...
It would have. That doesn't mean that policy wasn't a good idea, but it does mean at least one of the following:
- We needed to educate people more so that they see the issue the way we do.
- We needed to find a better way of communicating about the issue.
- We needed to prioritize something else until we made progress on (1) or (2).
It's not enough to be right -- we have to get tens of millions of people on board if we want to accomplish anything. That requires listening to feedback (even when it's "you can't possibly be serious") and adjusting our approach accordingly.
