Problem-posing education does not and cannot serve the interests of the oppressor. No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to begin to question: Why?
Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them”; for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated.
Implicit in the banking concept [of education] is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others…In this view, the person is not a conscious being (corpo consciente); he or she is rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty “mind” passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside.
https://envs.ucsc.edu/internships/internship-readings/freire-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed.pdf
I've never heard an argument for anti-natalism that wasn't just an extremist expression of individualism brainrot.
Children are the future. We build socialism now so that they can enjoy communism in their lifetimes.
I would say in the current world not “it’s selfish to have children” but “it’s cruel to your future children to bring them into this world”
Idk if you’ve noticed this but the planet’s on fire and the people capable of fixing that are instead trying their hardest to ensure nothing is ever done about it.
How do we reconcile in the West especially the incredible amount of waste and carbon emissions each person puts out, especially compared with the global south.
I am not trying to debate bro, but having a kid in the imperial core is almost the definition of selfish given that relationship to the degradation of our world where Westerner emits 10x to 30x the carbon and consumes products that lead to global exploitation
I'm not making an argument to sterilize the west or to shame anyone who does have kids, but I think it is an important fact to recon when considering having a child in the west.
of course it's selfish. being alive under capitalism is selfish. it's not a useful moral observation unless you are willing to go ahead and accept the Puritan premise that feeling nice things is bad. The observation that having kids is selfish is going to always lead to reactionary and individualized prescription for inaction unless you can couple it to a feeling that kids are a dialectal synthesis of human being, something that is both the self and greater than the self. me being alive rn creates the same amount of carbon etc. and by that logic, i should kill myself and everyone around me.
It definitely leads to a lot of reactionary emotions if left unchecked and ultimately the root of existentialism as you bring up in the question "why shouldn't I kill myself"
To me I see it as a decision that hasn't already been made (having a kid) vs one that has (already existing as a person), but ultimately if I see carrying capacity and overpopulation arguments as bunk then even Western population growth should be viewed through the same lense. It's a problem created via capitalism that individuals are then punished for or expected to respond to via individual action.
My biggest difficulty is understanding internally where the delineation between the hyperbolic metaphor of driving a big truck vs biking is from an environmental perspective with regards to kids and other ostensibly "bad" for the environment activities
How do we reconcile in the West especially the incredible amount of waste and carbon emissions each person puts out, especially compared with the global south.
By advocating for solutions that the global south adopts out of necessity. Or moving to places where they are mitigated to some degree. Mass transit, drastically reduced disposables, denser living, extended family homes, and localized agriculture all go a long way towards shrinking per-capita waste.
The highlights of Western living are rarely the biggest carbon contributors. Air travel is miserable. Coal power is archaic. Our homes are overflowing with junk mail and funko pops in a way that creates no real satisfaction. Our beaches have become waste dumps. Our forests have been decimated by logging and shriveled up by our irrigation policies.
None of these have anything to do with your personal decision to have kids. Your child will not factor into the volume of carbon we put into the atmosphere, because your child isn't the one setting the policies that favor fossil fuels over renewables or air travel over HSR.
I think it is an important fact to recon when considering having a child in the west.
I think its just another edition of "Individual Solutions for Systemic Problems". No better than a pledge to do more recycling or to swear off eating red meat. This simply doesn't impact industrial forces.
Definitely agree it's an individual solution for a structural problem line if reasoning and something I'm conflicted about when mulling this over. Where I encounter difficulty is the ability to prevent the additional emissions and waste of another human in the West by not having kids rather than individual responsibility items like recycling plastic bottles that are already existing in the world and consumers are supposed to be responsible for that. I guess that same argument can be applied to having kids in so far as individuals are not responsible for the state of the environment today. Certainly something I am still thinking through and not an area where I pass judgement on others who think different
Where I encounter difficulty is the ability to prevent the additional emissions and waste of another human in the West by not having kids rather than individual responsibility items like recycling plastic bottles that are already existing in the world and consumers are supposed to be responsible for that.
Think of it this way. The federal government spends an enormous amount of money propping up failing industries. We've got tons of agricultural subsidy going to (ostensibly) highly profitable businesses that still end up destroying something like 40% of their industrial output. You get back to the old Grapes Of Wrath parable:
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
that puts the lie to the notion of human demand driving industrial productivity and waste.
I guess that same argument can be applied to having kids in so far as individuals are not responsible for the state of the environment today.
We have a systematic problem, one in which people in power have devised a mechanism of control over the body public that relies on artificially inducing rising profits through engineered lower wages and higher prices. The waste we generate as a consequence of this planned economic model is incidental to its number of participants. If the population of the US were to shrink by half tomorrow, the social engineers at the top of the political food chain would scramble to maintain the rate of profit first and foremost. That would still create unsustainable amounts of waste, because waste - in the neoliberal growth model - still remains "free". Arguably more free now that there are fewer people to contest natural resources.
Nothing puts paid to this more than bitcoin and AI schemes in the tech sector. Turning highly efficient and effective calculation engines into ever-escalating busy-boxes that gobble up natural resources at an enormous pace. All to feed the illusion of productivity into the finance sector model and to justify the Big Line Goes Up mythology of American economic growth.
Population size isn't driving consumption of bitcoins. It isn't driving the consumption of air travel. It isn't driving the consumption of waygu beef or skyscrapper steel. This are decisions entirely beyond your control, and your decision to procreate has nothing to do with them.
I understand where you’re coming from. A material analysis of the west in term of immediate environmental impact certainly does suggest that children are a net negative. And if that’s the analysis you’re going with to advocate for an antinatalist life, then you are justified.
I’m sitting in the imperial core right now with a baby in my arms, bottle feedibg and shitposting in my heated home. Why? Because I’m a mediocre parent at best. But I didn’t have children without the knowledge of their impact on the world. Their mere existence will contribute to climate change as mine does. But despite the immensity of climate change and ever other challenge my children will face I chose to being life into this world to experience it in their own way. And hopefully prepare and help them face, surmount, and solve those challenges. And to care on my legacy of shitposting of course.
Don't get me wrong either, I think we need people like you who reject or move forward while still knowing these facts.
A bunch of childless leftists attempting to or helping centrist and right wingers' children learn about leftism won't end well, and while children raised 'red' like Pete and Kamala exist, many more like Christian Parenti do too.
I can also see how having children could push others to the left purely because they now must consider the future of our world but it's a coin flip if they end up as a chud there
Very reasonable. Personally I agree that focusing educating children about leftism will only help so much. I say that as an elementary teacher who tries to incorporate as much transgressive, empathic, and class-conscious content into my pedagogy as possible.
But please reject the notion that a child’s disposition is dictated by chance. I’m my opinion that is a reactionary stance, a deterministic and myopic worldview that dissuades people from caring about the well-being of children. Yes, we are all a culmination of predispositions. Some children will excel in reading or math without any specific intervention. Some will be naturally inclined to charity and other pro-social behaviors. And some will be little shits. But you can’t forget how great of an impact nurture and experience have on people. It is the duty of leftists to cultivate material and social conditions around children such that they will be good people. To me that is worth much more than their weight in carbon.
I'm definitely a nature/nurture combo believer, you can certainly create an environment for someone to become a leftist but ultimately it is up to them to wield what they have learned for the benefit of all. Agreed that we have to create an environment that allows that and without leftist parents then an important area of that environment will be lacking
There's a difference between valuing kids as actual human beings, and wanting to bring more people into this world of suffering.
I personally really have problems with the "world of suffering" argument because my grandparents were born born while China was being invaded by Japan after years of civil war, and my parents were born during the Great Chinese Famine.
They all had or have had more than their fair share of suffering but never once did I hear them regret their lives.
Just another misanthropic reddit edge lord. Don't mind them.
Got a real brain genius over here
"I didn't know lyrics were copyrighted."
I just... What?
I guess that’s something that comes with the severe depression. I already regret my own life half the time and I’ve been relatively privileged. If my life had sucked more for material reasons my parents obviously knew about I’d be pissed at them.
Voluntary extinction is abdicating our responsibility to undo the suffering we brought on this world and the suffering that would likely only get worse if we just all snapped out of existence.
Anti-natalism is reactionary no matter how you try to spin it.
This is a problem we created and a problem we have a responsibility to address no matter how many generations it takes.
We have already set the apocalypse into motion. To bow out now is cowardice.
and the suffering that would likely only get worse if we just all snapped out of existence.
Suffering for who?
All the shit we have dumped into the environment, the shit we would leave behind in the form of decaying factories and mines and oil rigs.
It is our responsibility to do something about that. It is still going to exist. All the forever chemicals. We can't just opt out and walk into oblivion with a clear conscience. That is the coward's way out.
you'd need scifi technomagic to actually clean up all the microplastics and shit. I don't really understand what you expect future people to do that you'd have conscripted into cleaning up a mess made before they were born.
diminishing returns on resources and effort put into environmental cleanup is hardly "positive improvement is impossible".
we can clean up a lot, certainly more than capitalists ever would but
All the shit we have dumped into the environment, the shit we would leave behind in the form of decaying factories and mines and oil rigs.
is a ridiculous proposition even with global communism, and saddling future generations with our problems seems like a shitty thing to do to them.
And if not for children, what is the point of socialism? If we want people to die then what is the point of fighting for a better future?
Being born is a choice that must be made for you. The idea that it's unfair because you didn't consent to it is ridiculous because no one ever concievably can.
Which I guess is why anti-natalists have to rely on twisted calculations to come up with a measurement showing that existence is an objective negative for everyone (or just most people?), which is too broad a claim to even be meaningful. I'd even go further to say it's very reductive of human sentience to be able to qualify all our experience on a spectrum from suffering to pleasure/happiness/whatever, before we start to entertain the idea that we could tally it all up.
But anyway, in short: if you think being born wasn't worth it, I'm afraid you're speaking for yourself. Someone had to make that choice for everyone, and it's too complicated a question to be answered with a universal no.
I have a somewhat tortured relationship with Freire as a teacher.
I think it's important theory, and really helpful for thinking about what education might look like under socialism. However, it's also big in "progressive" education circles (I first encountered it in my Masters program), and they are totally unwilling to grapple with the contradictions of what it means to practice a "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" while teaching under capitalism. Friere was writing about education in a revolutionary context and that's not easily separable from the theory. Very annoying to watch a bunch of libs fail to understand this in real time and be like "Wow, maybe we can have some more student-led discussions!"
That seems like entirely a problem with the reception of the work and not the work itself. Have you tried explaining to these teachers that he very explicitly means something more radical than the practices of some hippy liberal arts college?
Have you ever tried explaining something to a liberal?
But yeah this is not a criticism of the work itself
Have you ever tried explaining something to a liberal?
I have, and I often fail but I still succeed like 20% of the time if they can be moved to take an interest in the subject, and I succeed closer to half the time if I carefully rein in the scope of my claims.
and I succeed closer to half the time if I carefully rein in the scope of my claims
related to this, I feel like hexbear lemmy outreach should focus harder on exposing Adrian Zenz and less on defending China as a whole to people who are not yet open to that.
the last time I tried it I was upvoted in the thread and the person I was talking to seemed to take it to heart
Yeah, you need to have focus, not because the bigger position is unreasonable but because it opens up a thousand different tangents that you will get people going on and the conversation can never productively resolve. Instead, just undermine the more important of those tangents one at a time in a very deliberate way, setting up the scope of your claims so it is very clear what you are saying and not saying and dismissing subjects (for the time being) that exceed that scope. You can transform the way someone views the general subject over time without ever needing to address it because that general subject is an accumulation of the more specific ones.
If antinatalists were sincere you would not be hearing from them owing to their permanent inability to post. Or do anything.
I mean that they coat their mundane hatred of children in philosophical dress-up about how life itself is suffering.
do they? I have never once seen an anti-natalist reference simulation theory
yeah I've never once came accross anyone who believed both things though so I don't think that is part of it
i'm fucking begging you people to understand the difference between never beginning and stopping something that already started.
I’m fucking begging you to understand that random chodes on reddit don’t hate kids out of a deep philosophical commitment
reddit is big enough and old enough to have users with multiple distinct positions and motivations and you shouldn't paint with so broad a brush.
In this case yes, but it can be more widespread.
I would use the analogy of redditors addicted to gore. They’ll write entire essays waxing poetic about how they like to watch gore because it philosophically reminds them of the fragility of the human condition or some other bullshit to cover for the fact that they’re just sad basement dwellers who’ve substituted cartel torture videos for porn.
And with the whole “men’s rights” circlejerk, hatred of children is almost always a proxy for their hatred of the evil seductress women entrapping them with an anchor baby. Just like with their gore addiction, they must pretend that their positions are something deeply philosophical instead of impotent MRA rage.
We can be anti-natalist without being anti-living. We see preventing a birth as something different than
(CW: self harm)
killing someone or oneself. It's like saying pro-choice people should kill themselves because they would have liked to be aborted anyway.
pro choice means pro women having the ability to get abortions it doesn't mean pro abortion in the general case
Lots of anti-natalist men. No small number of them are obsessed with "anchor babies" and getting "trapped" by an SO and other nasty theories about how children are some inherent threat to their entitled existence.
I see far fewer anti-natalist women, by comparison.
I would appreciate if you distinguished between reddit antinatalists and antinatalists writ large
They do not want revolutions or positive change that improves society even somewhat.
Its a selection bias. Folks that were more militant and active got pruned from the system. Big sub mods hate activists. Admins hate activist mods. The end result is a site that's little more than a headline news feed with ForwardsFromGrandma tier comments, because anyone outside of that mold gets censored, kicked, or sitewide banned.
Western adults when I talk about communism: “but humans greedy Stalin giant spoon.”
Western kids when I talk about communism: “sounds cool sign me up.”
Leftists arguing with each other on the internet: “you’re so childish!”
Yeah hating on kids per se is deffo reactionary. Unfortunately capitalism also produces conditions where the raising and education of kids is often extremely tiring, frustrating and unrewarding, and where you do not have the resources to deal with behavioral issues, above all if you are a worker who works with children, such as teachers.
Honestly though having taught mostly working-class kids I was shook when I then taught more bougie kids. There are obviously a bunch of behavioral problems in poorer schools for obvious reasons and I can sympathize as I was once one of those disrespectful working class kids whose environment was definitely not helping my behavior. But the disrespect and poor behavior is more disgusting from the bougie kids honestly. Like I really trip watching bougie kids being clearly shaped into shitty bourgeois people and knowing that it's not their fault but that there's also not much you can do.
you do not have the resources to deal with behavioral issues, above all if you are a worker who works with children, such as teachers.
I know a handful of teachers, and they almost universally acknowledge that the problem with education is the insane bureaucracy. Standardized tests do nothing but ramp up anxiety for everyone involved. Administrators are constantly in CYA mode, as they off-load the actual labor of administration onto the lowest paid workers. VPs just run cover for the admins and exist to gaslight teachers and parents alike. Teachers are horrifically overworked and underpaid. Parents are constantly kept in the dark, except to hear how awful their children are and how every new draconian punishment is a singular remedy to keep their wretched spawn from becoming morality tales for the next line of parents.
The absolute last people at fault for all this shit are the kids. They've been commoditized and they are doing all that they can to struggle against that commoditization.
Like I really trip watching bougie kids being clearly shaped in shitty bourgeois people and knowing that it's not their fault but that there's also not much you can do.
I grew up in a wealthy Houston suburb. Had a science teacher in 6th grade - back in the 90s - who was the gold standard for middle-school educators. He had us doing real chemistry in a lab setting. He kept a menagerie of small animals in the class (mostly lizards and rodents) for us to inspect (and periodically play with). He was generous with extra credit, took deep dives into every subject, and made that class the highlight of my day.
He was also a loosely closeted gay man.
When one of the kids in a class started getting bad grades, he decided the solution was to blackmail the teacher by threatening to claim sexual harassment if his grades didn't improve. The teacher refused, and so the kid's parents filed a complaint. Guy was out of that school before the semester was over.
He got replaced with a woman straight out of college who had no teaching experience and mostly just played old 80s science videos for the class. The exams were a joke and everyone got easy As in a grade where As don't functionally matter. We didn't do anything fun or exciting or learn anything particularly useful in that second semester. Shit sucked.
you hit the nail on the head. the job of a teacher is largely predicated on enforcing the behavioral norms of capitalism. my spouse just wants to teach kids math, not have to cop the ones who's material conditions make sitting in school for 8 hours a day a psychologically intractable reality.
That story is wack af. Real fucking shame that happened. It sucks when you lose a good teacher, especially if they get replaced by one who's not very good. Would be lying tho if I said I hadn't also seen a lot of similar situations.
You're completely correct that the administration is a major, central issue, and for all the reasons you mentioned. This isn't only the case at lower, middle or high school but also at universities obviously, in which the size of the admin has ballooned and yet so has the the administrative work that academics now need to do. And which fucking sucks. This was implicit in my mind when writing but I didn't make that clear by only mentioning resources.
The resources issue is also a matter of the economic situations of the students, the school and the teachers. If the kid is in a broken home where they have a single parent working 4 jobs who can barely make ends meet (like me) and doesn't get to see their kid for much time each day, then this has an impact on the kids behavior, motivation and education, especially when they are, say, an adolescent boy surrounded by other equally angry, alienated, and frustrated adolescent boys struggling with a lot of mental health issues. Given the pressure of on them when their teachers put a lot of homework on them, the household environment they are doing this in matters. Also the resources put into public schools is just not the same, and this has an impact of the quality of the education, the pay, the number you can attract, the size of the classes, and the fact that certain students have been so failed by the system up to that point that it really can be extremely difficult to motivate them. Working class students also don't have access to extra tuition and external guidance in the same way, and if they do it's generally of lower quality.
And I can confirm that as a teacher everyone despises that pile of papers to be graded. So imagine you are in a public school and you have a class of 40 kids and you have to grade their standardized tests, and you may have more than one class you have to do that for regularly. On top you have to prepare classes. All of this is essentially unpaid labor-time.
There's also an issue you have, especially if, like your old chemistry professor, you are LGBT, or if you are a woman, let alone both, where when you're teaching a bunch of young angry adolescent teenagers, you're going to hear a lot of crazy misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic shit. And you are often going to feel extremely uncomfortable when having to deal with a lot of that, and some people are going to feel very unsafe, for obviously justified reasons. This is a thing in both working-class and bougie settings, thought it's expressed in different ways. I manage okay because I'm a more intimidating man and the combination of being disciplinary when necessary and otherwise very friendly and easygoing with the students, as well as trying to make it interesting for them, does somewhat pay off. Being a man also helps because women quickly realize that most teenage boys treat them with little-to-no respect. Heart goes out to my teaching comrades, especially the women and LGBT peeps.
The thing with bougie kids is that you can really see that they are often coming from households that raise them to believe the world belongs to them, that they are literally God's gift to mankind, and that if a teacher just making ends meet calls out some unacceptable shit they do or say, as part of their education, then they must be at fault. And that's not even getting to debates about ensuring that students know about topics that the chuds would rather pretend don't exist or shouldn't be spoken about as if they should.
When I'm Commissar of Education I will personally sign the death-warrant (in minecraft) for every bougie parent who's ever said that teachers should get low pay because they are compensated because they 'love their job' or because their job is easy.
Wish I still taught my section 8 housing students. But I jumped districts and now teach in the burbs. I do not want to spend another second explaining to Tanner’s mom that, no, he cannot just call other students gay because they don’t have Teslas.
Christ alive yh the extension of the entitlement of bougie kids to their parents is actually really the thing that get's to me.
I remember telling one kid who'd just spent the class spouting insane misogynistic shit that it was unacceptable and that i'd be discussing it with his parents, and he told me he didn't care because he was getting picked up by his maid.
It's reactionary in every configuration I've seen.
"They're going to suffer" is supremely individualistic, and by extension blames the oppressed more than the oppressor because the oppressor's children won't be the ones suffering
"Too many people" in the absence of a world order that responds to need is misanthropic Malthusian nonsense. It implies that our elite is somehow innate to humanity, once again blaming the powerless and excusing the people and system responsible for ecological devastation
And "I just don't like them, they're annoying and they don't know anything" is just depressingly small-minded and nihilistic
Kids good.
yeah but when you're sensitive to sound anyway being around (loud) kids can literally be torture. but that's my problem, not the kids
I'm a teacher, though for older (late high school) kids. I don't have any kids of my own, don't plan to, and don't particularly like being around them when I'm not at work. I really enjoy my job, but it is a job. Kids are exhausting, and while I don't hate them, I do find it kind of puzzling why people want to have their own. I also think that it's at least a little morally questionable to bring new people into the world considering what their lives are likely to be like over the next century or so. I'm not really an anti-natalist, but I think I would feel bad about consigning a human being to living through what we have every reason to think is going to be a very rough time, and I don't think that's a reactionary viewpoint. I do think we have a strong responsibility to do the absolute best we can for the kids that are here, and (as I said) I really like my job. I just also like being able to go home in the evening and not keep dealing with kids.
I also think that it's at least a little morally questionable to bring new people into the world considering what their lives are likely to be like over the next century or so. I'm not really an anti-natalist, but I think I would feel bad about consigning a human being to living through what we have every reason to think is going to be a very rough time, and I don't think that's a reactionary viewpoint.
You can decide to not have kids, that's fine. At the point where you decide other people shouldn't have kids for whatever reason is where it gets real iffy real fast.
Yep, agreed. I have lots of friends with kids. It's not for me and I have a hard time getting the appeal, but people do all sorts of things that I don't understand the appeal of. That's fine by me.
At the point where you decide other people shouldn't have kids for whatever reason is where it gets real iffy real fast.
"shouldn't" as in moral prescription or "shouldn't" as in hey we should use the government to enforce this somehow?
i think people shouldn't cheat on their intimate partner(s) but i don't think there's any way for a state to enforce that without increasing harm.
Not reactionary. Maybe a little utilitarian. But like the good kind of utilitarianism that actually cares about people.
iPad kids are a product of capitalism; ergo we should hate capitalism (shock revelation)
i just have lingering trauma from working at a restaurant
i see that plate of french fries soaked in root beer in my nightmares
edit now that i think of it it was probably the parents not being able to handle them more than it was the kids themselves
Just because I don’t like kids doesn’t mean I won’t support free lunches.
I still find them annoying and want nothing to do with them out of personal preference
Here’s my take. I am a Marxist-Leninist-Comedyist. Kids are funny, therefore kids are essential to the laughter revolution
