>“It’s sad, but the good news is there's a simple intervention — don't give report cards on Friday.” Yeah that avoids the one instance of child abuse but that's not the big picture here. How is it that there are that many people that struggle to cope that this is common enough to show up in this research. I feel for both the parents and the children here. If something like grades are causing the parents to lash out a…
> If something like grades are causing the parents to lash out at the kids it's a sign that the parents are struggling to cope. I think that's starting from a mistaken premise. Why expect parents to cope? Parenting takes an amount of empathy and patience and care that many people simply do not have and will not have. In pre-modern society the nuclear family made sense, but at what point do we say, being someone's bio…
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In the first of several radical claims that he makes in this section Socrates declares that females will be reared and trained alongside males, receiving the same education and taking on the same political roles. Though he acknowledges that in many respects men and women have different natures, he believes that in the relevant respect—the division among appetitive, spirited, and rational people—women fall along the same natural lines as men. Some are naturally appetitive, some naturally spirited, and some naturally rational. The ideal city will treat and make use of them as such.
Socrates then discusses the requirement that all spouses and children be held in common. For guardians, sexual intercourse will only take place during certain fixed times of year, designated as festivals. Males and females will be made husband and wife at these festivals for roughly the duration of sexual intercourse. The pairings will be determined by lot. Some of these people, those who are most admirable and thus whom we most wish to reproduce, might have up to four or five spouses in a single one of these festivals. All the children produced by these mating festivals will be taken from their parents and reared together, so that no one knows which children descend from which adults. At no other time in the year is sex permitted. If guardians have sex at an undesignated time and a child results, the understanding is that this child must be killed.
To avoid rampant unintentional incest, guardians must consider every child born between seven and ten months after their copulation as their own. These children, in turn, must consider that same group of adults as their parents, and each other as brothers and sisters. Sexual relations between these groups is forbidden.
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