321–330 of 440 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not all ideologies that constrain free markets are socialist. Georgism even has libertarian variants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism I should also note that zoning laws and other regulations make the real world into a fixed pie game. And those are often completely apolitical, their only ideology being NIMBY.
Zoning laws, rent control, etc., are not a product of free markets.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article is exactly about teaching children to blindly accept hierarchy. The teachers tell them what they can play with and when, how they can play together, and why. Why should the children accept the student-teacher hierarchy? Are they old enough to question it? I suspect you have more in common with the teachers politically than you and I have in common. Perhaps you think it's good for the students to be politi…
> Conversely, I would not share my politics with children, even abstractly. Except, everything is politics . Even basic empathy is now (unfortunately) a prominent political issue.
What _you_ consider basic empathy is a political issue.
Which, of course, makes it easy to denounce anyone that disagrees with you as evil without any self-reflection or analysis.
I agree, that's unfortunate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They had a bunch of whole-group conversations about what kinds of social behaviors everyone was observing and how it made different people feel, trying to help all of the kids understand the experience that the other kids had, talking about whether it seemed fair, and trying to decide as a group how best to respond. Is that supposed to be bad? Like... you don’t want kids explicitly thinking and talking about what goe…
> ...and trying to decide as a group how best to respond... > Is that supposed to be bad? Quite possibly. One of the big successes of the law and modern political traditions like liberalism has been demonstrating that the most successful path is when "we" don't respond and provide mechanisms to let individuals sort out their own differences in a 1:1 fashion, personally navigating the power dynamics. Strong group resp…
This is definitely not a big success. What we get from this mentality is billionaires hoarding resources and corporations destabilizing democracies. The law exists to establish rules of conduct for living in a civilized society, not for encouraging individuals to sort out their differences on their own.
> Strong group responses are actually quite destructive and squelch non-conformance. Anyone who might be unusually successful with an unorthodox strategy gets crushed. Ends really badly for minorities too.
Strong group responses can be destructive or constructive. Either one can benefit or harm minorities. Organizing into a group to accomplish a goal does not automatically mean that individualism is cast aside -- many social movements have existed to empower individuals.
> We don't want the teachers taking an extremely successful and tolerant society focused on individual action in context of a group and then inculcating group reactions in context of an individual.
It sounds like in this case study, the society in question was far from extremely successful and tolerant. The whole point of the exercise was to promote social harmony among students.
It appears to me as paywalled/blocked? Has everyone here registered to see the content or is it a temporary block I wonder.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201206142006if_/https://rethin...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you miss this part? > We recognized that children are political beings, actively shaping their social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity — whether we interceded or not. We agreed that we want to take part in shaping the children’s understandings from a perspective of social justice. I'm sure that the children of the Nintendo generation frequently discussed the power dynamic of King Koop…
I say, let the kids learnt these dynamics naturally without adult suggestions. These political ideas emerge from fundamental ways of social behavior. Let the kids learn these from a bottom up approach rather than a possibly flawed and skewed top down approach.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Seriously, count how many times the article mentions "power", and count how many times it mentions "share". Why? What would that even tell me? Toy-hogging is one of the earliest and simplest examples of a power imbalance a kid will see. Teaching the kids about the power imbalance directly instead of just decreeing "you have to share" is outstanding teaching, and certainly much more effective. These are some lucky 8…
> Teaching the kids about the power imbalance directly instead of just decreeing "you have to share" is outstanding teaching, and certainly much more effective. Uh huh, it sounds like you agree with me now? The article isn't about sharing lego. It's about using lego to teach kids about society, power structures, and capitalism. The article lays the ideology motivation of these teachers bare, it isn't hiding anything.…
I do agree with you, that's what the article is about! I also believe that it's a good thing to teach children about when they're young. Things make a lot more sense when you understand the structures of power that created them. I kinda wish I had figured it out a bit sooner than I did.
They're good lessons to teach kids. Do you disagree with that, or did I just misjudge what you were saying?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someday our current cheap energy will run out, and we'll just have to divide up what we have left. At least, that's what I hear. People have been predicting this for a while, and it hasn't happened yet (at least where I live in the US), but that doesn't mean it won't.
The Earth is just a dot in the sphere around the Sun through which all the Sun's energy passes.