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The bus stop turns into the youth club...
First love, first drink, maybe even first time getting physical. And lots of friends.
What has modern society to offer to its youngsters?
Living in sterile, mold-contamined, pimped up flats, celebrating their weekends in used up buildings whose purpose they know at the highest from when they were kids, offered consumer goods which they can never pay, jobs that don't exist and promises that never come into effect. On top, bags of clothes manifactured in the third world which they can cut and rearrange to show how run-down they are, and ugly hair-cuts which make them appear like they have some sort of problems.
Education somewhat is an alien concept, both in the way of knowledge about the world and emotional development.
They get handed a lot of toys and tools to get paid the time their parents haven't spend with them, but can't make up for the deep nothing they perceive.
Sold out worlds, they long for destruction, for the destination that remains for when there's no task for you or your body is plagued by diseases. Diseases the parents thought about in their selfishness "they will be able to get along with that". And they keep wondering why these kids in their selfishness for exstasy beget another aimless generation of kids accidently...
On the other hand, education in the form of learning in excess for those who can pay for it. Planning of futures until the age of 40, orchestrated and without a doubt that anything can come in between this. No guess of what poverty means, what deprivations means, not even that it exists at all or what life-threatening circumstances could be. A bubble which nothing goes wrong within.
In the end, the planning also reveals its shallowness: Getting education, getting jobs, founding families, reproduce, buying houses, buying cars - running around and following the established role model, without a thought for a deeper meaning, just as trying to get drunk and loitering around in derelict houses and on the streets. It's about running away and clouding your mind.
The middle class youngsters ignore in their planning, that their kids are going to have to fight even harder for getting jobs as there is limitation in this, so it is also done in a manner of feeding your ego, numbing your mind to prevent to understand something.
Whereas the kids which grow up in poverty rather get their kids unvoluntarily and suddenly start to get those dreams of a idyllic world that isn't reachable for them. If they do not turn out in the end to abandon them, to show them the true face of what their existence already is: Superfluous.
First love, first drink, maybe even first time getting physical. And lots of friends.
What has modern society to offer to its youngsters?
Living in sterile, mold-contamined, pimped up flats, celebrating their weekends in used up buildings whose purpose they know at the highest from when they were kids, offered consumer goods which they can never pay, jobs that don't exist and promises that never come into effect. On top, bags of clothes manifactured in the third world which they can cut and rearrange to show how run-down they are, and ugly hair-cuts which make them appear like they have some sort of problems.
Education somewhat is an alien concept, both in the way of knowledge about the world and emotional development.
They get handed a lot of toys and tools to get paid the time their parents haven't spend with them, but can't make up for the deep nothing they perceive.
Sold out worlds, they long for destruction, for the destination that remains for when there's no task for you or your body is plagued by diseases. Diseases the parents thought about in their selfishness "they will be able to get along with that". And they keep wondering why these kids in their selfishness for exstasy beget another aimless generation of kids accidently...
On the other hand, education in the form of learning in excess for those who can pay for it. Planning of futures until the age of 40, orchestrated and without a doubt that anything can come in between this. No guess of what poverty means, what deprivations means, not even that it exists at all or what life-threatening circumstances could be. A bubble which nothing goes wrong within.
In the end, the planning also reveals its shallowness: Getting education, getting jobs, founding families, reproduce, buying houses, buying cars - running around and following the established role model, without a thought for a deeper meaning, just as trying to get drunk and loitering around in derelict houses and on the streets. It's about running away and clouding your mind.
The middle class youngsters ignore in their planning, that their kids are going to have to fight even harder for getting jobs as there is limitation in this, so it is also done in a manner of feeding your ego, numbing your mind to prevent to understand something.
Whereas the kids which grow up in poverty rather get their kids unvoluntarily and suddenly start to get those dreams of a idyllic world that isn't reachable for them. If they do not turn out in the end to abandon them, to show them the true face of what their existence already is: Superfluous.
(no subject)
Date: 17 July 2016 04:54 pm (UTC)Tragedies are about. I'd, personally, like to see opportunity exist in an increased measure of independence from economic background. There are always way, but reaching prison is easier than reaching your dreams, yeah? Perhaps that sounds a little too pessimistic... However, I've honestly found an increased probability in encountering cheer amidst the poorer individuals in my area. There's a shift, living in the struggle where you're deprived of high-standing wealth seems to leave one more openly finding value in the company of other humans... More evenly. Do you ever see any such tendency?
I've been wondering for a while, what spectrum of wealth did you grow up with?
(no subject)
Date: 17 July 2016 05:22 pm (UTC)A lot of people also are plagued by fears of falling the latter a few steps down - this applies to even more people than from the lower classes.
I don't generally talk about really personal stuff. Does have its security reasons.
Maybe I can answer it that way: You may not have an idea about German school system, but, tell you, if you attempt to reach out for Abitur graduation (Abitur can be equalled high school graduation in the US in the niveau,, if not even better, at least you can enroll university and college if you got that graduation), if you're from the lower class, you'll be like a lonely island in the ocean. There aren't many from the lower class which try for it.
You'll be surrounded by kids of the local bourgeoisie.
(no subject)
Date: 21 July 2016 12:47 pm (UTC)I'm sorry things are this way.
I think you have told me too much, saying it is for "security reasons". Now my mind is tumbling around all sorts of imaginings. I promise: I will try to contain myself! You may always 'slap me on the wrist' if I ask what I shouldn't have.
Thank you for an interpretation that teaches me. I've seen/read this as a problem often, in other circumstances, the pattern may be seen as identical under certain forms of scrutiny.
Humans keep segregating themselves, and it keeps making problems. Do you think there is a way for both this 'segregation' and a sense of 'equality' to coexist?
(no subject)
Date: 21 July 2016 06:59 pm (UTC)I don't have much to do with the East-West-past thing over here, but I get that from hearing peoples's stories and from doing quick history researches on things that I don't know anything about.
The East was less poor than West Germany and the rest of the Western international companions always make the people believe.
You remember that one entry about me saying "if you do a revolution, just keep in mind: all you know right now is over and done then. you lose your comfortable live, your toys, your wares - anything that comes from the big capitalistic West. Be prepared for deprivation if you really wanna do this."?
That's exactly what they had to face. A currency which is internationally accepted only under its real value, artificially set on a low value, banks which don't want to give them credits (because a certain elite doesn't want such a project to survive), wares you have to produce yourself of you got none (no such endless importing from abroad for penny prices), wars starting in the countries you want to make trade partnerships with and then the overall political agitation against you and the advertising to lure your skilled worker people away out of your territory.
The current order of the West only can exist because it exploits other countries and people, pays them under their value, brings the governments into power which they want to have sitting there, because they print their own money if they are in a crisis, and because the banks still loan billions to them even though rationally one must already think "you can't give them any more money, they never gonna pay it off - this even ruins your bank because of uncovered loans".
Take some of these away or even all, the (former: industrialized) West is just also a poor place to live in and only compares to the third world.
The school thing
Date: 21 July 2016 07:22 pm (UTC)Well, the local bourgeoisie sends its kids to the school with the highest graduation achievable because they want to keep a certain status in society. Also, often enough, to find somebody who takes over their business once they grow old.
They do this - I don't know, if you can say "less caring about whether their child is able to make that" or "just to make sure their kid receives the best possibilities in life", which a graduation defintely is which enables you to study at university.
Maybe you know it somewhere from practice, people which only have a secondary school leaving certificate themselves sending their kids to the same school with the same educational qualification because they think "this has been enough for me to get along in life, so it will be enough for you too". Even though the kid could do better than this. Or it would be better for it to start there because who knows what happens? Maybe he even makes it to graduation and more doors stand open to it in life.
On another hand, and this is something I can understand, if you try for Abitur, financial costs that come with that are sure higher than only 10-classes-school. That's because of school trips that take longer than a day. A trip to Weimar, London or whatever - people which are not that rich need to save for this. Actually, otherwise it maybe would be their own family vacation.
You need to know if you want to put yourself in such situations or not. If you got 2 kids that try for that graduation, you gonna experience that twice.
Maybe a lot of people also fear this strongly and that for they don't let their kids go to school where they try for Abitur.
10-classes-school - if the kid even makes it to the 10th, these days they got that school form pretty much worked down by putting it together with those from the 9-classes-school; often enough you only have one class in the 10th school year - only sees you until you turn 16 or 17 (if you make it without ever needing to repeat a year). With under 18, it's a lot more harder with travelling abroad as you legally cannot fully make all decisions by yourself. So - none of that taking place.
On another hand I also must say: Education is a matter of the federal states. Each one can design it that way that it wants. You have like 16 (little or more ) different school education systems.
In some federal states it may be more possible because more poor people generally live there, in others it may be even more like "only snobs and rich kids have Abitur graduation".
This also surely comes into play.
(no subject)
Date: 17 July 2016 05:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 17 July 2016 06:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 17 July 2016 07:49 pm (UTC)You should read the series of five books by Karl Ove Knaussguard too- the My Struggle series. It seems to relate to what you and I do: kind of left wing frustrated working class male stuff. It is like a current movement, maybe it isn't a movement but I don't know what to call it- zeitgeist?- of being sick of globalization and the way multi culturalism currently works but now wanting to go to being conservative like old white people.
(no subject)
Date: 17 July 2016 09:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 17 July 2016 07:51 pm (UTC)Also, I was going to say that reading a lot seems to allow someone's writing to grow.
(no subject)
Date: 17 July 2016 09:42 pm (UTC)For some kinds of content, it's also the best way of remaining respectful towards the certain topic. Say, e. g., a story can depicture brutality just to make the reader wanna puke and be appalled about something, but an opinion of a narrator in between can turn something directly into political propaganda. With some topics, this is just beyond respect, it's downright ugly and disgusting. (Two examples I think I got it expressed in an okay manner: http://matrixmann.livejournal.com/105475.html, http://matrixmann.livejournal.com/120003.html)
(no subject)
Date: 17 July 2016 06:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 17 July 2016 06:37 pm (UTC)Hm, I don't know if I want to imagine, but sometimes it would tickle me to get to know which kind of category they put me in today... (It would tickle me because most of all times they surely would be wrong.)
(no subject)
Date: 17 July 2016 06:18 pm (UTC)Maybe a big part of this though is that I've met and seen A LOT! of teachers that act like they are into hip hop and popular culture in order to relate better to their students and maybe they are into hip hop and pop culture a bit or a lot because of their students.
You don't have to be very passionate to appear or actually be into hip hop or popular culture. They are very shallow things to begin with.
It makes me think though that say in the 1950s, 1970s, or even the 1990s, a young person in school might feel that their teachers and professors were into things that were more mature and deeper than the shallow things that kids are into. But, nowadays teachers try to act like they are into the same things that teenagers are into, so why would a teenager feel like they should ever be more mature?
(no subject)
Date: 17 July 2016 06:42 pm (UTC)Nothing against if you find a teacher who's already that old that he can say about my musical preferences "hey, fuck, didn't heard that stuff for 20 years!", that's just a stone in the wall, if otherwise he shows signs of a typical adult, distance towards his students and a greater personal difference to them.
But teachers which you can hardly distinguish from their students in attitude, that's horrible, you hardly learn anything from them. They're more the type of people which you wanna go binge in a tavern with.
(no subject)
Date: 18 July 2016 04:36 am (UTC)The idea is that students are now supposed to interact with each other about what they have learned. They are supposed to be ab;e to learn things more if they talk about them and write about them.
Also, teenage students like listening to each other more than adults. So, administrators and teachers try to encourage students, through rewards and such, to talk with each other as part of class time.
It is preferable now for a teacher to have students do group projects where they work with each other too.
Because of all this, teachers now are supposed to relate and be able to talk to students more which requires, or seems to require, liking many, or some, of the same things they do. So, teachers use examples of movie stars, pop culture things, bad movies, athletes, hip hop music, etc to relate to the teenagers.
(no subject)
Date: 18 July 2016 06:59 am (UTC)Saying, today I can see I'm pretty autonomous with learning things. There are some things where this doesn't work, which you need to be told through a human - like languages -, but on the whole, skills I acquired during the last couple of years, it got stuck the best way if I went reading, maybe even watched a video tutorial where you needed to visually see what you're doing.
Reading and mimicry, that you may call it like.
(no subject)
Date: 18 July 2016 04:43 am (UTC)It can seem ridiculous, but if I was suddenly in charge of a high school of 3000 teenagers from low income areas, it is what i'd do too because it works. If you do the old school way and just warn, threaten, and punish students, they'd set fires and attack you and each other. In the past, teens at wealthy schools would behave because their parents would kill them if they didn't and teens at poor schools would just go to jail if they were awful.
I do think now that teens in wealthier neighborhoods still behave well in school because their parents would kill them, but in poor neighborhoods what I was writing about above happens. It is weird and like a propaganda community. Like I said though, it mostly works.
The best ones though use the rewards, but also have stern punishments at the same time like Saturday schools and a classroom full of like the 30 or so students that don't follow rules at all. In that classroom, there are like four adults and everything is watched very carefully.
Also, there are a series of different schools where teenagers that get kicked out go to.
(no subject)
Date: 18 July 2016 07:24 am (UTC)It really sounds like giving up.
Rewarding them and making things easier in the exams for them - that's a thing that I know -, adapting to them, it sounds like nothing more than "okay, we give up getting them to do anything because they fucking bomb and destroy us for attempting that".
And giving up means there actually are tensions in society with these kids, but society itself and all other entities which could help it don't do anything. And that's also due to having given up, there's no public funding for it.
I get upon this idea because I heard it a few times during a while how kids got pulled back onto the high road in the GDR if they really strayed from it. It has to do with something that is called "Jugendwerkhof" or so, but I really don't know what this term exactly means in practice.
But the general idea behind it I recognize from what is told about it: If kids go haywire, brawl, binge-drink, take harder drugs, steal, turn into thugs, destroy things, terrorize their surroundings - you need a conecept how to get these kids back onto that path which you want as a society. If you haven't, and if you don't make your attempts that they can't avoid to deal with, then they won't be any better as adults. You won't ever get to get it out of them again.
And this is just not based upon adapting to their desires, but to put them in an environment with solid and consequent rules, where they get a solid feeling about what they can do and what not, and as long as they play by these rules they can acquire their pound of flesh.
This would need to be done these days too, but public households are broke everywhere and private investors would only turn this into a profit business and not into a moral business.
The schools can't fix this behavior either because first they're dependent on public funding too, and second, it's a task in that way which they can't perform. It's too much for their spectrum of competences. The only kind of schools which maybe could do this are boarding schools as the students live there too and it's their daily surroundings.
(no subject)
Date: 19 July 2016 01:13 am (UTC)Maybe it is mostly just where I am, in Southern California. At the schools I'm talking about, the students really do need to be encouraged to try to do well in school at all. A lot of the students, from low income and minority homes, would just quit and stop coming.
Here there are junior colleges too. In Southern California there are like fifty or more of them! It is like junior colleges have become an extra two years of high school and high schools, which is where teenagers go, is now like preparation for junior college which is now like trade school. In the high schools now, teachers are trying to get students to learn to come to class, take tests, get assignments in on time, get along with others in classes, etc...
It is sad that it used to be much better than this and people should try to make it better. I think though that since the 1960s and 1970s or something the school system is suddenly responsible for all girls, all African Americans, all illegal immigrants from Mexico, all native born Mexican kids, etc... So, the schools are responsible for having all these people come to school, even homeless children- I think in the United States there are like a million homeless children, so it is something to just get almost all of them to understand what school is and how it works by the time high school ends.
There's a weeding out process too where maybe the worst two percent or something end up jail or keep getting separated from the regular student population by being expelled and going to worse and worse schools.
It is like when someone is 20 years old now, it is like they are what someone was like when they were 16 before. So, high school is like extended grammar school and junior college is like what high school used to be.
This all sucks for the top 10% of high schools like this though. I can see where they'd feel like it was mostly dumbed down, but actually surprisingly it seems like kids in like calculus and physics classes seem to like the new way these schools work. They love all the rewards and stuff.
I'm sure schools were much better in previous generations, but what are you going to do?
I will say the good side of the whole thing though is that I bet in previous generations there were a lot of teachers that were unscrutinized and were not really doing much and there is so much scrutiny now that this doesn't happen nearly as much anymore. Like, you can see all the young teachers getting arrested for sex with students. That is something good coming from the way it is now. It is really heavily analyzed and scrutinized and shit like that is caught almost right away.
(no subject)
Date: 19 July 2016 06:20 am (UTC)People must get sick of their money being carried out of their state and their communities by themselves that offers their children such bad public education. I can't do that for them.
(no subject)
Date: 17 July 2016 06:22 pm (UTC)On one level, it might be ok if they were into hip hop, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, and I think in the past a lot of professors hoped that this is how it would work out, but in practice what happens is the professors are condoning and approving of hip hop and popular culture and college students never think of moving beyond it into something more substantial. In a way, hip hop can be confused with being substantial and deep because it is related to race relations, but it is also extremely shallow.
(no subject)
Date: 17 July 2016 06:54 pm (UTC)On one hand, it should be so that references to popular culture should be allowed, not only because it's what most people know first, but also because even popular culture can have its moments of philosophical and psychical depth. This is not strictly limited to books written by intellectuals.
There only should be any kind of modern pop culture be allowed - let's say, not only hip hop or current pop culture, it should also accept niché culture like from the goths, from books or movies done 30 years ago, or even that kind of culture that I know (I think that's a big contrast, judging by my musical preferations).
But, on the other hand, it should not only be run by that because then you make college an experience as if you'd hang around with friends in your age and you'd write each other fantasy diplomas that have no professional validity.
E. g. you can't talk about the surveillance state only from the point of some recently released computer games, you better take Orwell's famous novel to get it onto a deep niveau that is more like reality and not like something that somebody regards as entertainment.