Lost

[matrixmann]

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.

Comments

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

It feels to young people, adults have to be into hip hop music and popular culture for them to feel comfortable with them.

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?

[matrixmann]

If a teacher behaves like his students, actually I find it hard learning anything during his classes then. Because he skirmishes too much with the students.
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.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

I agree, but it gets to be really complicated and your and my preference for teacher and student interaction would be called very conservative here and maybe in Europe too. There is this thing called Common Core which is the new educational plan here though it is becoming discredited. It is something that is done in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden- I think.

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.

[matrixmann]

Group work projects... There you picked out a pest. I always fucking hated it. Hm, if you talk about some newer guideline, maybe that's the reason why it got more and more with such projects...
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.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

Even if there wasn't common core though, the way schools keep order and discipline now is through rewarding students with trinkets and points and snacks and things. So, schools try to be "hip" and relate to students as much as possible. Some high schools I go to play hip hop music over the loud speakers as the teenagers walk from one class to another.

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.

[matrixmann]

You know what this rather sounds to me? Schools have given up disciplining the kids which shall be the future of their countries.
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.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

There's some of that and the teenagers do seem to turn out missing grit and determination and give up easily and do heroin. On the ground at the school though, i can see why it is done this way. It would be much worse if all the schools and teachers were just angry at the students for not doing their work and flunked nearly all of them.

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.

[matrixmann]

I can only continue saying what's on my mind and spread some knowledge too (the little that I know).
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.