ArtemisWe need to encourage curiosity in children more.
Incurious people are killing the world.
The first thing people want to teach kids is how to "obey", how to walk in lockstep, but that's not the kind of human we should be trying to grow.
It's tough because there's a certain amount of control you *have* to have over kids you're responsible for. You have to keep them safe, and feed them, and maintain your own sanity.
But still...
Training people from infancy to submit without question to "authority" is a wild choice.
Almost every human starts out incredibly curious. As soon as kids learn language, they start asking question after question after question. It's so constant it's exhausting. That makes me think that incuriosity is learned.
One of the constant hallmarks of the people driving the global rise of fascism is a total lack of curiosity. They have no desire to understand the world or other creatures better. They don't want to learn anything they don't already "know". They don't want to correct or refine their beliefs. They simply don't care about anything that happens that doesn't concern them.
But when you remember that people can and do literally beat the curiosity out of their children...no wonder we have so many small-minded adults.
If we ever want anything better for humanity, we are going to have to do better for kids, specifically.
Riley S. Faelan@artemis It's not necessarily true that this is the common source of protofascists. Scientists have looked into it, and while authoritarian upbringing correlates weakly with authoritarian personality in children, there's a hairy confounding factor: it correlates very strongly with authoritarian personality in parents. Which brings in a whole forest of confounders yet to be successfully analysed and interpreted.
OTOH, curious children can apparently be taught to mask their curiosity by way of violence and other child abuse.
Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary@riley @artemis
One thing I think gets too little credit in the way children grow up is how their teachers act and what their school environment is like. School tends to be treated culturally like its influence isn't as important as parents', even though most parents' only means of choosing schools is to move (and good luck with that nowadays) and children frankly tend to be stuck at school for longer spans of the day than they spend with their inevitably-working parents.
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@riley @artemis
In the US, schools tend to be *very* controlling, *especially* as both school shootings and desperation not to lose funding because of bad standardized test scores became overwhelming factors. Authoritarian elements were bad enough when I was in school that I wound up dropping out because of them; they're clearly far worse now.
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@riley @artemis
For my own part, I was in a widely-acclaimed public school system in a rich, right-leaning suburb. It had a private school too, but both the public and private schools were seen as high-quality and valid choices there, with no stigma either way, just lacrosse rivalry.
The public school in Yuppieville was decent enough at the actual *school* part, sure, but it was still intolerably controlling and clearly thought something was wrong with *me* in particular.
@riley @artemis
(Aside: it used to be a pretty Republican town back in the day, including being anti-LGBTQ+. I looked up my old house on Google Maps a few months back and a Pride flag was waving in front of it. Makes me wonder if the Republican pivot to being against schooling rubbed these particular rich suburbanites who were very proud of their schools the wrong way and they're now corpo Dems...)
(Aside: it used to be a pretty Republican town back in the day, including being anti-LGBTQ+. I looked up my old house on Google Maps a few months back and a Pride flag was waving in front of it. Makes me wonder if the Republican pivot to being against schooling rubbed these particular rich suburbanites who were very proud of their schools the wrong way and they're now corpo Dems...)
@pteryx There's different views on what a "good school" is supposed to do, and they tend to translate into personality bias in the selection of teachers. (But it's also a curious tidbit that right-wingers tend to be more aggressively seeking out teaching positions, so non-selective systems of teacher recruitment tend to gather a lot of right-wing teachers.)
On one side, there's the idea that a high-quality school is one attended by children of aristocrats, so its desirable education outcomes are making children familiar with future noblemen and learning the sort of behavioural patterns that will allow them to work for life in a well-paying royal court. In European discusions, this is typically associated with the English "public school" system (which, as you probably already know, corresponds to "private schools" in many other structures, including USA). Eton is this sort of school.
On the other side, there's the idea that a high-quality school is one where skills needed to build and maintain the next generation society's common infrastructure are tught well. Typically, schools focused around this sort of thing are imagined as technical, because technical infrastructure is kind of more tangible, but in systems like that, future lawyers are taught largely in the same way. In European discussions, this is typically associated with the German "Abitur" track (or for pre-WWII history fans, the "Gymnasium" network).
Both are far more common than just a few stereotypical countries, though, and, especially where school systems are not homogeneous, most countries have significant numbers of schools of both kinds, as well as many that just aim to get by and don't particularly care about being good schools.
@pteryx Stereotypes notwithstanding, I'd particularly recommend looking at Finnish schools for techniques of curiosity-encouraging education. Have I already hyped the tutkimustehtäviä ? (Some authors prefer the term tutkimusongelma; the basic idea is the same; the slight difference is in the focus.)