An Educational Miss

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If kids can vote at 18 and everyone thinks they should vote then why is there essentially no formal education related to political philosophy? They should also be practiced in evaluating candidates and understanding the process and its consequences.

There seems to be a gap between whose role it is to teach life skills and job skills. Formal education was originally a supplemental experience that would prepare one with a means to know how to do something valuable. Something that would ensure they get a skill-based job. I'm sure that it all originated with apprenticeships and other on the job training and then, in time, turned into more and more of an institutionally based endeavor. Education, it seems, has become bastardized by laziness, bureaucracy,  and politics. (Yet another example of how the government corrupts a good idea.)

More and more people started sending their children to school. This allowed them to get a head start on reading, writing, and math, which was becoming more and more of a necessity in industrialized nations. As occupations went away from farming, parents spent less and less time at home and needed somewhere for their children to be during the day. Soon, and with the help of the efficiency born of the factory, schools started taking up more and more of the role that parents once held.

Life skills were traditionally taught by parents by both modeling and direct teaching. Parents would teach their children about household duties, sex, religion, politics, and all the things that are involved in navigating once's culture. It was the role of the parent to truly prepare their children for the outside world and it was the role of the school to prepare their mind for fundamental cognitive abilities that would become financially viable.

Throughout much of American history, mothers stayed home and took care of household maintenance and fathers went off to work somewhere for most of the day. As women started joining the workforce and the government decreased the value of money through inflation in an effort to increase tax revenue children became more and more neglected. Now we have a situation where the vast majority of citizens live in the working class, which means that they typically need a two household income in order to pay bills. This means that there is less time to teach their children life skills and with schools teaching nearly everything under the sun, parents don't know what their children are missing. Also, because they were never formally taught modern life skills they assume that their children will learn as they did, just by doing it.

I think that we would all be better off defining the roles of both parents and educational systems. I think that the government's "free" schools should either provide life skills or not. If they are going to take on the role of educating the youth to create effective, successful and productive adults then they should teach the things necessary to accomplish this. This includes teaching skills such as sex education, finances, political philosophy, cooking, health, computers, typing, etc. If this was the case then this would be on the top of the goals list of teaching children job skills as well, such as math, science, geography, English and the like. This is a lot of work for the government and it seems that they are already in charge of much of this and yet don't seem to have a clear goal in mind. If you are going to take on the task of educating the future entirely then you should do it well.

If the government is not the right choice for the job of educating children in life skills then it would fall to either the parents or a private agency such as a private school. The nuclear family seems to be falling apart and one thing that is helpful about the nuclear family is it relieves the parents of some of the burden and allows for a more stable, nurturing and ultimately healthy environment for the development of a child's capacities. As single-parent households rise parents are more stressed, less attentive and more absent in their children's lives, leaving less room to teach life skills. Also, because the parent is struggling it does not provide a hopeful example for the child either. Why would a child listen to the advice of someone who is barely making it? They won't. They will go somewhere else.

Where do children go to learn life skills? Now, it's the internet. If they want to learn about sex they look it up online. Not just porn but articles about how to be in relationships. Or they just watch porn. Only the more intelligent look deeply into their own potential and seek out experts. Many just do as others do and will end up just like their parents even though they despise them. They look to celebrities and emulate their personalities in a naive attempt to become someone important instead of becoming themselves.

The world is becoming more and more complicated and young people have more possibilities ahead of them than ever. Even if parents take the time to teach their children they are most likely unaware of the current considerations that young people should be made aware of. Every year there are new technologies, industries, laws, and cultural mores that parents can't keep up with and therefore cannot educate their children in a way that will be relevant for them in the future. The government takes so long to update their curriculum and continually changes their standards that they cannot educate the youth in a way that prepares them for our complex and rapidly changing world. It makes sense that so many young adults (and many not so young adults) find themselves scrambling to understand the world that they are thrust into when they turn 18.

Waiting for people to "figure it out" on their own is terribly inefficient and wastes so much potential. Well before someone graduates, they should be immersed in the real economic world. Diverse and extensive job experiences before the age of 18 would help transition the young into the world that they are already a part of but are separated from partly out of necessity and partly out of fear. People learn from doing and so if you want people to understand the world they must experience it. For children, this is facilitated by adults and for teens, mentors can help transition them into the world. If parents don't take the time to mentor and educate their children then there will exist a gap between the real world and the insulated world of children. On the other hand, some children are thrust into the real world too early and are forced to engage in adult activities before they understand them.

Maybe companies like Youtube, Kahn Academy, Udemy and others will bridge the gap that exists but children don't know what they don't know and if they don't actively engage in educating themselves then they will go through the growing pains that most of us deal with when we have to fend for ourselves. While people make due and some will be very successful and some will fail miserably with the majority somewhere in between the world could be improved by taking education more seriously, not for the sake of the state but for the sake of humanity and freedom.

I'm not a workaholic!

"Your grandfather died on a toilet at work at 55. He had a heart attack because he was a workaholic."

Someone told me that once or at least that is how I remember it. The idea of the dangers of being a workaholic has always stayed with me and I became sensitive to the idea of "working to death" at an early age. My grandfather was a successful businessman and inventor. Supposedly he helped invent the first color printer or something like that. In attempting to write this out I realize that my knowledge of the man is muddled and I am probably making some of this up based on old memories of conversations with my mother. None the less it is a related memory.

Speaking of my mother, she is a borderline workaholic. I would call he a straight up workaholic but she does take the time to visit and socialize with family and she had a long-term boyfriend. She is also calm, open to conversations about most topics, and enjoys the occasional movie out. I call her a workaholic because the vast majority of the time for the past 30 or so years has been working.

From my earliest memories, she has always put work above anything else. She was barely home and when she was she was busy doing household things and arguing with my father. She was a speech pathologist, then she worked in special education and then went on to administration jobs such as Dean and she is now an administrator for an entire school district. During her time in education, she went back to school and got her Ph.D. and taught college courses as well. She is very accomplished and has won an award in education recently. I am very proud of her as far as this is concerned. She is good at what she does and I think she has made the education system better although I have had only a glimpse into her career and I am biased.

She has been a positive role model for her work ethic, and the ability to support our family, but she has been a negative role model for how to balance work and family, nurturing, affection, and parenting in general. When I was younger I appreciated that she worked so hard and that people seemed to appreciate her work but I also felt the lack of attention and personal bonding that occurred due to her prioritization of work. This has taken its toll on our relationship and I would have rather had her in my life more than at work more.

This is all to say that I am cognizant of the impact that a workaholic can have on those around them and that while there is a lot to be gained in terms of financial freedom when one works more I am not interested in forgoing the pleasures of life either. Taking time to talk with friends will not gain much in the way of long-term financial wealth but as I get older and my friends begin to die I doubt I will wish I had spent less time in their company. The same goes for swimming, playing games, smoking weed and the myriad other activities that only hold fleeting intrinsic value for me.

At the same time, I have a deep guilt that wells up in myself when I neglect to be productive. If I play for too long, waste too much time in pleasure seeking or spend too much time stagnating and not seeking some goal then my self-esteem rots away leaving despair, depression, and anxiety. The few times that I have been unemployed I have felt the worst. I once had a mental breakdown right out of high school when I spent about three months out of work in a new town and with no friends. Obviously, this was a recipe for disaster but had I kept myself busy with a job or hobbies I might not have been so existentially confused.

In attempting to have balance in my life I try to be aware of the two competing forces in my mind. One voice telling me to "slow down, don't worry, have fun, you're just going to die in the end anyway," and another voice saying, "hurry up, you're just getting older, man up, you don't want to die with nothing." This dichotomy winds back and forth in my mind like two rocking horses battling to the death at high speeds. All the while constantly recalibrating for new goals, new ideas of pleasure and new ways of attacking the problem of existential angst that is never satisfied and never quite certain. 

In the Shadow of a Beast: A trip to the beach

A Trip to the Beach

I grew up in the shadow of a beast. I felt powerless and thus, drew in on myself, hiding in places where the beast could not find me. I stayed out of the living room. I spent time at friend's houses. Fortunately for me, hiding was easy, seeing as the beast I hid from rarely looked for me. But when he did I could not flee.

I remember one such occasion where I was trapped by the beast. It was visitation day and the beast decided that it would be a good idea to take me to the beach, a normally calming and tranquil place, but on that day it was just a backdrop to tyranny. The drive there was only 20 minutes or so but it felt like a blurry lifetime. I was about thirteen that day and I had been honing my selective attention skills for some time by then. This skill came in handy anytime my beast of a father decided it was time to tell me "how it is". He would rant about how evil the world is, how my mother was a liar who was stealing his children and how all of our hatred of him was the result of brainwashing.

I sat, trapped in the car, on the way to a remote part of the Oregon coastline, with a knot in my stomach and words passing through my head like a dark fog. The full content was lost but the message was clear. His hate and malice for my mother, himself and life drove through my selective attention filter and I knew that either he was evil or I was. How else could such poison exist to warrant such verbal anger?

We made it to the beach and there was at least something more to distract me from the incessant diatribe of a man with only frustration and hate in his heart. It wasn't much but I remember walking down the trail to the beach and feeling a slight sense of relief in seeing the ocean but mostly it is a blurred memory. I retreated inside myself and bottled up my anger and resentment for the beast and knew that there was little I could do. He had a "right" to my presence and attention so I did what I could to ignore the words and emotions.

Later in my life, when in conversation I would find that my attention had wondered and that I was not listening I tried to understand this instinct to ignore someone even when looking right at them. I realized that this selective attention mechanism was a defensive operation developed over a decade of being trapped by my beast of a father and forced to listen to his vitriolic rhetoric. If I didn't want this mechanism to ruin future relationships I had to understand what caused it and to recognize that it was no longer needed. I had to consciously recognize when my mind would wander while in mid-conversation and then bring my attention back to the person talking in order to engage in the conversation. I realized that I really enjoy a good conversation where I am an active participant and that comes from listening.

I still get a little nervous when speaking my mind and engaging in a meaningful conversation. Just asserting an opinion can be exhilarating for me know which is a sign of the lack of power I had growing up. It is important that people are not taken for granted or treated as dumping troughs for other's negative emotions. It is important to be present and allows your needs to be expressed in a conversation. If you are not part of the conversation then you become a ghost and not sticking up for yourself can lead to resenting yourself and those around you. Sometimes it is important to say, "Hey, I'm not in the mood for your depressing, angry words right now."

Another outcome of being in the shadow of a beast is that in withholding my expression, for good reason when I was younger, is the creation of imaginary conflicts in my head. Now, if I predict a potential conflict I will reliably have a continuous debate in my head with those that I might need to convince of my argument. I will try to predict all possible sides and argue them relentlessly in my head assuming that I need to prepare for a verbal battle. The sad part is that it creates stress and detracts from life because my predictions are almost always wrong. Almost all of my adult interactions have been pleasant and reasonable but because of my early life, I imagine otherwise. I take a defensive position and ready myself for a battle that I can now choose to not have.