6 Ways Parents Teach Their Children Socialist Values

Source: liberty.me

By Michael Esch from The Stand Jun 9, 2015

All the time we hear older generations saying that millennials need to grow up. Some have said that they do not care about college readiness they just want “out of my basement readiness”.  That the younger generation needs to take personal responsibility for their lives. We hear that the younger people have no work ethic and that they feel entitled to everything. For the most part, this is true, but it has resulted from a parental generation reinforcing socialist ideas at home.

Socialism is the idea that everyone is responsible for everyone else. No one in the community should have more than another person no matter your productivity. If someone were to make more money than the authority figure, government, would redistribute that money to people in need.

Here are 6 ways parents teach socialist values to their children.

1) Sharing

Forcing children to share is the laziest form of parenting. A parent hears two children fighting over a toy and comes into the room yells at the children to share the toy and walks out. Parents who do this are teaching their children that whenever someone comes to steal your possession you should just give it to them. If you hold onto your property, then the authority will come in and punish you.

Solution

Teach your children that they are not allowed to steal. If a child is playing with a toy in the house, then that is theirs, and they do not have to share it. Simplifying the rules in the house makes it easier for children to know right from wrong. Children will naturally share because they are social. They want to play with others, and the only way to do that is to share. Sharing is good when it is a choice, but when it is forced it is unnatural and results in strife. Reduce conflict in your house by stopping the stealing.

2) Teaching Obedience

When a parent says, “because I said so”, they are teaching their children blind obedience. This is also a form of lazy parenting. It reinforces the idea that a child has no say in their lives. They are supposed to obey authority no matter what. As children grow up hearing this phrase it results in some of the most heinous of crimes and the defense is, “I was just following orders.”

Solution

Parents should explain their decisions to their children. As a child grows, he should have more control in decision making. Also, if you want to teach your children personal responsibility, then allowing your children to make poor decisions is a learning lesson. Yes, sometimes this is more stressful, but it results in a child that takes charge of their lives and learns to deal with their consequences.

3) Unnecessary Force

Sometimes when a child is not obedient, it is easy to use unnecessary force to obtain compliance. When punishments are too harsh a parent can usually manipulate a child to do almost anything. This teaches our children that punishments can never go too far. After growing up with harsh punishments it is no wonder majority of Americans agree with government torturing prisoners.

Solution

There are natural consequences to every action that we take. As parents, we should try to mimic these natural consequences. If Johnny hits his sister, then he is not allowed to play with her. This is a natural consequence. This way children will grow up to become more sensitive to injustices in the world.

4) Managing Play

In a socialist society, there is one business that supplies one product. Competition is restricted because it promotes profits. Therefore, schools determine how a child can best serve the community. Then the child is put in that occupation. This is becoming more accepted because parents are managing a child’s play or traditional “free-time”.

A school-age child wakes up, and they go to school for 8 hours. At school, they are told what to read, what to watch, and what to study. Then they go to sports practice where they are told how to play. Then we wonder why they sit around “bored” all the time. They are never given the opportunity to explore their own decisions.

Solution

Give your child more freedom! Let them decide what they want to learn. Let them decide what they want to play. Let them explore their curiosity. As a child grows in this freedom so will their learning potential. Children naturally will learn to take responsibility of their time.

5) Chores Without Compensation

Many children are given weekly and daily chores with no compensation. Some parents say that they pay their children with rent and food. It is not true because if the child does not do the chore then the parent will still provide the rent and the food. This reinforces socialistic values that no matter what you do you will be provided housing and food.

Solution

Teach your child how to make a deal. Chores should resemble work and with work there is compensation. This does not mean that your child should be given a weekly allowance. It simply means there should be a trade for their work and time. Teaching them that their work and time have value is good for their work ethic.

6) No Options

Bernie Sanders, a Socialist presidential nominee, recently said that there should be one kind of deodorant. In a socialist society, there is no choice. Parents who do not give their children options are reinforcing the value that the authority knows what is best for the individual and that the children should rely on them for that decision.

Solution

Give your children freedom of choice. When they eat breakfast, let them choose what they are eating. When planning a vacation or going out to eat, allow the children to have a democratic voice in the decision making. This teaches the children how to have an opinion and defend it. By consistently allowing your child choice, they learn the value of freedom, what they want in life and how to get it.

Psychologist Lists 8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back

Source: anonhq.com

Written by: EV

Clinical psychologist and author, Bruce E. Levine, has compiled an in depth list of reasons why young Americans don’t fight for their rights. His article has, of course, caused a little controversy. One journalist went as far as claiming Levine believes youthful resistance should focus on his own agenda, however it would seem most agree with Levine’s analysis, and even the skeptics admit the article is worth reading for the points listed and consideration.

According to Levine, young people have traditionally energized democratic movements, yet these efforts have been diminishing due to the ruling elite having created societal institutions that subdue young Americans, and break their spirit of resistance to domination. Young Americans—more so than older Americans—have basically resigned themselves to the idea that corporatocracy (a term used to describe an economic and political system that is controlled by corporations or corporate interests) can completely screw them over, and they feel helpless to do anything about it.

In a 2010 Gallup poll, Americans were asked, “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?” 76% of 18 to 34-year-olds said ‘no’. Despite the fact that these individuals don’t believe they’ll receive their social security benefits, few have demanded it be shored up by fairly taxing the wealthy. They accept that they will have more money deducted for social security even though they don’t believe they’ll one day receive those benefits.

How exactly has American society subdued young Americans?

1. Student-Loan Debt. During the 1970’s, tuition at many U.S. public universities was affordable. It was possible to receive a bachelor’s degree having accumulated no debt. Those days are dead and over. Large student debt, and the fear it creates, has become a pacifying force. Today, two-thirds of graduating seniors at four-year colleges are in debt, and that includes over 62 percent of public university graduates.

These debts come at a time in one’s life when it should be easy to resist authority because one does not yet have family responsibilities. Instead, young people are burdened with the stress of the cost of buckling authority, losing their job, and being unable to pay an ever-increasing debt. This has resulted in a vicious cycle where student debt has a subduing effect on activism, and political passivity makes it more likely students will accept their debt as a natural part of life.

2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance. Erich Fromm, who was a widely respected anti-authoritarian leftist psychoanalyst, wrote in 1955, “Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.” Fromm died in 1980, which happened to be the same year Ronald Reagan was elected president, and an increasingly authoritarian American Psychiatric Association added to their diagnostic bible (then the DSM-III) disruptive mental disorders for children and teenagers such as “oppositional defiant disorder”, or ODD.

“Symptoms” of ODD include; often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules,often argues with adults, and often deliberately does things to annoy other people. That pretty much describes the majority of all children. Those who are actually diagnosed with ODD receive heavily tranquilizing antipsychotic drugs, such as Zyprexa and Risperdal, which are now the highest grossing class of medication in the U.S. ($16 billion in 2010). According to the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2010, many children who supposedly have ODD are being given antipsychotic drugs when they have a nonpsychotic diagnoses.

3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy. John Taylor Gatto, after receiving the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990, upset many who were in attendance at the ceremony by stating, “The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.”

Regardless of the subject matter, the main objective in most classrooms is to socialize students to be passive and directed by others, to follow orders, to take seriously the rewards and punishments of authorities, to pretend to care about things they don’t care about, and that they are impotent to affect their situation. School teaches us that politely asserting our concerns is “moral and mature”. It demands our compliance and teaches us not to act in a friction-causing manner.

4. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top”. Thanks to corporatocracy, our already authoritarian school system has become even more authoritarian. Educational policies such as “No Child Left Behind”, and “Race to the Top”, have essentially standardized-testing tyranny that creates fear. This is contradictory to education for a democratic society. Fear forces students and teachers to constantly focus on the demands of test creators. In doing so, it crushes curiosity, critical thinking, questioning authority, and challenging and resisting illegitimate authority. Were our school system actually democratic and less authoritarian, one would evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher not by corporatocracy-sanctioned standardized tests, but by asking students, parents, and communities if a teacher is inspiring students to be more curious, to read more, to learn independently, to enjoy thinking critically, to question authorities, and to challenge illegitimate authorities.

5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education—But Not Their Schooling—Seriously. Today society has been led to believe that disliking school means disliking education in general. Many Americans are under the delusion that if you lack a college degree, you are a “loser”. In actuality, this is not the case. Gore Vidal and George Carlin, two of America’s most astute and articulate critics of the corporatocracy, never went to college. Carlin himself dropped out of school in the ninth grade. You don’t need a degree to have a voice or an opinion, and you don’t need to attend a school to read a book. Throughout history we have seen many examples of those deemed “the common man” fighting for what they believe in without schooling, and succeeding in their endeavors.

6. The Normalization of Surveillance.We are living in an era of surveillance, and in the case of our nation’s youths, they’re being born into it. The National Security Agency (NSA) has been in the world’s spotlight for monitoring American citizen’s email and phone conversations, while at the same time employer surveillance has become increasingly common as well. Young Americans are starting to accept corporatocracy surveillance because it’s become routine in their lives. From a young age people are being heavily monitored. Parents scan websites and browsing history, and like employers, they monitor their children’s Facebook pages. Some parents use the GPS in their children’s cell phones to track their whereabouts, and other people go as far as placing cameras throughout their house. Many children and teenagers have lost their confidence due to the fact they are constantly being watched. How can young Americans be expected to pull off a democratic movement below the radar of authorities when, as youths, they didn’t even have the confidence to throw a house-party when their parents were out of town?

7. Television. In our current age of technology, American children now have access not only to televisions and computers, but to cell phones, iPods, and other technologies capable of accessing the media. On average, children spend around 8 hours a day on such devices. Many progressives are concerned about the concentrated control of content by the corporate media, but the primary issue is the fact that television itself has become a pacifying agent. For example, private-enterprise prisons have recognized that providing inmates with cable television can be a more economical method to keep them quiet and subdued than it would be to hire more guards.

Fear-based television works beautifully in an authoritarian society to keep people afraid and distrustful of one another. It isolates people from one another to prevent them from joining together to create resistance to authorities. Regardless of the programing, watching television also slows down brainwaves making critical thinking difficult. Although playing video games isn’t as mind-numbing as simply viewing television, such games have become the only real form of potency boys and young men experience, and “virtual potency” is no threat to the ruling elite.

8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism.Young Americans are offered “choices” of fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist consumerism, however all varieties of fundamentalism—the demand for a strict, literal interpretation of certain doctrines—narrow one’s focus and inhibit critical thinking. Some progressives call fundamentalist religion the “Opiate of the masses.”

Fundamentalist consumerism destroys self-reliance. It creates people who feel completely dependent on others and who are thus more likely to turn over decision-making power to authorities. This is the precise mind-set the ruling elite is striving for. A fundamentalist consumer culture legitimizes advertising, propaganda, and all kinds of manipulations, including lies. Once society legitimizes the lies and manipulation, people cease to trust one another and form democratic movements.

In conclusion, Levine states that these are not the only aspects of our culture that subdue young Americans and crush their resistance to domination. The food-industry has helped to create an epidemic of childhood obesity, depression, and passivity, and the prison-industrial complex serves to keep young anti-authoritarians “in line”.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, “All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.”

Ideas can mean the difference between wealth and poverty

Source: adamsmith.org

Written by Sam Bowman 

Adam Smith never said that “The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations”, as some people who have never read him think. It is hard to think of a less Smithian view – he was the opposite of that quote’s patrician and patronising voice, and had a deep compassion for people who had been unlucky in life.

But there is some evidence that disadvantaged people underinvest their savings at a huge cost to themselves. This seems to be true even when there are no social constraints or market failures that might cause this to happen.

One reason for this may simply be that poor people do not realise that the investment opportunities exist, or do not really consider that they might benefit from them. Consider those bright young students from deprived backgrounds who have never even considered applying to university, just because nobody in their families ever has either. Your experience of the world shapes how you react to various opportunities that you get.

To test this hypothesis, a group of researchers at Oxford performed a controlled trial in remote Ethiopian villages, where they showed one of several one-hour documentaries about poor Ethiopian farmers who had expanded a business, improved their farming practices or broken cultural norms by, say, marrying for love. “Individuals succeeded largely through their own efforts and by drawing on assistance from community members and available resources, not through outside government or NGO intervention.”

The trial involved a placebo group (shown a comedy movie) and a control group (shown nothing at all) and it seems to have been a success. Six months after the screenings, the documentary group’s savings rate had risen significantly above the control group’s and had also begun to access credit at a higher rate. (These are some of the poorest people in the world, so the absolute amounts – a few pounds – may seem very small to our eyes.)

School enrolment was up by 15 percent in the documentary group, although it was also up by 10 percent in the placebo group so the effect is unclear, and spending on school expenses was up by 17% (compared to no change in the placebo group).

Overall, the results seem to show that showing extremely poor people examples of people like them who had made something of themselves inspired them to invest in themselves and their families.

It’s just one study, but it hints at something bigger. Incentives matter, of course, but you have to be aware of the existence of an incentive for it to work on you. Even if you’re aware of it, you might discount (or exaggerate) its significance according to your experiences. In a complex world, each of us uses a different pair of glasses to focus on what matters and filter out what doesn’t. And no pair is perfect.

There is no obvious public policy lesson from any of this, except perhaps that people don’t always react predictably to incentives. Incentives matter – but so do ideas.

Free Education? Don’t make the situation worse!

Source: adamsmith.org

We love to moan about the system – how it conditions our thought, places expectations upon us, is inflexible and ill-suited to the modern context etc. – and that moaning isn’t limited purely to students. Free education sounds wonderful but, in reality, a subsidised higher education sector works against students’ best interests.

The increasing supply of universities, places, graduates, qualifications etc. continuously devalue educational qualifications. With the exception of courses that have a significant vocational content such as Medicine, Engineering, Nursing, Teaching and Natural Sciences, many graduates will find their course’s academic content mostly unnecessary for the line of work they plan to enter. Unfortunately, an oversupply of graduates means that many firms advertise relatively well-compensated occupations as being exclusively ‘grad jobs’. This serves to reinforce the perception that you actually need a degree to even be capable of doing these jobs when, in actuality, it’s just that so many people currently have degrees that it’s pointless applying if you don’t. The necessary skills are better taught outside of a university.

What about all those who would essentially be coerced into going to university because, with free education and the increased supply of graduates, they’d have even less of a chance out there without a degree than they do now? What about those who left education earlier and whose relatively meagre qualifications are further devalued because of more graduates in the labour market? Funnily enough, the income inequality that education subsidies purport to alleviate would only increase. The training required to get a ‘good job’ (and, therefore, to fill them) would simply be lengthened due to qualifications’ devaluation. Normative signposting for how best to spend time is a subtle deprivation of civil liberty.

What is education? Why do we value one form of learning over another? Why stop at higher education? Why not subsidise gap years to Southeast Asia where people ‘discover themselves’? Subsidising one form of education almost always forcefully elevates it to a normatively superior perceived status; this perpetuates social structures, labour market characteristics, outcomes etc. since this normative dimension of legal institutions works to resist our attempts to reinvent social structures and deviating from the accepted norm. Does society really need to pay to offer free behavioural conditioning and thereby limit its own evolution? Free education protests are (mostly) unintended expressions of backward, socially destructive and misery-perpetuating conservatism veiled in social liberalism via equal opportunities and rights rhetoric.

1. Keith Hudson says:

   November 22, 2014 at 11:54 pm

   You diagnosis is, I think, generally along the right lines. But what is your prescription for a corrective course? I suggest that the new free schools in this country, fiercely opposed by the teaching unions and gained only after a considerable struggle with the Department of Education, are the only way forward. They are free in the sense that the government is still paying for them, but they would otherwise not be able to get off the ground. They are being set up by parents who want their children to have the same sort of quality education that the best private schools offer but who cannot afford to pay their sorts of fees.

   The new free schools are the first attempt to turn the clock back from the time around the 1820s and ’30s when even factory workers in Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and a few more manufacturing cities were beginning to pay for their children to be educated — albeit only up to the age of about 11 years (longer for the brightest pupils), but it was a start. The parents couldn’t afford much even though their wages were just beginning to grow a little — only two or three pennies a week for each child — but it was a start. They managed to make the schools financially viable by using what became known as the “monitor system” or the “Victorian system”. (This method is still being used in India, China and other Asian countries in the poorest areas — where the teachers in the free state schools are slipshod and often don’t turn up at all.) One teacher would hold an early morning class in which she would teach the lessons of the day to about a dozen of the very brightest 11 or 12 year olds. They would then take over in turn as ‘monitor-teachers’ to the rest of the children, maybe 200 or 300 during the rest of the day.

   At the same time, local liberal councils in those cities, together with some of the more progressive employers, were establishing municipal universities. So here was the beginnings of a private education system that was catering to the children of ordinary workers.

   But what happened? The government stepped in. The government was aware of the free state schools in Germany which Count von Bismark had established with the prime purpose of indoctrinating young minds into the glories of the newly accreting German nation. The motivation was pure nationalism (with an emphasis on the science and warfare). By the 1850s and ’60s the British government realised they were going to be left behind by this powerful rising nation, Germany, which, more than anything else was jealous of the prosperity of Great Britain and power of the growing British Empire. By one means and other the British government effectively nationalised the new private universities and schools. By about the 1880s, the task was complete and the government was in charge of mass indoctrination in the schools — and employers realised that they could forget about their inputs into the universities. By the time of the First World War it was therefore not surprising that a million or so enthusiastic volunteers turned up at the Army recruiting stations. (They soon petered out after a year or so when accounts started coming back from the trenches, and the government had to resort to conscription. But that’s a diversion.)

   With the new free schools a start has been made in this country. So long as they keep to a standard curriculum they have a great deal more freedom as to what they teach and how they teach. You can also be fairly certain that, because of the parental inputs — those who have more idea of the trends in the job market than the Department of Education — then the new free schools will be giving much more emphasis on relevant subjects than the state secondary schools are doing at present. We can but hope for their future.

How Common Are School Shootings?

Source: Cato.org

Schools are stocking up on M16s and modified grenade launchers and holding drills involving shooting blanks in middle and high school hallways, but is the risk really worth the expense and possibility of preemptively traumatizing children?

Groups like Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety argue that our nation’s schools are dangerous, claiming that there have been 74 school shootings since the Sandy Hook massacre in December 2012 in an infographic that went viral earlier this summer. But a closer look at their numbers revealed that they artificially inflated the statistic by including suicides, accidents, incidents related to criminal activity (e.g. - drug dealing or robbery), and incidents that took place outside of school hours or were unconnected to members of any school community. Moreover, half of those incidents took place on college campuses. Since Sandy Hook, the actual number of K-12 school shootings in which the shooter intended to commit mass murder has been ten—a far cry from the “one school shooting per week” that President Obama claimed back in June.

Surely even one such incident is too high, but with nearly 106,000 public and private schools in the U.S., there were shootings at only 0.009% of schools since December 2012. According to the National Center for Education Statistics’ 2013 “Indicators of School Crime and Safety” report, from the 1992-93 school year until the 2010-11 school year, there were between 11 and 34 homicides of youths ages 5-18 at schools each year (including attacks with weapons other than firearms), with an average of about 23 homicides per year. Comparing that to NCES’s enrollment statistics, about 0.000044% of public and private K-12 students were killed at school per year between 1992-93 and 2010-11. That’s about one out of every 2,273,000 students per year. By contrast, the odds of being hit by lightning in a given year is one out of 700,000 according to National Geographic. 

School Year	K-12 Student Homicides	Fall Enrollment (thousands)	% Homicides
1992-93	34	48,500	0.000070%
1993-94	29	49,113	0.000059%
1994-95	28	49,898	0.000056%
1995-96	32	50,759	0.000063%
1996-97	28	51,544	0.000054%
1997-98	34	52,071	0.000065%
1998-99	33	52,526	0.000063%
1999-00	14	52,875	0.000026%
2000-01	14	53,373	0.000026%
2001-02	16	53,992	0.000030%
2002-03	18	54,403	0.000033%
2003-04	23	54,639	0.000042%
2004-05	22	54,928	0.000040%
2005-06	21	55,224	0.000038%
2006-07	32	55,524	0.000058%
2007-08	21	55,762	0.000038%
2008-09	17	55,966	0.000030%
2009-10	19	56,186	0.000034%
2010-11	11	56,480	0.000019%
		Maximum:	0.000070%
		Minimum:	0.000019%
		Average:	0.000044%

It makes sense for schools to take precautions and have contingency plans, but they should keep a sense of perspective. School shootings, especially the mass casualty incidents like Sandy Hook, are exceedingly rare. Schools should dispense with the M16s, grenade launchers, and armored vehicles.

Use Education to Transform China From Within

Source: Cato.org

BEIJING—China’s university system is growing.  However, the People’s Republic of China still lags behind the U.S. and other Western nations.  Chinese students increasingly are heading to America for higher education. 

While recently playing tourist in Beijing I spoke to a number of young Chinese.  They were bright and inquisitive, ambitious and nationalistic.  They worried about finding good jobs and were irritated by government restrictions on their freedom. 

Beijing’s global influence depends upon domestic economic growth and political stability.  And that ultimately depends upon China’s young. 

The PRC’s university students today are most likely to become the country’s leaders tomorrow.  The number of college graduates has increased to seven million, a four-fold jump over the last decade. 

While the number of universities in China is growing, few have national, let alone international, reputations.  Undoubtedly that will change over time.  Today, however, competition for the few available spots at top schools is extraordinary. 

For instance, Peking and Tsinghua Universities are the only Chinese universities among the world’s top 100.  They have space only for 6000 new students a year. 

Obviously, far more Chinese students could succeed, indeed thrive, at fine universities.  So more than 400,000 young Chinese are heading abroad every year. 

The Chinese government increasingly accommodates students who desire to study overseas.  Indeed, in 2011 President Hu Jintao admitted:  “While people receive a good education, there are significant gaps compared to the advanced international level.”  The daughter of his successor, President Xi Jinping, attended Harvard University. 

The U.S. remains the favored destination of Chinese students.  There were 235,000 Chinese students in America during the 2012-2013 school year.  In the past most Chinese students were in graduate school, but the share of undergraduates has been increasing—up more than ninefold from 2005 to 2012. 

U.S. universities offer a greater variety of courses, making it easier to specialize.  They also provide an education more attuned to the global economy in which China is expanding its role. 

A foreign degree is particularly helpful for the three of ten Chinese students who remain overseas.  Chen Yuyu of Peking University observed:  “High-end jobs that should have been produced by industrialization, including research, marketing and accounting, etc., have been left in the West.” 

Foreign companies doing business in China also desire employees with a Western-oriented education.  Even Chinese students destined to work in China gain an advantage from schooling that sets them apart. 

Of course, while many Chinese students are capable of succeeding at foreign universities, many find foreign study difficult.  Some prospective applicants turn to private companies to help them prepare.

The Chinese educational surge is good for America.  Chinese students deliver $24 billion to the U.S economy. 

Moreover, educating many of China’s future leaders is more likely to lead to better bilateral relations and a more peaceful future.  Attending American colleges won’t turn Chinese into Americans, but will yield many personal friendships and business relationships. 

A common educational experience also may encourage a more liberal international vision.  Western schooling certainly does not guarantee humane views, but as I wrote in Forbes online, “a U.S. university education is more likely to reinforce the independent impulses evident in so many Chinese students today.”

They still will be Chinese patriots (and likely quite nationalistic in the eyes of most Americans).  But Western-educated Chinese may be more likely to appreciate if not share U.S. worldviews and objectives.  At least, the possibility is there.

The U.S.-China relationship is the most important bilateral relationship of the 21st Century.  Both nations must work through the inevitable disagreements and make cooperation rather than confrontation the hallmark of their relationship.  While there’s no panacea to make that happen, the growing number of Chinese attending U.S. universities is a hopeful sign.