Step 1: Have a Rich Family

Not sure what the other steps are...

Most people say there are two certainties in life. Death and taxes.

I'd like to add a third to the list: Mothers thinking their way of raising their kids is better than x, bragging about it and if allowed to will continue to write about it in a blog, on Facebook or in a magazine in excruciating (to the rest of us) detail.

Nothing new here, just a new fad 'that's better because...' and the reasoning is usually just thinly disguised as because "I'm doing it"

We don't want our young cattle to grow into leadership roles, are you nuts!? Here, we make a point to keep kids docile with a mix of fluoride and Prozac.

I'm sorry, this is just too much. Every week there's at least a couple of these what's-wrong-with-American-education stories. It's always that Americans are doing it wrong, somewhere else is doing it better.

It's entirely reasonable to survey the different approaches to teaching and try to select the best for your own kids/schools/country. But the underlying nationalistic streak in all these articles, and the bogus tone of imminent disaster, is just baiting. And you're going to provide a big fat forum for the libertarians and plutorepublicans to grind away at "why don't we totally defund public education, it's clearly not working". Someone will misquote ol' Thom Jefferson.

God, I would like to be able to differentiate this week from the one that came before. Why is this what Slashdot has become? How is this "news for nerds"? This looks much more like "bait for hot-headed middle-aged guys".

Well, what you Americans do looks very much like organized child abuse to the rest of the world. Not letting children make essential experiences results in stunted development, and there are not many worse things you can do to a child. Even if you think you are protecting them, what you really do is setting them up to fail more drastically later, when they are less resilient and learning is harder for them.

Is that the Boy Scouts you are referring to?

Are you kidding? They are a pale shallow immitation of what they were 30 years ago. If anything they are a great example of what the original article was talking about.

The Scouts have similar failings as the public schools you're whining about.

It's not mosques that were banned in Switzerland, it's minarets.
And minarets are not a religious symbol, except to extremists who consider them the "bayonets of Islam" and a symbol of conquest. Historically minarets were built for practical purposes, to call Muslims for prayer so there is not even a question of religious discrimination.

In Switzerland, the call to prayer is banned and thus minarets are useless for that purpose. Therefore the only reason anyone would have to build one is because they're extremists and want to show to other extremists that they have conquered Switzerland. We really don't need or want to let extremists build something that encourages them to commit violence, thank you very much.

The "brown people" (I prefer calling them Middle-Eastern, Arabs or Muslims, depending which of these they are) are welcome to practice their religion peacefully in the many mosques that nobody stopped them from building in Switzerland.

I suppose next you'll be bringing up the Polanski affair and blaming Switzerland for not extraditing him when the USA refused to provide all the required documents?

I have no idea if you're an Al Qaeda supporter butthurt over the ban of your precious conquest symbol or an American (one of the dumb ones) who's butthurt over the fact that you raise your kids in protection foam and turn them into pussies as a result, but either way you can go fuck yourself.

I don't think its really an administrative decision to protect children and provide only safe choices that prevent an education like this. Its the need to protect the schools, the businesses and any other organizations involved from lawsuits. Here in the U.S., the insurance premiums necessary for any group that would allow a 3 yr old to even approach - let alone use - a functional cutting blade bigger than "safety scissors" would be astronomical.

Its like the need for all that squishy rubber surface on playgrounds these days. It isn't there to keep kids from breaking limbs falling off equipment because breaking limbs is a bad thing. Its to minimize exposure to litigation if they do.

Maybe the Boy Scouts have been depicted as homophobic because of the way they throw out gay Scoutmasters.

why?

I was thinking about "depicted as" and now I wish I had phrased that differently. Yes, Boy Scouts is officially opposed to participation by GLBT people. I had not meant to imply otherwise.

I cannot think of a large scale secular organization that parallels the function of Boy Scouts that is more inclusive in this respect.

'Run' in the figurative sense.

From what I've seen of kids these days, any actual running is out, as they would have to put down their electronic devices for more than 2 seconds.

And yet, it is truly disgusting that so many turn a blind (or ignorant) eye as to the real cause of this exact situation. If we wouldn't allow such nonsense into a courtroom in the first place, then we wouldn't have the joke of a litigation system we have today.

Exactly.

As much as reactionaries like to think it, there's nothing inherently worse about the younger generation, or our kids. Tromping through the woods doesn't make you a better person. It certainly doesn't make you a leader.

Except that the point wasn't about serious instant inury - breaking your leg when falling from a pyramid, etc.

It was about brain injuries from repeated concussions (and sure cheerleading has head injuries, but it doesn't have them at the frequency of football).
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Realistically its a side effect of the work culture and the family moving from stay at home mom to dual income. Latchkey kids became common and parents slowly realized that their jobs didn't allow them to pay the same level of attention to their kids that their parents paid to them. They were ashamed and felt a need to prove that they do care about their kids, even if they don't have time to spend with them. That leads to overprotectiveness as a proof method and the precious little snowflake situation. Add that kid success is also used as a societal status claim for the parents, that our politicians have figured out that fear is a vote getter and so push the danger of crime, that we have an overabundance of lawyers and that we have a serious dislike of someone being treated better if they haven't been seen to earn/deserve it and this is the result you naturally get.

Sounds like a place I want to live. America used to be that way...several decades ago.

You're missing the point a bit, its not a problem with "personal comfort and hygene", nor litigation, its a problem with personal responsibility. The culture is obsessed with finding someone to pin the blame on, rather than instilling any rational sense of personal resposibility for anything. ANYTHING. Nevermind personal responsibility for having caused harm or financial loss. American children are being shown how bad it is for them to raise their hands or ask for ANYTHING, except food. Such people don't make great leaders.

Scouts and regular education have become a lot more alike over the last several decades. In school kids go to "environment camps" and there's much more hands on education (e.g. designing and building bridges to learn about engineering)

Scouts have made rank advancement (something which didn't exist in Baden-Powell's method) ever more elaborate and challenging, and focused more on citizenship and explicit moral lessons. The original Eagle Scout requirements were twenty-one merit badges. Later requirements focused on woodcraft and personal self-sufficiency. Currently six of the twelve required merit badges for Eagle rank are focused on social adjustment: Citizenship in the Community, Citizenship in the Nation, Citizenship in the World, Communication, Personal Management, and Family Life. Since the 1970s scouts have to pass both a one on one review of personal morality with an adult leader and a community board of review,

So what happened? Well, it turns out a youth program like scouting fits well with the Mormon Church's missionary training. That's true of other churches, but the Mormons took to scouting in an organized way. Consequently scouting in the USA has evolved to meet the needs of it's largest and most organized bloc, and in some cases even serving the church's ideological ends (e.g. rejecting the Unitarian religious emblem badge on doctrinal grounds and barring Wiccans from membership entirely).

So in effect Scouting in the USA is a program geared toward developing leaders consistent with Mormon views of leadership. Non-Mormon sponsoring organizations and troops just live with this, quietly ignoring bans on homosexuals, agnostics, and pagans, and sucking up Mormon oriented advancement requirements. This has spawned a "Traditional Scouting" movement, which is much more focused on scoutcraft and self-sufficiency and less on indoctrination.

The question is, by teaching kids in essence Camping/Survival Skills, are we really teaching them leadership?

Yes the Boy Scouts teaches Leadership skills, and the Boy Scouts teaches Camping/Survival Skills, and some of them a joined together... However There is a lot of leadership training outside camping skills, Putting children in positions of authority, being able to give commands and take the consequences of such commands, are important leadership skills... However Camping and Survival Skills, don't really make you a good leader. It just means you can fend for yourself better (This is a good trait, however it doesn't make you a leader, it may just make him a more effective servant.

Good leaders don't need to be tough, they need to be smart, calculating, thoughtful, and ethical.

On the upside? When you are sick, stay home. Don't spread your very communicable disease to others. That's as much a problem in the US, btw. Drives me nuts every time I see someone coughing their lungs out at work....

Who's homogenizing now?

I hope your wife kept up that teaching method/activity. Sounds like they learned a critical life lesson far more valuable than the math skills that day.

It's the "fear" part, not the "ration" part. He was indicating that, rather than being paranoid and frightened, they had a policy in place based on simplistic interpretation of their moralistic views. They can be homophobic, hysterical, or militant; but they can also simply be following stricture.

You'll find the same in churches, really: some ministers are insane and flame and condemn homosexuals; others actually preach that it goes against their holy texts, and that such behavior shouldn't be engaged in, but offer their moral support to those that bring such issues forward to them (i.e. they insist it's 'wrong', but also insist that having those tendencies don't make you a bad person--they tend to press that homosexuals should remain chaste, though).

Belief systems are strange. They make more obvious sense when you want to burn the evil people at the stake; they make much less sense when you actually try to enforce your beliefs without inflicting harm--could you imagine employers barring all homosexuals like the US Military did? "Just policy" becomes "Removing your ability to live," and to some people the decision would become extremely complex: the 'sin' or 'amoral fault' or whatnot of homosexuality stands in opposition to the sin of condemning a man whose sins are between him and God (somewhere in there didn't we say you're not supposed to pass judgment?). It's easy to abstract away the consequences of your actions, much harder to hold firmly to your beliefs of what behavior shouldn't be supported while not violating other beliefs of not harming other people.

Public education has been a big target since the early part of the 1920s when Progressive reformers realized it was the perfect tool for turning dirty immigrants into model citizens. Of course, prior to that it was something to occupy kids in the winter when there was little farm work to do until they were old enough to work full time, at about the 9th grade.

Catholics never trusted it -- they were often the dirty immigrants targeted -- which is why there is such a huge Catholic school system in the US, which is becoming kind of the discount private school system in many areas as public schools disintegrate and desperate parishes de-emphasize religious education and chase fallen/non-Catholic money to keep their schools and parishes from becoming ghost towns.

Since the 1920s, though, the public education system has been repeatedly targeted by political activists. Option 1 was always get your propaganda to be the curriculum -- hence the emphasis on anti-communism and values in the 1950s and early sixties.

In the mid-late 1960s, the emphasis changed to the war on poverty and schools became both educational institutions and social welfare delivery systems (free lunches, immunization clinics, etc). In the 1970s it was desegregation as the mission --- we were going to fix race by putting the kids together.

In the early 70s, though, there were a glut of new teachers thanks to the baby boom and draft deferments for college students studying education. This basically was the liberal/academic colonization of education where you get all kinds of weird curriculum and a relentless focus on the "education gap", which I find to be like the emperor's new clothes -- a failure to realize that minority kids do badly in school not because we aren't teaching them right, but because they come from a failed social milieu. But accepting that means being racist and giving up your cultural relativism.

All you're making a case for is that the laws are too numerous and wide-reaching, making everyone a criminal, and it's only by the grace of our "benevolent" prosecutors and judges that they only go after those who trigger their ire or win them reelection via PR. I.e. it's not about justice.

Because I totally want the guy at 7-11 who's handing me my taquitos to have to do this.

Oh wait, they already do.

A good amount of this is from people knowing that if they do get sick, they don't have any paid time off, and thus are either going to have to be completely miserable on top of working their shitty job, or be completely miserable while they get better and be miserable after because they don't have paid sick leave, and will just have lost a few days worth of pay, which is a big deal.

You miss one key point. Knowing you can fend for yourself without relying on others and being confident in that fact is the first step on the way to becoming a leader. That confidence and self-assuredness is necessary in becoming an authority, necessary to yourself. One who is not confident in himself cannot effectively lead.

Perhaps; at the very least, it teaches kids not to be afraid of the unknown, not to be hopelessly dependent on those around them (especially those in authority positions), and so forth.

Whereas a typical elementary school student in the US is subjected to the following treatment:

1. Sit at an assigned desk, arranged in a grid
2. Boring, repetetive assignments whose completion is a determining factor in their grades and ultimately their ability to advance to the next level of education
3. Systematic discipline systems in a well-defined power structure
4. One person who leads many; levels of leadership arranged as a tree
5. Forms, paperwork, scantrons, and other common bureaucratic designs
6. Flourescent lighting and uniform floor tiling
7. Regimented schedules, mandatory evacuation from the building at the end of the school day unless you have a specific, authorized reason to stick around.
8. Locked doors, locked cabinets, locked desks, chain link fences, bars and grates over the windows, locks and chains over the gates, security cameras around the perimeter of the building
9. Metal detectors and X-ray scans to enter the school; no expectation of privacy in lockers, desks, or even on a student's person. Contraband items are collected at the door -- cell phones, various tools, etc.
10. Computers that are programmed to thwart any deviation from the prescribed curriculum. Firewalls and invasions of online privacy, systems that block Tor and proxy servers, etc..
11. Police officers and guards patrolling the hallways, grounds, etc., looking for students who are not sitting in their assigned desks in their assigned classes (and heaven forbid those students are doing something that was not assigned!).

How many people could possibly be prepared for leadership of any sort after 13-14 years of such treatment? Yes I know, we had "good reasons" for all of the above, but the result has been that our children are sent to some kind of Orwellian nightmare for many hours each day.

I cannot speak for other nations, but in America, our schools are in desperate need of positive reform. We need to stop using an authoritarian approach to education, and start creating schools that students want to attend, rather than schools that students flee from.

The GP makes a point that spreading minor disease builds up a social tolerance of the minor disease. Over time, your body develops natural defenses to things you're constantly exposed to. You pass along that defense to your children.

And for people suffering from constant headaches... the most common cause of headaches is dehydration. Drink water, get better. Relying on advil or aspirin to numb the pain is counter-productive to the unhealthy eating habit of not getting enough fluids.

Thousands of studies have confirmed what we've known for decades: your immune system cannot learn to deal with any microbes unless it is exposed to it.

In fact your own damn example proves the point: vaccines. Deliberate infection with a weakened form of a virus to assist the body in developing an immune response before it may have to face the full-blown version.

For bacterial infections this is doubly true. More-over a few years ago a study (there was a slashdot article about it) found that Staph actually fights off other infections when it's externally on the skin (it's the most common bacteria in 'dirt') merely getting dirty reduces your risk of other infections (staph INTERNALLY on the other hand is a dangerous infection and often requires treatment - on the other hand, if you have had a few small staph infections you greatly reduce the future intensity of such infections since your body has developed an immune response to it).

HIV is the exception to the rule - the body actually DOES have an immune response to it, and the antibodies it develops fights it back just like any other virus. The problem with HIV is it attacks white-blood cells which are a crucial component of the immune system - so even as your body is trying to fight it back it's ability to fight infections in general are worsened.
Technically there is no such thing as an "AIDS" infection you can be immune to - AIDS is a condition caused by numerous possible things. The most common by far being the HIV virus but severe drug abuse for example can also cause AIDS. AIDS is simply an acquired (e.g. not born-with) immune deficiency. When you have AIDS - it's some other infection that kills you because you have no immune system to fight it off.
If a bone-marrow transplant recipient (who has had his immune system killed off by radiation) gets in contact with any microbe he will develop full blown AIDS too.

So yes, eating a dirty hotdog, getting a little dirty etc. does make your immune system stronger. Using antibacterial soaps and that kind of crap makes it weaker - because you prevent your body from getting into contact with germs. Small contact, through the skin (a wonderful protective organ) is the bodies only way to develop an immune response early - the same one it will need if it gets a severe infection.
Of course you also develop an immune response during a severe infection but the extra time for this to happen could mean you die before it's done (in the case of the diseases we vaccinate against: this is practically guaranteed), and not having had small infections greatly increase the risk that a somewhat larger infection will turn into a severe one before the body can react and learn to recognize and fight back the microbe in question.

It's not so hard to understand is it? Your body is ONLY immune to two things: the diseases you gained a genetic immunity to from your parents (very, very, very few) and the microbes you have been in contact with.

In other words, if you don't get dirty, you get dead.

Because most of "us" (Europeans) grew up in a world which was dominated by the US and we did not really mind as we were thought by our fathers and grand-fathers you were benevolent (I am teaching my children something different ...)

Because most of "us" see (not necessarily watch) movies coming from the US which portrays the US as the land of the "Free" and "Brave" while we know it is not the case and just propaganda for the mindless masses.

Because most (but not all) of "us" see the state of the US economic capabilities (and in case you are wondering ... yes, US is in worse shape than the EU, even in this euro crisis)

Although it may sound weird and alien to you, but Europeans do care about what goes on in the world, just like you would (probably) care if your neighbor is doing something that either harms you, the community or himself. And it seems the neighbor thinks he is the best, brightest, richest, friendliest and best looking person around while in fact he is abusive, rude, dangerous, steals and destroys other peoples properties. The only way to let this guy know his behavior is unacceptable is by actually telling him. (supplying proof in some cases as he otherwise just pretends normal conversation is only an opinion)

Currently America is FAR, FAR AWAY from the utopia your founding fathers had set it out to be ... The current generation is eating up the goodwill and faith, that previous generations have built up, in a record pace and either the American population in general is being kept in the dark or they lack the mentality or intellect to see what is going on.

Your comment "Most Americans couldn't give a rat's ass" is spot on because most Americans believe they are still the biggest, best, etc, ... which clearly they are no longer (in a lot of areas).

Don't get me wrong. I do not have anything against Americans (otherwise I would have used it ... jk). But I find it a shame that a once great nation WITH good foundations (equality) has turned from its roots and only acts in its own interest screwing whomever is on or in in their way. Maybe the US once was able to get away with it, but this is becoming less and less the case.

When there is only a single "warning light", you might indeed be right that there is no problem at all. But to me there are so many and Americans are constantly trying to convince us it is Christmas all year round

Only around 10 americans from 0-19 years die each year due to lightning strikes. My guess is that calling the kids inside during rain will in fact indirectly (more likely to avoid exercise in rain in the future etc.) result in many more fatalities than just leaving them out (of course avoiding reckless behaviour like climbing trees when lightnings are near).

But then again I live in a really rainy country and like rainy weather. And my kids really like to play outside when it rains. In fact they love it. And that is mainly because we as parents have shown them that it is fun to play in the rain.

No, it explicitly included socialism. "For the general welfare" strike a chord?

See, I had to work for my US Citizenship, so unlike you, I learnt this stuff.

I'd guess that has its roots in our history.

After the WW2, the US were "our friends". No, seriously. We loved that country pretty much as much as you do. The US were the best thing since sliced bread. Goes without saying that it was in the west, after all they "protected us against communism" and all that, but even in the East. The US were THE country. Everything from the US was sacrosanct and good. It was an economic power house, it was the technology leader of the world, it was the pinnacle of freedom and free living.

No, seriously. We wanted to be just like you.

That kinda changed, ya know? When I look at the US and what's going on, it seems less and less free as the time progresses, and Europe looks more and more interesting as time passes. We rebuilt, we had our own economic growth, and we're now, economically, on par. Wealth distribution seems also a bit more sensible here. We got to see the incredible poverty in some areas of your country and we compare it to us, and we notice that while yes, you have rich that have no parallel over here, you also have a damn lot of poor people that can only be compared to some areas in, say, Romania or Moldavia. And that's not really something that we'd consider commendable. We tend to put a lot of emphasis on a kind of fairness and equality that differs a lot from yours.

Then there's that religion thing. Religion tends to have a certain stigma around here, especially the die hard ultra-orthodox kind. We only know that from "bad people". Read, idiots that use religion to cause harm. People who are overly religious (and that means "anything but paying lip service to it") are kinda suspect to us. Not to mention that the mere idea of the struggle between ID and evolution is comical to us altogether. The idea to teach crap like ID like it's some kind of real theory is quite outlandish. And the idea of actually voting for a politician who seriously wants to push that agenda sounds kinda nuts.

The US were some kind of role model for us during that latter half of the 20th century. That's probably the reason why we look at their actions so closely, and right now I'd guess it's a mix of disappointment and spitefulness.