The poor child-rearing in societies are necessary to create people who fit the standard roles of traditional society
Many have called attention, with some impatience, to the brutality and stupidity of many of our traditional child-rearing methods. These methods are “brutal” and “stupid” only if one regards the goal of child-rearing as the production of a sane, balanced, creative human being. THIS HAS NEVER BEEN THE GOAL OF ANY SOCIETY IN THE REAL WORLD. The school critic John Taylor Gatto sums it up by saying: “the more I … persisted in thinking about the “problem” of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no “problem” with our schools? What if they are the way they are … not because they are doing something wrong, but because they are doing something right?”
Children serve to inject new ideas into the system of cultural evolution, so the traditional childrearing methods are quite logical, pragmatic and sound in fulfilling the real purpose of society, which is not to create an ideal person, but to create a semi-robot who mimics the society as closely as possible—both in its rational and its irrational aspects (groupthink), both as the repository of the wisdom of the past and as the sum total of all the cruelties and stupidities of the past, as the integrating function suggests. Very simply, a totally aware, alert, awakened (unbrainwashed) person would not fit very well into any of the standard social roles society offers; the damaged, robotized products of traditional child-rearing do fit into those slots.
That is, there is a sociological “logic” to the illogical. Are traditional schools very much like mini-prisons? Public schools serve to manufacture a manageable population and to put down dissent and originality? and run on various forms of overt or covert terrorism? Of course, the answer is an unambiguous yes; but such schools are necessary to train people for social roles in the ordinary office or factory or profession, which are also very much like mini-prisons, stifle imagination, cramp the person physically and mentally and run on terror (threat of loss of bio-survival tickets (money), in the form of pay-checks or tenure).
The permissive movement in child-rearing appeared only when it did, and has succeeded only to a limited extent, because society, who are in a low-entropy state, has always needed and still thinks it needs human robots. Utopian child-rearing will advance further, necessarily, only as society itself evolves out of authoritarianism. That is, as the accelerated changes now occurring propel us into the most rapid period of social evolution in all human history, we will then need citizens who are not robots, who are creative; who are not docile, who are innovative; who are not narrow-minded bigots, who are explorers in every sense of the word. Traditional child-rearing began to falter only when society began to enter into the present period of accelerated change and technological omni-transformation of all traditional values.
References
- Wilson, A., Robert. (1983). Prometheus Rising Chapter 8 The Moral Socio-Sexual Circuit (Location 1521). Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press.
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Type:🔴 Tags: Biology / Sociology / Sociobiology / Politics Status:☀️