I more or less get this, but is the part about students really a US folly, or modernity broadly?
Since the 1970s, Norberg-Hodge has been visiting the northern Indian region of Ladakh. When she first arrived such age segregation was unknown there. "Now children are split into different age groups at school," Norberg-Hodge has written. "This sort of leveling has a very destructive effect..."
This seems like just just what you get with one-room rural schoolhouses, and presumably she'd see more age-splitting the bigger the cities and schools get.
The segregation of most seniors into either (a) isolated home living or (b) senior facilities is pretty distinctly American, though, and closely related to our car-stricken existence.
You can make me feel guilty for all kinds of things that I really played very little role in designing.
I know I always bring it back to cars, but that also connects to problems of the Youths in ways the article leaves out - the more we're in built environments kids need to be driven to get anywhere interesting, the less they can develop their own life independent of school, ergo the more school will dominate it.
This reminds me of my first boss, who was about sixty at the time. She wore suits that were clearly based on cuts from the 1970s but the fabrics were not those used in the 70s. They were modern. Turns out she made her own suits and kept using the same pattern.
I suppose this is a good opportunity to confess that it was only very recently that I realized I was constantly confusing Rebecca Solnit with Rebecca Traister. They're both excellent.
Anyway, the linked piece is interesting but I don't really buy it. High school has its problems, but it has its advantages too, and I think her perspective is skewed by not having experienced it herself. Bullying and homophobia are broader social problems that get magnified in that setting, but the real solution is changing social norms (which is already happening to some extent; the environment our teens are in is way more gay-friendly than I remember high school being).
not sure about the youngs' fashion sense is all I'm saying.
Link fail on phone, but a must-be-shared image from I heart mess. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9e9e8ac9-f738-4e79-a59a-fe06d2f9d592_1920x2880.jpeg?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
not sure about the youngs' fashion sense is all I'm saying.
Link fail on phone, but a must-be-shared image from I heart mess. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9e9e8ac9-f738-4e79-a59a-fe06d2f9d592_1920x2880.jpeg?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Also age-grading is very common cross-culturally and many traditional societies have (had) very elaborate systems of imparting knowledge to children and adolescents in a rigidly structured way based on age cohorts. The Great Plains and Melanesia are well-known areas for this.
My high school was back a bit before yours and wasn't very gay-friendly at all. Which makes me wonder if that didn't have something to do with the fact that the only person from my school I know of who is out as gay is also the only person I know of who plead guilty to trying to overthrow the U.S. government.
Or whatever it was a plead guilty to that was part of an attempt to overthrow the U.S. government.
3. I mostly grew up in London, which I think counts as a built environment, and I used to get around fine on public transport from about the age of 8. If kids have to be driven everywhere, that's a choice that was made by your parents' and grandparents' generations, so you can blame the olds. If you're old yourself by now, you can blame the dead. But if that's the case, it's a legitimate grievance for young people.
8.1. Give them a break. The girls might be wearing bustles, then you'd have grounds for complaint.
Men's clothing really hasn't changed since the 90s.
It's one of those cute utopian arguments -- in reality, abolishing high schools would mean child labor.
When I saw the line about "generational stratification" I thought about old folks homes and colleges. In high school you're still living with your family and in a neighborhood with people of all ages. At college, you're surrounded with people your own age all the time.
You still need friends over 21 to buy alcohol.
re: 12
Yeah. My son, in some ways, is starting gently to explore a life that is closer to the sort of free-range 1970s childhood than I think is now the norm in a lot of other places.
This week, he started walking home from school on his own (he's 9). His friends all live within a 15 minute walk, and most are closer than that so I'd expect in the next short while, he'll just head out to meet up with them. That was totally the norm for me, from a much younger age, but isn't in a lot of places.
My friends' kids that are about 11-12+ are now regularly getting the tube into central London to do things, or getting a bus into Ealing to get lunch somewhere at the weekend.
18: Nah, just rely on the kindness of strangers walking into the liquor store.
The link in 8 leads me to fear that the kids really aren't alright.
I don't have those pants but my Swedish hiking trousers have a zipper on the sides so I can release heat from my thighs.
Mine has a zipper in front for that.
That's probably not good to leave open while you walk.
I wouldn't want the heat to escape.
As a homeschooler I certainly had similar opinions about age-stratification being bad. Though it's hard now for me to strip out the parts of that viewpoint that were good from the adjacent bad things about homeschool and evangelical culture. For example, there was a big obsession with how "teenager" was a recently invented concept that infantilized the more traditional notion of "young adults," which I'm now pretty skeptical of. And of course a lot of it in that context is all mixed in which purity culture and hard to separate from "teens shouldn't be dating, they should be preparing to get married, which might be an 19-yo woman and a 25-yo man because age segregation is bad" and other obviously fucked up things.
16: and early marriage for girls with trad dads.
I think it's a bit much to blame some instanves of rape on high schools, as the article seems to. But there is something to be said with how kids behave differently when given small amounts of responsibility (care for a younger friend or sibling), and in school they spend an awful lot of time not doing that.
I'm as happy as the next red-diaper baby to blame capitalism for all of society's ills, but I think maybe age/cohort stratification/segregation happens in part because people are looking for sexual partners, and functioning societies (pre-capitalist societies as well as capitalist societies) have an interest in people finding partners of roughly their own age.
Fashion is all about creating different ways to present partial nudity. Various hip cutouts, 8 being one of them, are certainly a current trend (replacing the immediately previous trend of visible bellies, and the one before of various ways of exposing parts of shoulders). One of the baristas at my coffee shop has recently taken to wearing something roughly like these, for example.
29 is a great pair of pants if you love having tan lines that look like the Walmart logo.
I think the most take-worthy recent fashion trend among the youngs (or at least the college-aged set), was that the tums-out trend wasn't just for skinny women. It was really an all sizes and shapes trend, at least around here, which seemed like a positive development. So contra 21, maybe the kids are already. (Also, maybe even more weirdly, it was not just for summer! So many baffling winter tums-out outfits.)
21: I suspect it was an adult that dressed that kid up like that.
The thing that struck me is that the diaper/codpiece part of the outfit must itself be belted to hold up the visible lower belt. This seems like a lot of trouble to put on, plus the too-long pants and sleeves mean that walking or handling things are both impossible in these clothes.
The responsible parties are I think the guys on this page? The website is as practical as the clothes. https://egonlab.com/physical/about
The linked article is pretty unsatisfying. Solnit seemingly blames high school for the failure of law enforcement, for instance, and in general she talks about high school causing issues that are actually problems for society at large.
When she discusses the suicide rate, she makes no attempt to differentiate between the home-schooled and the conventionally schooled. And I'd guess a lot of folks are home-schooled precisely because parents want to avoid tolerance.
But is she actually promoting home schooling as an alternative? She doesn't say. If not that, then what? Community College for 16-year-olds is the only other choice that she discusses.
She starts the article with a red herring: "I didn't go to high school." In fact, we find out that after eighth-grade, she went into a more age-segregated environment than the ones that she criticizes: She went to a school for ninth and tenth graders that chose to call itself an "alternative junior high" rather than an alternative high school.
And a lot of the problems she identifies with her own education have nothing to do with age segregation. She didn't like Hard Times? Okay, but the solution to that is to not teach Hard Times.
I don't actually get why she hated Hard Times. It's not Dickens's best work, but it's fine.
It read like she wanted to abolish high school hegemony ("...recognize the tremendous variety of schools..."), promote various models that can stand alongside each other as options, that sort of thing. But one can't abolish, say, TV depictions of high school.
I've had multiple conversations with parents debating the merits of a middle school system (6th-8th) versus a jr high system (7th-9th). Indisputably, some 6th graders would be better off being lumped in with elementary school kids, but I also know that Hawaii and Ace were super done with elementary school by mid-fourth grade.
When my peers went to school here, the district had one single school for kinder-1st, one for 2nd-3rd, one for 4th-5th, one for 6th ONLY I believe, and one for 7th-8th. And then a million iterations where sometimes it was 7th only or whatever. Fortunately everyone seems to be in agreement that it was terrible.
Yeah, there's already lots of different types of high schools. Some really do fit the caricature but lots of others don't. She gestures toward this but doesn't really engage with the implications.
I think people on the left like to say "abolish", so they can call themselves abolitionists.
OK, I read the article. Nicely written, but not well argued.
She mentions a few high schools in intolerant places that are filled with intolerant kids who are horrible. I agree with a bunch of her tangential points (meaningful communication with older people and some responsibility for younger ones are both good experiences, are getting rarer under US driving-only atomized existence), I'll read more of her essays, she's good, but the broad conclusion isn't supported in this piece.
39 is definitely true, and the original anti-slavery abolitionists were the same way.
My high school was small. I graduated with 17 people.
We didn't even have partial nudity. We also didn't have the numbers to separate into different groups by interests.
Abolish clothes at Moby's high school!
Community College for 16-year-olds
I'm still not sure why there isn't a streamlined high school/college diploma track gaining widespread acceptance -- maybe some kind of accelerated six year curriculum, with a mixture of academic and vocational options? Actually I can think of at least ten reasons why this isn't a thing, but it seems like such an obvious way to lower costs. (AIMHMHB, I finished high school in three years and so had time to go to college, pick the wrong major, have a rolling mental breakdown, take an extended leave of absence, go back and cobble together a pitiful degree so I could finish up and start full-time work before my 23rd birthday. Profit! It did leave me feeling like I'd aged a hundred years in six.)
Yeah, knowledge-wise I was really for college much sooner than I was ready for it in terms of executive functionality or social whatever. Fortunately, four of the seven boys in my high school class, so the social whatever didn't really change.
46: There are definitely partial versions of that out there, although I don't know if any of them include a full bachelor's degree. There's one here called "middle college" where high schoolers take some college-level coursework. I think they mostly are geared toward giving kids a head start in college rather than replacing it though.
46: It is a thing in Washington State: https://www.sbctc.edu/colleges-staff/programs-services/running-start/
Running Start is a program that allows 11th and 12th grade students to take college courses at Washington's 34 community and technical colleges. Students earn both high school and college credits for these courses.
Running Start students and their families do not pay tuition. They are responsible for mandatory fees, books and transportation. Students receive both high school and college credit for these classes, which accelerates their progress through the education system.
It's a thing here. Hawaii gets to decide as an 8th grader if she wants to do early college access through the high school, where you leave with an associate's degree. And there's a very developed vo-tech program at our high school, including things like catering and hair/salon/beauty classes, as well as the more traditional manly arts.
more traditional manly arts
MAD GOD is a completely off the rails vividly imagined hellscape (many layers of hell, each carefully depicted, each alone jet-grade nightmare fuel. Funnels to capture the suffering). Parts are done with stop action animation using model kits. Not for kids, no joke.
46: it's a big thing here. Everyone gets an associate's by the end of high school! Lock in gen ed credits through concurrent enrollment, which means a high school teacher teaches a college curriculum. The taxpayers are a big fan. The universities are discovering that it turns out that gen ed kept the lights on, sooooo. For the students, it's mixed. Some thrive. Most use it as resume padding. And some discover that taking an easy class to fill their gen ed box at age 15 means they aren't actually prepared for their degree program.
Just had a meeting today about our university's new plan to get all the students who come in with all that gen ed credit to stay another year for a masters. So we'll just rename senior year of high school to fake college and senior year of college to a fake masters and then all jobs can start requiring masters degrees, and nothing will have changed and people will still have 16 years of education. Progress!
My mom had two, but I only have one.
46, 50:
The Ohio equivalent is College Credit Plus, and it's the main thing keeping community colleges afloat. It's going to grow a lot, too, with the Intel plant that's coming and the associated boom in trades education.
It's great to see more opportunities for leaning skilled trades, but I'm not sure it really does much to prevent age segregation.
If it can delay Ohio's descent until dystopia, it's a win.
I have mixed feelings about it. It's excellent as a cheaper way for bright students to get through college faster.
Here's the most dystopian snake-eating-its-tail part from my perspective:
1. Algebra is a class that all high school students must take to graduate.
2. College Algebra is a class that covers the exact same material. In theory everyone pretends that it's a harder, college version. But in reality, you've filtered out all the students who understood it the first time around and you're now strictly teaching students who find it more challenging. It would be stupid to make it a more difficult class, and so in general, it's going to be easier than high school algebra. Maybe. Maybe not.
3. Early College High School Programs now offer college courses for ambitious high school students. So now you can take College Algebra in high school. So you are taking a college class that really shouldn't exist because it's a watered down version of a high school class, and offering it to high school students. (Presumably it at least resumes its normal pace and depth. Maybe, maybe not.)
Ohio is consistently 5 steps behind Florida on the path to dystopia.
I didn't even know there was college algebra, except remedial.
A big problem with 60.1 is that it's really only helpful for bright students who for some reason are going to a lower rigor college than they should be going to. A class taught in high school can never match up with a good class at an excellent school. If it were at that level of rigor than most of the students would fail! So this really only works for classes that you'll never need as a prerequisite.
Algebra is sus because it was invented by Muslims. Calculus is safer to learn in high school because it's western.
I don't actually get why she hated Hard Times. It's not Dickens's best work, but it's fine.
I hated Dickens' best work, so I get it.
I kind of hate that Victoria's Secret song, but I do like how it portrays living in Ohio as inherently morally suspect. (Apologies to peep and Rob.)
The song isn't good enough to be on the radio that often.
I saw Les walking through the City Center Mall. The 90s were wild.
"I know Victoria's secret
Girl you wouldn't believe
She's an old man who hired Jeffrey Epstein
Making money off of girls like me"
When I go to the doctor it's at the Wexner Medical Center. I go to see weird art at the Wexner Center for the Arts. I guess I am morally suspect.
Is the artistic pile of broken glass still there?
James Palmer might be subtweeting this article:
I find the motte-and-bailey element of slogans like "abolish the family" interesting because it feels like people want the thrill of seeming radical and provocative but then retreat to "actually I mean provide better childcare choices" when challenged.
(I'm going to try out pasting tweets in full more often because who knows what's going to happen to Twitter)
OT: Is there a way to make Facebook stop trying to get me to join a militia-friendly group? I keep clicking on "hide all from ...." but people just start more groups, I guess.
75: Yes. By Maya Lin the designer of the Vietnam War Memorial.
Right. My wife's aunt, not believing it was real or something, reached through the fence to touch it. A recorded voice that sounded female told her to not reach through the fence. We always wondered if it was Lin's voice. Then my wife met Lin and asked. Not her voice.
The article in the OP kinda sorta makes a good argument to abolish high school sports. Or at least, cap their budget at that of a chess club, and not on a per-student basis but at the schoolwide level.
82: The budget for the chess club at my high school was $0. Not especially relevant to your point, but I'm still bitter.
It seems really strange to me that a known actor like Julian Sands (the main bad guy in Vibes) can disappear so close to Los Angeles and not be found in a week. I know the weather is bad, but I guess I didn't consider the mountains near L.A. were of that magnitude.
The highest mountains in southern California are a category of their own. Lots of places where the mountains don't get snow, but then a few places that are above 10,000 feet and get snow every year. I don't know what preparation Sands did for Mt. Baldy, if indeed that's where he went, but I'm continually surprised how many people attempt it without snow/ice equipment.
54: My husband has a Masters's and he defended a real thesis, because in Canada you get a master's degree before getting a Ph. d. Such a hassle explaining that down here if people don't know of his advisor.
That said, I always thought it was cool that an honors degree from Oxford or Cambridge turned into a Mastersvafter 5 years.
In re age segregation - it's a real problem with activism, because often there is like, literally zero historical or practical memory of the past.
Age segregation starts because of course people get further on in careers and/or have small children and/or have aging parents starting in their late twenties or around thirty and thus have to budget their time very, very carefully if they have time and energy for extraneous stuff at all; but it hardens into habit and culture, so people don't come back later. Younger activists often have very little imagination - never mind will - to understand how, like, it's not counterrevolutionary to need to care for aging parents or to have different personal, cultural and ethical concerns at forty-five than at twenty-five, and often young activists don't have a mode for talking to older people that isn't "talking politely to your socially conservative aunt", which is really not helpful.
I was at an event that skewed averagely young (let's say, under 35) but with a leavening of older people where some relative newb, activism-wise, was nice but really pretty patronizing to this retired guy in sort of schlubby flannel shirt with no obvious countercultural signifiers....not realizing that this guy was, like, someone who had been a radical activist since the seventies, was heavily involved in the event we were attending and had been a big figure in multiple major projects since I moved here in the nineties. The new person really didn't know anyone even moderately older or she would have known this and meanwhile she was gently trying to elicit what she clearly expected to be confused but proletarian left-liberal mumblings from the guy. I could tell that he thought it was kind of funny, but that kind of thing happens a lot, and indeed happens to me unless I am careful to roll up to events with the right demeanor and name-drop a bit.
And yet! I am part of a project that supports unhoused people, and in general it's better than most, age-wise. And I myself found myself talking in that too-polite way to a volunteer who couldn't be more than ten or twelve years older than me, an eyeblink once you're in your forties.
I think this is more common in majority-white spaces and that POC-led radical projects tend to have a better culture, and projects with a lot of union people tend to be better, but even there age segregation is pretty powerful. It would be nice to just dismiss this as stupid young people not trusting anyone over thirty...but on the other hand, I've observed stupid young people who don't trust anyone over thirty since I was one myself and those movements have been right about a lot of stuff that older people accommodate ourselves to. They were right about national databases in the nineties/2000s, they have been right about the pervasiveness and intensification of police brutality, they were right about body cameras as a tool for the cops to evade responsibility, etc etc etc etc - young radicals haven't yet had to make intellectual and ethical accommodations and this gives them a lot of intellectual freedom. When the Olds silo off into "respectable" projects we lose a lot.
"I always thought it was cool that an honors degree from Oxford or Cambridge turned into a Masters after 5 years."
I hasten to point out that it isn't automatic. You have to answer the following questions correctly:
1. Are you still breathing?
2. Do you have a suit to wear?
3. Can you send me £10, please?
88 is very interesting not least because it's completely opposite to my experience over here. Typically there may be a few people in their early 20s - students or recent students - but the bulk of the membership, including all the leadership and most of the people who actually know how stuff gets done - will be in their 50s at the youngest, and probably closer to 60 or 70. It is the last surviving part of my work universe in which I get referred to regularly as "this young man".
Actual young people just don't bother after a bit. AIMHMHB the experience of long-standing party members during the Corbyn years was hordes of young Momentum radical types who turned up exactly once, to vote for Corbyn as leader, and then did absolutely nothing else - all the organising, canvassing etc was left to the olds.
re: 54 and 87.last
The old Scottish universities award an undergraduate Masters degree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Arts_(Scotland)
Those are traditionally 4 year degrees, though, and do often involve a thesis, so they are are longer and more challenging than traditional BA degrees. The distinction is much more blurred now that a lot of B.A (Hons) degrees are also 4 years, so it's largely a labelling thing.
Ironically, my 2 year masters at Oxford was a B.Phil (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor_of_Philosophy#University_of_Oxford ), so I have an MA and a B.Phil, but I did the "M" before the "B".
To get a masters I had to fill out a form, and some people recommended not doing it because our program didn't enroll for terminal masters so if you have one some people assume it's because you were at risk of failing out of the program.
92: Someone I know was hiring a software person and interviewed a guy with a Masters from MIT, and he said he was appalled at the caliber. And I said, I bet that MIT doesn't have a terminal masters and you were interviewing someone who dropped out of their program.
Dropping out of a Ph.D. program is fine. A great life path.
I don't have a masters, because I never fulfilled the stricter breadth requirement for class work that out masters required.
Here we're supposed to make everyone fill out the masters paperwork because some our students are instructor of record for remedial courses, and it's bad for rankings to have instructors without a graduate degree.
94: Completely agree. Bur basically, he was saying that MIT computer programming graduate students were bad, and I was suggesting that the particular guy he was interviewing was probably not reflective of the program as a whole.
Indeed. I never bothered because it's obviously a bullshit credential and I'd rather have a tenner than a useless (to me) qualification.
85, 86: Mt. Baldy was used by a friend of mine as an inducement to accept a job in Southern California. "You can leave work and be up and down a 10,000 foot peak before nightfall" was the essence of the pitch. In the event I did move out there and we were preparing for the climb on those terms (near the solstice so snow not the issue, but daylight was). However, a day or two before we were to do it my wife showed signs of preterm labor and was prescribed bedrest so the hike was scrubbed. By the next summer I had moved to Pittsburgh (my friend's assessment: "You're leaving this for those scruffy little hills?"). Did get in some hikes in the Baldy area including nearby Iron Mountain (not as tall but > 7,000 vertical from the trailhead). Also got up San Gorgonio, San Jacinto and Telescope (overlooks Death Valley). Really enjoyed my relatively short time living out there on that front.
No, an intrepid Kiwi who has since fled back to Auckland.
84: You made do with the large sticks you found on the Great Plains veldt.
Dammit. Some day I will learn to close tags in hand-rolled html. But not this day.
103, 104 those are two of my favorite things
What about bikinis and balaclavas?
