My brother skipped out on the first year (6 in a 6-8 system) by going to Bratislava for a year with my father. He didn't miss a thing. Based on that, I think I can advocate for sending all middle-school age kids to Bratislava.
sending all middle-school age kids to Bratislava
Having seen Hostel recently, I second that recommendation.
I went to the kind of school district where the issues were violence in schools and getting kids to graduate, and I had a miserable experience in middle school as well. It was mostly the same social stuff Becks describes, plus the fact that we basically didn't learn anything in most of our classes.
As someone who taught middle school students, I can assure you that teachers hate middle school just as much as the students do. Students come into middle school from the controlled environment of elementary school and are basically placed into a miniature high school environment, but they're no way equipped to handle that. And our (the teacher's) attempts to work around the system to give the students the discipline and support they need in order to succeed are often actively resisted by principals who view teachers collaborating with each other as a threat to their own power.
And the fact is that most kids don't learn anything in middle school. The teachers are too overwhelmed simply trying to maintain basic order amongst children who lack the emotional maturity to deal with the middle school environment (an environment which is completely and utterly inappropriate for the developmental level of the students), meaning that they have to resort to busywork all too often.
I don't know what the solution is, but I do know that the current American middle school ain't it.
What's all this "no learning going on in middle school". Yeah, it could be better, but it's not like we all came out of there three years later with the same level of knowledge.
gswift: I came out of middle school with severe emotional problems and mild PTSD. But it is an understatement to say I learned nothing.
Is an overstatement to say, rather. What is wrong with me lately?
Jesus, that's horrible. Jr. high wasn't fantastic for me or anything, but it was nothing traumatic.
Two of the very best teachers I had in all of public school were at my Jr. High -- Mr. Arnold, who taught Social Studies, and Mr. Jost, who taught Math. (Also had a very good speech teacher, but (a) I have forgotten his name and (b) the lessons don't seem to have stuck very well as I am Not Much of a public speaker.) It's funny but I think of all of public school I have the most positive memories of Jr. High*; I know this is pretty unusual. (Also I have the highly traumatic memory, previously discussed on this site, of my nakedness exposed for all of my 8th-grade English class to see.)
My Jr. High experience was complicated by my being struck by a car a few weeks before the end of 7th grade and spending two months of the summer in the hospital recovering from head trauma, and still being partially paralyzed at the beginning of 8th grade.
*Speaking here of memories os school -- I have some better memories of social interactions from high school. But high school was mostly just 3 years (skipped senior year) of waiting to leave home.
I've got two solutions: First, all jr. high-age kids could be given the equivalent of half an ounce of cannabis every month (brownies, whatever) and allowed to hang out someplace where they wouldn't bother other people too much. Alternately, jr. high could be primarily vocational ed. -- typing, shop, drafting, home ec. etc. It would give the kids something to do with their hands, and help them feel a little more grown up.
My experiences seem similar to Clownaesthesiologist's. Junior high school seems to me to be a very good thing--an academic half-way house where a kid can more safely transition from elementary school to high school. Apparently YMMV.
I went to a 7-12 high school, with no formal separation between middle schoolers and high schoolers, so I remember the 'middle school' experience as being a scuttling rodentlike creature in a building full of bigger more important people.
But that wasn't particularly unpleasant -- I had a perfectly fine time in 7th and 8th grade. Still, my social experiences weren't all that normal -- I was coming out of an elementary school where essentially no one spoke to me, so just not being an absolute pariah (which, for the first time in seventh grade, I wasn't) was awfully nice.
scuttling rodentlike creature in a building full of bigger more important people
You sure this isn't your memory of being a first-year associate?
Very much the same sort of thing.
What struck me about the article: both the school which coddles eleven-year-olds and the school that molds eleven-year-olds seem to produce successful eleven-year-olds, but it's neither the coddling nor the molding that does it, just the simple fact that someone paid attention to eleven-year-olds.
We had a middle school from grades 6-8 when I a kid. Now, due to enrollment skyrocketing, there's a middle school (made out of an elementary school) for grades 5-6, a junior high for 7-8, and all the elementary schools are for grades K-4.
When I was still planning to be a teacher, back in the day, I was planning to be a middle school teacher. I found jr. high (mine was 7-9) to be chock full of all the standard white middle-class social trauma, yes, but I also was later able to assess it as a period of tremendous personal creativity. There was a definite crucible effect. While I found some of my most burnt-out and hopeless teachers there, I also found the very best in my entire academic life.
The conventional wisdom, ten years or so ago when I was studying it with the goal of it being my career, was that middle school existed to create a firewall between the hand-holding of K-5/6 and the ass-kicking of 9/10-12, a safe middle where kids could spend one day being a kid and the next being a little grown-up and then the next a kid again, and that in the new-face-every-day phase of development most jr. high kids adopt it was simply unrealistic to expect stable performance from them as students. As such, I spent much more class time on developmental psychology and reading the books we would be encouraged or required to teach in our own classes so that we could try to empathize rather than on learning how to teach. The elementary and high school tracks seemed, in contrast, to deal almost entirely with the mechanics of transmitting information from one person to another. Middle Grades Ed. was very much about fuzzier, touchy-feelier things.
I never made it into full-time teaching, but I did do a lot of classroom field work and spent a summer teaching algebra & astronomy to rising 7th graders, and my own experience was that they tended to respond better to being treated like little grown-ups than like big kids. I'd love to see more work done on the 6-12 schools, since as the story says they are much less common and thus much less studied. The kid who complains about not having a locker with a combination? I'm willing to bet he's the majority.
just the simple fact that someone paid attention to eleven-year-olds
Regardless of the ways in which the age groups are (not) bracketed off from other age groups, having smaller classes would improve performance by leaps and bounds. In the summer program where I taught, at which I was much more successful than when I would man the front of the room out in a public school for a day every week or so, my largest class was five students. I attribute much of my success to this single fact.
I'm a veteran of this fight. Working with a very forward-looking principal our local, in which we were active in the management, was doing the best it could not to isolate the seventh and eighth graders. When his removal was orchestrated—by Vallas ironically enough and thank-you-very-much‐the middle-schoolers were consolidated on the uppermost floor and the hammer came down, just in time for my daughter's seventh and eighth grades. What saved her were arts: she's comedically gifted and was in several ambitious productions, and once a week in the eighth grade she went to an enrichment program at the Art Institute where she was taught on the college level, I thought, and responded beautifully. On the other hand, her math and general academic self-confidence nose-dived and have never really recovered.
We felt one child was enough of a sacrifice, having been defeated so to speak, and my son has gone to a special magnet program 6-8, in practically the richest public school in the city. We've found that many of the other parents of the kids in his class are just like us, long-active in their local schools, unwilling to put their children through middle school there. He's had a good experience, having bonded very well with the other kids, who are much like himself. This is a startling contrast to my daughter's experience (and mine) of middle school, where sheer incongruity and being considered freakish for having an advanced level of knowledge and sophistication no one had ever taught us we needed to hide led to much bullying and viciousness.
speaking of being an associate, is it normal to file motions for vague strategic reasons that you don't actually have a real chance of winning? I guess it probably is, but damn.
It was academically much more worthwile for me than elementary school, but yeah, miserable. Is it the school or the years though? Schools that do K-8 tend to be very different in other ways too...(smaller, etc.)
speaking of being an associate, is it normal to file motions for vague strategic reasons that you don't actually have a real chance of winning?
As long as they have a basis in law and fact, sure.
Yep. I spent much of my junior associatehood entirely mystified by why we were doing many of the things we were doing, given that there was no chance they were going anywhere. As a more senior associate, I often disagree with the strategy, but the vague strategic considerations (educating the judge about an issue that will come up again later; positioning yourself for settlement negotiations; pleasing the client; could be anything) make more sense than they used to.
By the way, lawyers looking for something to buck ourselves up this morning might look at this from CharleyCarp.
Yes. My problem is I got exposed to that side of the legal profession *first* for several blissful years, so being a drone is all the worse...
I hate litigation.
You may have chosen the wrong profession.
10: allowed to hang out someplace where they wouldn't bother other people too much. Alternately, jr. high could be primarily vocational ed.
Along similar lines, my brother has long been of the opinion that junior high-aged kids should work on a farm or do other manual labor. Their hormones are raging and they can't sit still or concentrate and it'll do 'em some good.
(And why not combine that with the community service most kids seem to be required to do in high school these days?)
It's probably indicative of my middle school experience to note that I dropped out of school at the end of it.
30: Do you mean practically, or legally? I believe I was probably in violation of something or other for a while. I was officially on the rolls of a high school for a while (two, actually) but didn't go.
Huh. What happened? GED, work, you're commenting from a public library where you warm up after a long night of sleeping on the streets?
32: nah, all that sleeping on the streets stuff was done with as a teenager. Bounced back and forth, eventually got minimal diploma, worked a bunch of jobs (some boring some interesting some crazy) and other things. Got bored, took correspondence classes, took/challenged all the high school stuff I missed at a community college, transferred to uni., then b.sc, m.ma, ph.d -> academics. Guess it (education) eventually stuck, just not the first go round.
Community colleges really are a wonderful thing. One of my roommates at the University of Chicago transferred in from some Jersey community college after having dropped out of high school and waitressed for seven or eight years. She took the first class for fun, and the next several because she started to realize how smart she was and how interesting college was, and then ended up doing very nicely thank you at U of C. It's one of the few institutions that really gives people an alternative route back into education after something goes wrong with the standard route for them.
It's one of the few institutions that really gives people an alternative route back into education after something goes wrong with the standard route for them.
That's what I'm banking on.
I'm a pretty big fan of them too. I was able to take 1st year and high school classes together, which helped too. There was a bit of stigma a the uni when you went applying for honours programs and the like, but nothing that actually got in the way. More of a `you can't do that', `yeah? watch me.' than a real barrier. Some of the best undergraduate teachers I've run into anywhere were at that college (which may be a bit of a stand out, but still).
Yeah, I'm not sure that middle-school dropouts are known for their interest in what they can and can't do.
you're probably right, bitchphd.
About my middle school experience: I really hesitate to try and generalize from it. I mean, it was pretty bad --- but perhaps it was just pretty bad for me, at that time. There was a lot going on in and outside of school. I've always suspected a slightly different chain of events could have changed things a lot for me.
It's one of the few institutions that really gives people an alternative route back into education after something goes wrong with the standard route for them.
And I think the standard route really doesn't fit a lot of people very well, even if just in regards to timing. The gnashing of teeth and rending of garments you hear in some quarters when junior doesn't go directly from highschool to undergrad to professional/higher degree to fast-track career is, I think, both unwarranted and actively harmful.
Not that it's necessarily easy to get back "on track", and not that it couldn't be made much easier, but the "oh no, s/he's throwing it all away!" sentiment seriously gets on my nerves.
And having now met soubzriquet, I can attest that noone would never ever know that at one point in his life he "threw it all away".
never
Which just goes to show that the standard route, which I assiduously followed, isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be.
M/tch: I'm sneaky that way....
More seriously, while I wouldn't recommend quite the path I took to anyone, I'm all for kids taking some time off after high school before heading to university. It's a failing of the educational system that we make this more difficult than it should be.
And *definitely* taking time off between college and grad school.
M/tch: I'm sneaky that way....
A while back, the multiple piercings would have been a dead giveaway that you were a miscreant, but lately, I've seen investment bankers with more metal scattered about their face. Not to mention that I think you said you're from BC, so of course the calibration has to be adjusted.
I'm all for kids taking some time off after high school before heading to university. It's a failing of the educational system that we make this more difficult than it should be.
It's also a failing that we place so much pressure on students not to take any time off. And that, at least in the US, higher education costs are so steep that students are often trapped in jobs they don't like or feel unsuitable for due to their debt load. The pressure to choose a path, and then the difficulty of getting off that path and following another if it turns out not to be the right one, is, in a word, sucky.
It's *also* a problem that in the US a college degree is almost requisite for middle-class status.
43: Yeah, it's pretty common now. I don't go out of my way to look non-mainstream but don't go out of my way to look mainstream, if that makes sense. I got flack about piercings in the 80's, but these days most people are relaxed about it. I'm not entirely sure why I still wear them (and occasionally change them), and haven't quite decided whether or not it's something I want to make a point of, professionally.
As for your latter bit, and 43: yes. the pressure on high school students is a big part of the problem, as are the barrier to entry aspects bitchphd mentions. Particularly in the US, the way higher ed is funded is becoming more and more crazy. Encouraging people who can least afford it to aquire large debts as they `start off' is just loony.
This conversation is exactly what I've been thinking about lately, and it pleases me to see so many people whose lives have been based on continuous academic success endorsing it. I still think formal education plays too large a role in our society, for reasons Ivan Illich laid out in the seventies, in Deschooling Society and a series of follow-on books, but it's always worth remembering that people bootstrap themselves back all the time. I did that myself, in a way. I graduated hight school with something like a 1.9, and seven years later was a grad student at the University of Chicago.
I am sending my kids to a K-8 catholic school and am interested in all data that help me rationalize this decision.
I didn't drop out quite as soon as soubzriquet, but I did drop out after my first semester of high school, and this was after homeschooling a cumulative total of three years off and on, and trying private schools, and generally going all over the place education-wise. I finished my HS diploma with a correspondence course from UT Austin and a few community college duel credit courses and then, at my parents' strong urging, spent a miserable (as in crippling depression + academic mediocrity + not meeting any friends at all) semester at a third-rate school a few hours from home. I dropped out and started working as a programmer, and have been for about four years now, and my depression improved immensely, though I still haven't met any RL friends (the meetup notwithstanding).
I'm still not sure about my future. I was so very unsuited to formal education the first time around, and I don't think I'm ready to go back. And even if I could develop the skills I need to be successful in school (and get my money's worth out of it) I'm not sure that it's really what I want to do anyway, but the social aspects of it keep me thinking about it.
Actually, I guess I didn't really "drop out" of high school, since I switched straight to dual credit and correspondence work.
It's pretty clear to me that what you need is a pierced lip, pdf.
Eyebrow bar. Those are hot.
I am sending my kids to a K-8 catholic school and am interested in all data that help me rationalize this decision.
Anecdotal: the classes are usually smaller, in my hometown, the science classes were stronger, there are no problem kids because they get booted out (which is a bad thing for education generally, but not bad for the school), it's cheaper than a private school.
Also, if you have daughters, they'll be desired in high school for that whole good-girl-everything-but set of talents that seem to come along with the Catholic schooling.
I wonder about booting out problem kids. Surely just giving up on them isn't the right choice, but it seems like the *most* hopeless cases (as opposed to Murray's "half of the student body") could be reliably identified sometime around 7-9th grade, and some sort of alternative path made available, that would lead to an overall improvement in the teen's life, and yet that doesn't exclude the possibility of re-entering the higher tracks.
Or maybe the focus is better on things like getting rid of drug-addled ghettos and such that commonly lead to the family conditions that produce these children.
Ugh! middle-school was Lord of the Flies without any of the fun island stuff. And I only experienced the Mean Girls/Heathers/John Hughes bitchiness. If homeschooling had been a real option in the 1980s, and I had known about it, I would have demanded it. It couldn't have been worse than the soul-crushing lessons in socialization and the absolutely education-free lessons in everything else. I honestly can't say I learned anything in middle school but math.
I'm not sure how to fix middle school. Getting rid of it altogether sounds tempting, but I suspect the horrors of teen group behavior would still exist in almost any form. But if it was made more academic, at least I might have learned more.
Eyebrow bar. Those are hot.
How you doin'.
Ugh! middle-school was Lord of the Flies without any of the fun island stuff. And I only experienced the Mean Girls/Heathers/John Hughes bitchiness. If homeschooling had been a real option in the 1980s, and I had known about it, I would have demanded it. It couldn't have been worse than the soul-crushing lessons in socialization and the absolutely education-free lessons in everything else. I honestly can't say I learned anything in middle school but math.
I'm not sure how to fix middle school. Getting rid of it altogether sounds tempting, but I suspect the horrors of teen group behavior would still exist in almost any form. But if it was made more academic, at least I might have learned more.
A friend from my long-ago high school described the junior high experience as going to school each morning only to discover that you were the only one who hadn't gotten the message that it was obligatory to be wearing/carrying/listening-to a ( fill in the blank).
This will sound like a strange question.
Now, in junior high school I was a total outcast. I was at the next-to-bottom rung of the social ladder, right above the boy who wasn't just fat like me but nearly spherical (Bobby N-, I hope your life improved a bit) and the mentally disabled girl and the girl who never bathed (Christine J-, I talked to her occasionally because I couldn't figure out what was going on with her, poor kid.) And that was it. Then there was me.
I won't bore you with details; suffice it to say that things were truly, sincerely awful for a long time.
So here's the question: I assume that many of you successful young professional Unfoggers were...were...the Others. The ones who made fun of the weak, nerdy, poorly socialized kids like me. And I'm curious: Why did you do it? What were you thinking? Were you just moved by invigorating hate for the weak? Were you conscious of a desperate, brutal struggle and decided to win at any cost? And if you have kids, how do you talk about this kind of thing with them?
There's lots of books by and about kids who are victims, and some about kids who were bullies but were themselves poor, learning-disabled or abused, but there isn't much from the perspective of the average/popular kid.
For the record, I think junior high should be abolished, probably replaced by a largely craft-based/vocational/hands-on program with small class sizes, sort of as suggested somewhere above. Of course, I'm not holding my breath.
Here's my very real answer, because I'm pretty ashamed of how I treated some kids when I was that age.
I perceived myself as being next-to-last in the caste system. Not often, but a couple times stand out in my memory, that I picked on kids (deliberately, meanly) who were in the lowest caste. It was a way of asserting whatever power I had. Proving to myself - and whoever was watching - that I wasn't in that caste.
Other times I was unintentionally mean, and really apologetic when I found out I'd hurt someone's feelings. I was a bossy, opinionated kid, the youngest of a family that slung around insults, and I didn't realize other kids were thinner skinned.
I assume that many of you successful young professional Unfoggers were...were...the Others. The ones who made fun of the weak, nerdy, poorly socialized kids like me.
Um... why?
(My parents did not sling around insults. I just mean a gaggle of siblings-type situation.)
SnackyCakes does not speak for the Unfoggedtariat as a whole.
60: Well, there's so many Unfoggers that statistics seem to favor it, for one thing.
And for another, victimhood does not predict adult success very well, children's books to the contrary. I, for example, really didn't have any social skills. I didn't know how to compete. I didn't know when to keep my mouth shut. I didn't know how to dress to be unnoticed. I didn't know how to think in a meta manner about social relations. And those are valuable skills--they're not simply things to be despised in favor of reading a lot or having a sensitive conscience--again, children's books to the contrary.
I think you have a tendency to overestimate how "successful" people at Unfogged are. This site is very, very skewed toward the academic/intellectual/verbal end of the spectrum, and within that context, sure, people here have mostly had a fair amount of success in their chosen fields. I don't think that says anything about how popular we were in middle school, though; I suspect most of us were more toward the unpopular end, precisely due to the academic/intellectual/etc. inclination (not greatly beneficial socially in the early teen years, as I recall).
Although I don't have any direct experience with any of this (my school experience was relatively untraumatic), Frowner, I would guess that the people who would torment the lower caste would be a small minority of the upper caste, who have particular self-esteem problems or particular sadism. Of course, plenty of the person's friends may join in, and the whole thing could turn into a hobby, but I think it's particular individuals who start it.
57: Got me. My high school was actually a fairly forgiving place to be at the bottom of the totem pole. I wasn't quite, but was reasonably low statusy, but I don't think anyone was seriously bullied or abused. (Not that there weren't status machinations, but I think anything really tense was people of moderately high status jockeying for position.)
I wouldn't be surprised if pdf were right, and the tormenting is engaged in by particular sadists and just ignored by everyone else where it happens.
63: Maybe I didn't make myself quite clear (so much for the "verbal skills" part). What interests me is not so much the kids who bully for reasons of personal pathology but the kids who participate in bullying who are just, I guess, average kids. In junior high and in the first couple of years of high school, I'd say at least half of the kids bullied people to some degree. Maybe not sustainedly, maybe not beating-people-and-stepping-on-their-bookbags-level stuff, but just the casual "Hey fatass, you're so ugly that you're going to die a virgin" level of remark, or the "Hey faggot" kind of thing.
I wish I could attribute this mostly to personal virtue, but mostly it was stupidity, naivete, lack of social skills: I really didn't call names or bully others. So I don't know what goes on in the head of a twelve-year old before saying something like that. (That and I was brought up with extremely strong prohibitions on using bad language--to the point where I couldn't make the words come out of my mouth--so I couldn't have cussed people even if I wanted to.)
And success is relative--I'm a secretary, for instance, and likely to be one until I drop in my tracks. It's a funny--and illuminating--position for someone with as appalling a quantity of education as I've carelessly managed to accumulate. (And I can tell you a LOT as a result about class relations in academia, let me assure you!)
I'm pretty okay with that, as it happens, but I do think that the things that happened to me in junior high...um...helped make me what I am today.
I guess what I'm not seeing is why you think we of all people would be the ones to shed light on this. I don't recall ever doing any bullying, and although I was never bullied particularly badly, I believe we've had Unfogged discussions in the past where a lot of people have said they had been. Now, we certainly do have at least one admitted junior-high bully here (ogged), but I've always been inclined to believe he was the exception rather than the rule around here.
Yeah, I'd say the commenters here lean more toward the geeky and abused than toward the Heathers.
66: I don't think it does happen unless there are some individual people to start it up. Everyone else is just copying them, like they do with fashions and slang. Abusing less popular people is just another fashion that comes and goes.
I usually just lurk here, but am avoiding finishing an enormous grant application, so . . .
The kind of group dynamics you're asking about, Frowner, in my experience have been somewhat distinct from bullying itself. As a data point, I was a bad girl at a good girl's school (convent college, no less), & thus one would expect *I* would have been doing the bullying. But no, those good girls made my life hell: partly by being so incredibly obedient & dull, & partly by exposing me to the horrors of Group Think. A lot of what looks like bullying is often the product of a kind of internalised consensus about what constitutes acceptable behaviour that people aren't even aware they are reproducing . . .
On the other hand, I am almost certain I was having more fun than they were, so there's that.
67: Why you? Well, you-all are more assorted than my small circle of identical knee-jerk radicals, so I figured it was now or never. And I figured that if anyone had some useful meta-thoughts about this kind of thing after having engaged in it, it would be Unfoggers.
Wrong again, though. It disappoints me deeply that where I sought Other there is only...whatever is the opposite of the Other. Self? I'm fairly sure you're not my selves, though. I'm sure I would have remembered putting together all those "Fuck You, Clown" poems.
It disappoints me deeply that where I sought Other there is only...whatever is the opposite of the Other. Self?
Selves with mustaches.
I actually think I might have some more to say about this all, but I'm too tired to think that clearly at the moment.
On a serious note, Frowner, you often seem to think of us as The Other but we're really not all that different from you. Unfogged may be more assorted than your circle of radicals, but it's still a very small and idiosyncratic slice of the world. If you want major differences in experience and worldview you'll have to look a bit further afield.
74. Ah but the Other and the Self are revealed as being the same (insert random Eliot quote here) when wearing mustaches.
Frowner, I can identify with your feeling, and its locus in banter, in what is sometimes called "giving people shit." I too was incapacitated for that by what I literally could not say, by the design of my earnest parents. And it is, or would have been, natural for me to associate the capacity for that with the capacity for bullying. But it ain't so.
I didn't know how to compete. I didn't know when to keep my mouth shut. I didn't know how to dress to be unnoticed. I didn't know how to think in a meta manner about social relations. And those are valuable skills--they're not simply things to be despised in favor of reading a lot or having a sensitive conscience...
I wish I could attribute this mostly to personal virtue, but mostly it was stupidity, naivete, lack of social skills: I really didn't call names or bully others. So I don't know what goes on in the head of a twelve-year old before saying something like that. (That and I was brought up with extremely strong prohibitions on using bad language--to the point where I couldn't make the words come out of my mouth--so I couldn't have cussed people even if I wanted to.)
I had a (probably milder) version of the same affliction; it'd be nice if there were a name for it.
But the average kid will seldom remember themselves as such. That wish-fulfilling children's literature you referred to? Average kids read it to, and see themselves in the lonely, the put upon. Maybe it's a largely universal feeling.
My kids have some of my tenderness, but none of my foolish inhibitions, and they seem to be able to give back at least to defend themselves. Progress!
Paul Graham's essays on high school deserve to be linked to everywhere, but they seem especially relevant to this thread.
http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html
I had another thought this morning, in that Frowner's association of the average commenter with "yuppies" may be a result of the opinions of revulsion toward hippies expressed on the thread last week. I was taken aback by that too, but attribute it to generational effects. Those attitudes were and are typical of "yuppies" within an older age group, but don't carry the same connections among younger people. One is tempted to think the marginally employed former grad student, of any age, a poor fit for those attitudes, but it may not be a simple case of false consciousness. The association of hippies with a nauseating combination of entitlement, insulation from hard realities and necessary compromises, and self-righteousness, as suggested on that thread, is not without some basis.
79: Wha...? Wait a minute, IDP, I don't believe I said anything about people who bully turning into yuppies. I said that success doesn't correlate with being the victim of bullying, which I think is true and which I stand by. (And my point was that the narrative about bullying which appears in children's books is that if you're bulled it's because you're special and clever and will go on to show them all...which certainly isn't true in my case! That's what I meant about success!)
And then I followed that up by saying that I thought that a substantial percentage of kids bullied others in a casual manner and I just couldn't get my head around that. Which again I observed personally, and which again I can't get my head around. Not--as I said as carefully as possible--because I was special and clever but because I was socially stunted. Which I was--that's part of the reason that being bullied doesn't correlate with success.
For kids like me, the narrative of "You're bullied because you're special-wecial and you'll grow up to be the best ever, you'll see!" (as it appears in children's books and movies without number, and as it appeals to literal-minded little suckers like I was) is a really, really bad one, a narrative that harms quite as much as bullying does.
Honestly, I apologize that I wrote something that must have seemed to be "You--you lousy yuppies--must have been trampling nice, sensitive little children at school as your first step on the route to success", but that's really, truly not what I was getting at. I was trying to say "A lot of kids bully but this is seldom talked about from their point of view; kids who are bullied often lack a lot of useful skills and are further prevented from acquiring useful skills by the complex of events around bullying. If you did engage in casual bullying, why?"
Seriously, if you assume that by "successful" I mean "yuppie", you're really, really misreading me. The type of people who mean "yuppie" when they say "successful" would view my own very modest employment as total, irretrievable selling out to the man. I meant exactly what I said--that success is not predicted by being someone who attracts bullies.
(I don't actually view myself as marginally employed, though, and I'm not a former graduate student...but that seems like a fair enough response if I had really been equating professional success with bad values, as I suppose I appeared to.)
(Although--as a little tiny data point--a 22-year-old acquaintance of mine informs me that in her set "yuppie" has lost all pejorative meaning and stands in for "white/pink collar adult who is employed, lives in the city and doesn't have kids". I learned this when she casually referred to "Yuppies like you, Frowner". )
I can't think of when I've seen a bullies'-eye-view account of bullying; I think for anyone with the self-awareness to describe it as such, by the time you're an adult it's shameful enough that people don't talk about it.
I do think that you're right about the narrative of 'Everyone hates you, which means that you're special and better than they are,' is a harmful one. After all, that's largely where Objectivists come from.
Or 19-year-old nihilists. I'm just like Nietzsche! I'm ahead of my time!
I guess I'd add that one of the problems about both hippie-talk and bullying is that it's hard to say "I didn't bully people/I don't [engage in optional environmentally harmful practice, or whatever] and I don't get why people do" without giving the impression that what you're saying is "I'm a good person, and you're a bad person, and there's no justification for what you do"--even if that's not what you want to achieve.
Possibly because there isn't a complex enough popular discourse on motives...I mean, I don't watch TV, for example, but that's only fractionally a rational/moral choice. It's also about habit; the small-black-and-whiteness of my family's television; the fact that I am a fluent reader but have bad long-range vision even with glasses; my young adult desire to define myself as not-a-TV-watcher; the fact that I don't have small children to amuse; the fact that I've always had a room to retreat into and hence didn't need to define my "private time" by watching my program, etc. Merely saying "I don't really like television" doesn't get at any of that. And it's a separate thing from a critique of television-watching.
I see. I collapsed this: I assume that many of you successful young professional Unfoggers were... into "yuppie" because that was the original meaning of the word.
I certainly agree with this:
I was trying to say "A lot of kids bully but this is seldom talked about from their point of view; kids who are bullied often lack a lot of useful skills and are further prevented from acquiring useful skills by the complex of events around bullying.
The problem is that it's so much less a big deal to them than it is to you that they may not have much memory, and don't consider themselves to be the same person anymore. Heebie-Geebie is rare in that respect, I suspect her guilt and introspection means she doesn't really fit the category of person you'd like to hear from.
I do think that you're right about the narrative of 'Everyone hates you, which means that you're special and better than they are,' is a harmful one. After all, that's largely where Objectivists come from.
"Fans are Slans".
No, IDP...actually it just means that I've always felt that graduate school, professorhood and even lawyering were rather glamorous. Which shows what a sucker I am, I know.
When I wrote about successful young professionals, I was really thinking of Ogged's [funny] post about the fancy lofts last week, where he starts it off talking about where the good-looking young successful people live. I didn't think about "young professional" translating into "yuppie" at all, and I was being only semi-serious.
On a related note, it is the dialectical tension, in fact, between hippie abstraction/idealism/big-picture-ism and less-hippie attention to practical really-existing political detail which is the most productive political thingy for me.
The problem is that it's so much less a big deal to them than it is to you that they may not have much memory, and don't consider themselves to be the same person anymore.
This is exactly right. To the victims, that day or week or year of agaony on the playground was burned into their memories because it was a traumatic experience. To the bullies, it was just another day in school. There was nothing special about it to remember.
My dad recalls going to his high school reunion remembering the wounds of high school, and being utterly startled when not only was everyone friendly, but they remembered having fun with him at parties he hadn't been invited to, and remembered him not as a victim of pranks, but as someone they knew was so smart and didn't he used to play piano so well?
Shorter: to the bully, you're not that important.
I didn't think about "young professional" translating into "yuppie" at all
Isn't one the abbreviation for the other?
I agree with 84. This is reminding me of the threads where women lament being catcalled and wonder why men never explain why they think catcalling is a good idea. With the answer being that A) any man here has never catcalled and probably has never even witnessed a catcall, and B) any man who engages regularly in catcalling would not stoop to actually arguing with some feminazi who takes his playful jests seriously.
87: Yeah, which is a bitterly unpleasant bit of being bullied.
Sort of. On the other hand, if they're not relishing it 30 years later, why should I decide to continue to be hurt by it? Assuming we're talking run-of-the-mill bullying here, not actual trauma, shouldn't there be a point when getting picked on in sixth grade just doesn't matter?
88: See, because I am literal-minded, I think of "yuppie" as "young ,urban professional". I would also only actually say yuppie where I was being totally, obviously silly or where I really meant something pejorative. I mean, there are young professional people who live in the city, but "yuppie" implies more about "I care more for my olivewood chopping block than I do for the health of my underpaid, illegal-immigrant nanny".
I've had Cala's Dad's exact experience, people saying they liked or admired you, or at least thought of you as completely normal. And it gets worse: wait till you hear your isolation and pariahhood made you a crushworthy character because of your knowledge and standing-apart, a romantic loner. When I first heard that, I thought it was a form of teasing, with which I was now ok, but it wasn't. There's probably a guy out there who sincerely remembers you as hott.
66: In junior high and in the first couple of years of high school, I'd say at least half of the kids bullied people to some degree. Maybe not sustainedly, maybe not beating-people-and-stepping-on-their-bookbags-level stuff, but just the casual "Hey fatass, you're so ugly that you're going to die a virgin" level of remark, or the "Hey faggot" kind of thing. . . So I don't know what goes on in the head of a twelve-year old before saying something like that.
I have fairly distinct memories (reliable memories? dunno) from when I was around 10-13 of bullying one boy in particular. ("Bullying" here in the sense of sustained name-calling; violence was never necessary). This kid had a number of odd characteristics, of which the worst was that he would burst into tears at the slightest provocation, which of course was a serious fucking liability in a school full of 12yr old boys. I was precariously close to the bottom rungs of the bullying ladder myself; but whenever I realised that I'd said or done something that might expose me to bullying, or when I felt the mob turning on me, I knew that I could say something that would make that boy start crying, and I'd be in the clear. Everyone could chase him around the playground shouting at him for a bit, and I could go back to my book. I think I did that quite frequently. I remember it as being a matter of quite deliberate tactical calculation. I don't feel very good about it now. I'd like to think that I felt at least a little bad about it then, but I don't think I did much.
I remember an experience similar to 94. There was a girl who was nicknamed "Shamu" for obvious reasons. She acted cocky in the face of these insults, which made her tormentors (that is, most people) think "OMG! Someone we can pick on who actually enjoys it!!!!" I could always think of something sarcastic to say about/to her. I never picked on people who cried and ran away when picked on; only those who put up a brave front, because it seemed like they (well, she) didn't mind it, and it helped out my social standing by joining in on the on-picking.
94: Hey, I knew there was at least one deliberate-calculator among the Unfoggers! I was waaaaayyyy too obtuse about social relations to make that calculation (In fact, I was really impressed with myself only the other day when I thought "I bet I could distract this person from this topic by introducing another favorite topic.")
Has anyone now here read Cyril Connolly's "Enemies of Promise"? It's a smarter essay, I think, than Orwell's better-known "Such, Such Were The Joys"--in large part because Connolly grasps the need for realpolitik when one is in school.
And to return to the hippie front, I bet we'd have better public policy in general if we didn't put kids through the standard junior high experience, just because eventually we'd have an electorate without the white-hot crucible of three years of cruelty behind them. Or perhaps that's too psychologizing.
Oh, since I seem to be unclear this morning, I was thinking that there would be someone who was able to do enough meta-thinking to calculate about social relations and protect him/her self, NOT that there was someone who was wicked enough to try.
Some validation for you after all!
Enemies of Promise is great, and ought to be read together with Such, Such, Were the Joys. Orwell had a somewhat different purpose, and would never have denied the need for realpolitik. His experiences had made him very hard, maybe a little too much so. One of Connolly's virtues, there and in The Unquiet Grave, is acceptance of his own weakness, self-pity and small-mindedness. TUG is a wonderful reaction to the atmosphere of WWII in Britain, better than its WWI era equivalent, Norman Douglas's South Wind, important though that is.
98: Ramblingly and unrelatedly, this is my hypothesis, out of which I would be glad to be talked: I think Orwell would have become right-wing if he'd lived into the fifties or sixties. (This is of course irrelevant to his actual work, but it causes me a twinge of depression.) I think he would have hated everything from about 1958 onward, and viewed the cultural loosening-up as stupid and soft. He would have liked neither the "womanish" Britain Can Make It consumer goods approach of the fifties nor feminism when it came along. I suspect that he would have been like Theodore Adorno only more conservative, because ol' Teddy liked him some good times and Orwell (charmingly, though) wouldn't have known what a good time was if it came up and bit him.
And I do like Orwell--we had the complete essays at the Family Estate and I can recite bits of them from memory.
One instance of writing about bullying from the point of view of the bully that comes to mind is in From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I guess it's not exactly bullying, but if I'm remembering correctly the brother ends up having a fair amount of cash because he's been systematically cheating his slower-on-the-uptake best friend when they play cards, and ends up admitting this somewhat ashamedly to his sister.
Also, in Pinkwater's Young Adult Novel, the Wild Dada Ducks engage in a highly intellectualized form of bullying Kevin Whatshisname.
I think you're underestimating how much Orwell believed in socialism as an intellectual position, rather than because it accorded with his emotional reactions.
There's certainly plenty of stuff in his essays that makes it likely that he would have been terribly annoyed by the countercultural left -- there's a bit somewhere in maybe the Road to Wigan Pier where he snarls about all of the dratted feminist vegetarian astrology believing macrame wearing idiots (obviously, Orwell's characterization, not mine. Well, astrology is dumb, as is macrame.) who get involved with Socialism. But he was already annoyed by all those people in the 40s, and that didn't do anything to change his political beliefs.
I'm not sure where he'd have ended up specifically if he'd lived another thirty years, but I'd be stunned if his politics turned into anything that could fairly be described as taking capital's side against labor.
Well, we have no way of knowing but I don't think so. Neocons would love to believe your hypothesis, as you know, which is one of the reasons I resist it.
Feminism I'll give you; with neither Eileen nor Sonia were his actions as self-aware nor forward-looking as we expect him to be on other subjects, as recent biographies suggest.
On sensuality, about knowing what a good time was if it came up and bit him, it's not so clear. Yes, he was dry and hard, but he wrote very well about sensual pleasures—remember "A Perfect Cup of Tea." Think of "English Cooking" or the lunch he describes in his ideal, non-existent pub. And think of Down and Out in Paris and London. When I read Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, his debt to Orwell was obvious to me as I read, and Bourdain, who I think is a very good writer, was explicit in acknowledging it.
I don't think we need to beat ourselves up about how he would have reacted to the post-war world, and I think neocon appropriation of him is illegitimate.
The feminism bit is hard to stomach; one of the problems with knowing a writer primarily through their essays is that you get to feel you know them personally, and if you like their writing you think of them as a friend. And so I do get sad thinking that Orwell was an anti-feminist.
I get over it by thinking, blithely, that he would have if he'd lived longer.
That part of The Road To Wigan Pier is very pointed, and has an explicit political purpose: why isn't Socialism appealing to the people who have most to gain from it? "Dirty Hippies" is not exactly his argument, but there is a family resemblance. The rant about vegetarianism is famous, but I don't remember feminism in there. You may be right though, my memory's been playing tricks.
Feminism definitely, because it hurt. Astrology and macrame I was inventing to match the tone, rather than because I remembered it.
I remember "sandal-wearing" and "fruitjuice drinking." Some cultural styles appear to be at least seventy years old.
I agree with your faith. Justice and fairness were very important to him, and he'd have seen it in those terms.
Orwell didn't like teh gays, either...although I suspect that what he meant was that he didn't like men he saw as girlie.
I tend to believe that he would have turned against socialism in sort of a "destroy socialism in order to save it", "no no, you're doing it all wrong" way. I mean, he ratted on Paul Robeson et al to MI5 because he saw them as a threat to "real" socialism, what with being involved in civil rights, or being Jewish or a commie. (Not that MI5 couldn't have figured that stuff out on its own.) And that seems like a conservative's trajectory to me. Or at the very least someone who would ally himself with the center-right in order to preserve what he saw as the "centrist" left.
Orwell's anti-feminism bugs me a lot because it seems so ingrained in his writing, whether it's woman-represents-sex-represents-the-Life-Force or woman-as-enforcer-of-prudish-morality. I really think that feminine-women-in-the-home were a core concept in Orwell's vision of the good life.
He was running around with a crowd where there were plenty of left-wing women writers and intellectuals, but we never see them mentioned in his work except in passing, en masse and pejoratively.
...I guess where I would differ from the right on Orwell is that I don't think you can project this possible-future-Orwell backward onto his writing. Even if we could know for certain that Orwell veered sharply to the right, that wouldn't mean anything about socialism, or his critique of the British Empire. It would just mean that he, individually, had taken a wrong turn. Just like shopping people to the Secret Service was a wrong turn, no matter who did it.
Frankly, I don't hold not being attracted to individual left-wing writers and intellectuals, nor having a domestic vision of the good life against him. If he'd been a philanderer I would.
I mean, he ratted on Paul Robeson et al to MI5 because he saw them as a threat to "real" socialism, what with being involved in civil rights, or being Jewish or a commie. (Not that MI5 couldn't have figured that stuff out on its own.) And that seems like a conservative's trajectory to me. Or at the very least someone who would ally himself with the center-right in order to preserve what he saw as the "centrist" left.
I'm not defending ratting out anyone as actually defensible, but I think in context what he did doesn't suggest actual or potential movement to the right. Orwell was very anti-Communist, in the literal USSR-affiliated Communist Party sense, and described it (in what I think was conventional leftist discourse at the time) as 'right-wing' socialism; authoritarian state capitalism. The people he was ratting out (which, still not a good thing to do) he was ratting out as (in his belief) political agents of the USSR, a government he saw as evil and oppressive, in part because it was insufficiently leftist.
On the antifeminism thing, what do you think of Dorothea in A Clergyman's Daughter? Not so much feminist, but there's something there that suggests to me that he might have made progress in his thinking.
110: See, it's not so much that he didn't like specific women writers or intellectuals as that he did not review or (apparently) read them. It would be like me claiming to speak for "the left" while never reading or commenting on the work of any activist of color, and then assert that the simple life would make those people of color much happier. Who you don't read--once you're old enough to find various materials--says a lot about your politics. I mean, there's important pan-left discussions all the time, and the ones that a prolific writer like Orwell didn't talk about...that does mean something.
Or how he writes about Alex Comfort and his circle. For years, I thought those people were simply crashing idiots, and then I read some memoirs by them and found out that they actually had quite reasonable reasons for believing what they did.
I think it's kind of funny the way (if you have the editions with the letters) he'll write something really, really unforgiveably mean in public and then dash off a note along the lines of "Sorry about saying that you were a pansy and objectively fascist, give my love to the missus."
I don't have my copy of A Clergyman's Daughter by me and haven't read it since summer 1997, so I honestly don't remember much about Dorothea, but this reminds me that I should reread it.
But on the whole, I'm relieved that you don't think he would have turned to the right. I'm always very pessimistic about people's politics (as perhaps one can tell...) and I should remember that I'm hearteningly wrong more often than not. On the other hand, this means that my life is one of lovely surprises.