social deficits

I wrote this in the Ten Key Values tab:

The acculturation to invasive and abusive bureaucratic structures may condition us to a learned helplessness when confronted with corporate gangs or class warfare.  The reverse is also true: brutal competitors feel justified and confirmed by the 12+ years of training in forced labors in schools whose mitigating social context has weakened drastically thereby creating an entitlement attitude instead of a community-minded attitude.   

I'm not sure how reduce to prime factors the dynamics driving the absolute inability to comprehend the threat of inequality on the part of our politicians. Corruption and ambition are frequently cited but as a homeschooling mother of three, I spent some time the other day wondering just what impact sitting through 16+ years of graded, hierarchical schooling has had on people's abilities to perceive injustice as a problem. After all, injustice isn't a problem in school: its a way of life.

In the classroom, all those messy aspects of life are not there. When you get a grade and pass, the other students who have failed all walk out of the room and the building and disappear. Our schools are huge and we will not necessarily see the other 28 students in each class again. We didn't know them in the first place. Our cities are large and cars take us far. We do not easily see the consequences of our actions. We spend more time in institutions and less in our neighborhoods as we commute and compute our minutes away. We navigate a processed food wonderland and have forgotten how our food is grown.

Our politicians are overly busy in endless meetings and sessions. They remind this woman in her 50s of a bunch of teens clinging to their pals, unsure of what is actually going on but deep in their clique and its issues. The political language in Washington may sound Victorian but the dysfunction is 21st century and has deep psychological roots. Identification with authoritarian tactics because of time spent in institutions and the excessive peer-orientation institutional life engenders are not just evils for homeschooling families to avoid: they are part and parcel of our current political debate.