Unfortunately, my experience (on long island, which has much better than average schools) was that most math teachers didn’t have enough understanding of their fields to teach in an interesting way. They were taught, “If the problem looks like this, do that,” and they knew just enough to teach that same way.

I imagine the question is there to test whether you treat it as “Why do taxes exist?” vs. “Why should you personally comply with the demand for taxes?” and I can’t see why the shrink would be surprised you went with option B.

Maybe she was just expecting, “So you’re not arrested for tax evasion,” and was surprised at the further reduction to men with guns.

Or you’ve over-estimated your ability to tell when she was confused.

What should be evident from the very nature of the mental health profession is that it deals in subjective, values based problems. What is, or is not, considered a healthy outlook or behavior is entirely a culture bound phenomenon. It is not because of scientific advance that homosexuality is no longer a mental health problem, but because of changes in the cultural attitudes that used to characterize the behavior as deviant.

I will go to work on Monday and tell everybody that they’re wrong and that we cause far more harm than good, and we must stop counselling people. Will that atone for my sins against humanity?

Wysiwyg, please be quite specific about the legitimate complaints. I’m aware I’m apparently setting myself up here as the defender of some kind of evil empire.

- @Antinous_Moderator:disqus
Don’t even get me started on police abuses. This has nothing to do with what I said, and I have no desire to get into an arbitrary and irrelevant conflict with someone I respect.

It’s not imaginary. It’s quite real.

-  Police routinely arrest people who are a threat to the public welfare because there are laws to stop such crimes and the police are there to protect the public.
-  Police routinely arrest people who are harming nobody, either because the laws are horribly wrong or because they feel that they have the right to arrest anyone who gets on their nerves.

Both statements are true.

Here is my first question:

What would a democratic/Montessori school do if a five year old kid wanted to go home and play with his trucks so?

Here is a question Brainspore earlier asked of the same commenter (my bolding):

That’s a complex question; rights go hand in hand with responsibilities and most societies recognize that it is often necessary to curtail both in the case of children. If a five-year-old would rather stay home and play trucks than learn to read is it a violation of his civil rights for his parents to send him to kindergarten anyway?

I found the response to this rhetorical question to be very surprising so I repeated it.

Since you say that my first and second questions are different I assume you missed Brainspores original comment. With the context of that comment, I honestly dont see how my question could be interpreted any other way.

Assuming this is the basis of the misunderstanding then I apologise for implying your error was deliberate rather than accidental.

Prediction: If you respond it will be an indignant protest that just because your question was about education doesn’t mean you’re asking a question about something to do with education.  Or that a “are you still beating your wife” type response doesn’t constitute poisoning the well.

Kids are certainly naturally curious about the world. I notice that that is not an answer to the question I unambiguously repeated with each post in this thread.

you seem to be conflating discipline with our society’s decision to condition children to think that learning about the world is stupid and boring.

I am genuinely curious as to why you believe this is what I think.

Although I believe victims is too sweeping and a bit harsh.

I believe kids need discipline but you seem to be conflating discipline with our society’s decision to condition children to think that learning about the world is stupid and boring.  Two different issues.

Edit: By “discipline” I do not mean any sort of corporal punishment.

I find it hard to see how the question could have been reasonably interpreted in any other way. Feel free to pretend otherwise of course.

Do kids get labeled as ADHD if they are “difficult”? Sure, I bet that happens, and that sucks.

Then you DO comprehend what hymenopterid was getting at.  Maybe you’re just not acknowledging how widespread it is?

I don’t know if a psychiatric Dx is really the answer though.

Here is the problem: “Things like grade school (and even high school) math are frankly dull as dishwater.”  It’s really not, though — or at least, it doesn’t have to be.  The way education has been institutionalized it teaches children that learning things is boring (and you’ve implicitly bought into that).  When you teach math as a bunch of disorganized algorithms for getting the right answer you completely rob your students of a deep and useful understanding of what mathematics is and instead convince them that “math is boring” or that they’re just naturally “bad at math” (not true, they just think it’s boring) and make further education in the subject completely impossible.  I learned mathematics in spite of my teachers, not from them. 

The amount of nationalistic propaganda in the history curricula was also very worrying to me as a teenager.

I wonder what all the “psychiatry is evil” people suppose we actually do? Do any of them have actual experience of coping with a close relative who suffers from a severe condition like bipolar affective disorder or paranoid schizophrenia. My grandma isn’t going to get any better from rainbows and crystals, I’m afraid. And I’m pretty sure she isn’t ill because an evil doctor gave her a label. It’s not imaginary. It’s quite real.

I have experience from both sides of the table as someone who has suffered recurring bouts of low mood over the years, and as someone who has personally helped people cope with anxiety, phobias, OCD and the like. The idea that people go into mental health work because they are part of some conspiracy to trap everybody in “the system” or whatever, I find both bizarre and offensive. It’s like something out of a David Icke storybook. (I had someone say more or less this, the other day).

It’s far from perfect, and I have strong feelings about the general over-prescription and efficacy of anti-depressants, when talking therapies are on balance more effective (but more expensive), but I’m worried by the apparent view shown in this thread that we are somehow out to cause harm.

I’m sure this has a lot to do with the general stigma attached to the whole area of mental health in general.

I call BS. If, at 15 you find you’re interested in something that requires math, you can learn it in a year, focusing only on math.

A 15-year-old who never had any training whatsoever in math will always be at a serious disadvantage against a 15-year-old who started learning basic arithmetic ten years earlier. You can’t learn algebra without a foundation in addition and multiplication.

There are many valid and differing approaches to education. “Don’t make any child do or learn anything they don’t want to, ever” is not one of them.

A 5 year old child gets up in a freedom loving classroom and walks towards the door. The teacher, rather than just let the kid walk out the door like a free man, asks him a question:
- Whatcha doing there, little buddy?
- Im going home, teach. Schools for suckers. Im gonna spend the afternoon playing with my trucks.
- There are many trucks to play with here, little guy. And you live on the other side of town. It would be great if you could stay with us.
- Nah, dont think so, teach. I wanna go home so Im going home. What are you gonna do about it?

I think the answer is obvious. The relationship between a parent and child is the clearest example of justifiable authority. This authority is not limitless but it certainly includes the child having to get schooled where the parent decides and if a parent drops their kid off to school the school has a responsibility to ensure the kid is still there at the end of the day.

It is reasonable to question whether schools are focussed more on obediance than on education and to propose improvements. But forcing a child to stay in school is obviously not a denial of civil liberties as @thecleaninglady:disqus  seems to think. The idea is ridiculous.

How is that not a civil rights issue?

It’s not always a civil rights issue. Or rather, it’s often necessary for parents and guardians to make certain decisions on behalf of their children, so if it is a civil rights issue then so are many aspects of child-rearing. See my response to Luke Mills.