Yeah, it really started with Columbine. Before Columbine, you mostly had moral panics involving Satanists abducting kids or putting razor blades in Halloween candy, but nothing truly substantial.
We arrest kids and send them to prison when they have fights. After the Colomubine shootings in 99 the official solution was to have a cop in every school. They called them a "School Resource Officer". Supposedly they were going to somehow prevent violence, but what they actually did was terrorize the kids, bring in drug dogs to arrest everyone suspected of having pot on them, criminalize minor discipline issues, and generally do cop shit.
In the 20+ years since school cops have never stopped a school shooting, but they have sent more than a million children to prison, plus god knows how many more to jail or on charges that didn't result in a prison term.
Sometimes I get a little jealous of people who got to experience life before 9/11. I mean, I was 11 when it happened, but I didn't get to live life as a teenager or young adult in that period. Not being tracked in everything you do, school administrations treating all of their students as potential criminals, the TSA, Homeland Security, all the extreme nationalism.
I know Columbine really got the ball rolling in treating schools like prisons, but 9/11 made the US a super shitty place to live.
Shit got turbocharged after 9/11, the next major education reform needs to be the "all children chill the fuck out" bill - free food at schools three times daily including weekends, big time after school program funding, equalizing funding between schools so our most heavily populated ones aren't the most poorly funded, paying staff and especially teachers better so that the profession is more attractive and gets more people and more talent, eliminating standardized tests as a requirement for college admissions and frankly eliminating grades as a measure of school achievement. People hate me for this one but we also have to shorten up summer break - spread those days off throughout the year if you want to keep them, but there's no reason to have a multi-month gap where most kids forget a ton of shit and have to relearn it the next year.
yeah, give them like an hour long lunch break like they do in France
eliminating standardized tests as a requirement for college admissions and frankly eliminating grades as a measure of school achievement.
hell yes
I don't know about getting rid of Summer break. I'd agree with having more smaller vacations throughout the year though. It's not like they're teaching very hard in school anyways, nobody's forgetting anything important over the Summer vacation -- least of all anything they can't just pick up again in a single class session.
I had uniforms up until like 11th grade, then they decided fuck it and just dropped it lol
I grew up in post 9/11 and even then I sensed something was wrong with the American psyche. I didn't have the theory or words to really put it into words back then, but it truly felt like being in a haunted house - paying a bunch of money to be in a place where everything looks like they're supposed to harm you, then when something does eventually harm you, the people in charge can't be held liable.
I’m so glad grew up in the pre-9/11 era. Something really snapped, you could feel it, and it’s hard to explain after 20 years when its the water you swim in. There was some breathing room to be young, make mistakes.
I think that was more Columbine than 9/11, although the ability to transpose all the social anxiety from Suburban White Failson to Brown Kid With Weird Last Name certainly sped things up.
But I think this shift has been coming much longer, as we have transitioned from SuccDem capitalist welfare state to Full Blown Fascist Hellscale. Like, the 80s Crime Wave + Reagan brain worms put us on this track. And 40 years later, Boomers don't just see Brown People as the enemy. Everyone under 60 is terrifying, so they all need to be locked up.
Part of me thinks this is just the cresting of a huge wave. We're just another ten years away from the Olds finally losing their grip and a backlash whiplashing the nation back in line with the rest of the world. But another part of me thinks we're here to stay. That this generation normalized the insanity of the 80s and I'll never see a country capable of even 60s era radicalism
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Things honestly got bad at school after Columbine for me but i was a goth kid
Yeah, it really started with Columbine. Before Columbine, you mostly had moral panics involving Satanists abducting kids or putting razor blades in Halloween candy, but nothing truly substantial.
That got really, really bad in parts of the US.
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Unfortunately The ones i knew where all very damaged kids that constantly did harm to their friends.
The school straight up disappeared a few of them to bd school after Columbine.
Most of my goth kids were nice Mormons, and the rest were obviously gay in retrospect but no one talked about it in the in the late 90s/early 00s.
Wait wait
You call the cops when CHILDREN have fights?
In the UK 30 kids form a circle and shout FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT and then they kick the crap out of each and get detention then go home?
What the fuck why are the police involved? They're children!
We arrest kids and send them to prison when they have fights. After the Colomubine shootings in 99 the official solution was to have a cop in every school. They called them a "School Resource Officer". Supposedly they were going to somehow prevent violence, but what they actually did was terrorize the kids, bring in drug dogs to arrest everyone suspected of having pot on them, criminalize minor discipline issues, and generally do cop shit.
In the 20+ years since school cops have never stopped a school shooting, but they have sent more than a million children to prison, plus god knows how many more to jail or on charges that didn't result in a prison term.
We do that in Canada too. It's dumb as fuck.
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Ahh the fight circles, good times lol. That happened over here too.
Sometimes I get a little jealous of people who got to experience life before 9/11. I mean, I was 11 when it happened, but I didn't get to live life as a teenager or young adult in that period. Not being tracked in everything you do, school administrations treating all of their students as potential criminals, the TSA, Homeland Security, all the extreme nationalism.
I know Columbine really got the ball rolling in treating schools like prisons, but 9/11 made the US a super shitty place to live.
Shit got turbocharged after 9/11, the next major education reform needs to be the "all children chill the fuck out" bill - free food at schools three times daily including weekends, big time after school program funding, equalizing funding between schools so our most heavily populated ones aren't the most poorly funded, paying staff and especially teachers better so that the profession is more attractive and gets more people and more talent, eliminating standardized tests as a requirement for college admissions and frankly eliminating grades as a measure of school achievement. People hate me for this one but we also have to shorten up summer break - spread those days off throughout the year if you want to keep them, but there's no reason to have a multi-month gap where most kids forget a ton of shit and have to relearn it the next year.
yeah, give them like an hour long lunch break like they do in France
hell yes
I don't know about getting rid of Summer break. I'd agree with having more smaller vacations throughout the year though. It's not like they're teaching very hard in school anyways, nobody's forgetting anything important over the Summer vacation -- least of all anything they can't just pick up again in a single class session.
I had uniforms up until like 11th grade, then they decided fuck it and just dropped it lol
I grew up in post 9/11 and even then I sensed something was wrong with the American psyche. I didn't have the theory or words to really put it into words back then, but it truly felt like being in a haunted house - paying a bunch of money to be in a place where everything looks like they're supposed to harm you, then when something does eventually harm you, the people in charge can't be held liable.
Absolutely. Everyone went from Cobain to Bauer real quick.
I think that was more Columbine than 9/11, although the ability to transpose all the social anxiety from Suburban White Failson to Brown Kid With Weird Last Name certainly sped things up.
But I think this shift has been coming much longer, as we have transitioned from SuccDem capitalist welfare state to Full Blown Fascist Hellscale. Like, the 80s Crime Wave + Reagan brain worms put us on this track. And 40 years later, Boomers don't just see Brown People as the enemy. Everyone under 60 is terrifying, so they all need to be locked up.
Part of me thinks this is just the cresting of a huge wave. We're just another ten years away from the Olds finally losing their grip and a backlash whiplashing the nation back in line with the rest of the world. But another part of me thinks we're here to stay. That this generation normalized the insanity of the 80s and I'll never see a country capable of even 60s era radicalism