Quotes with socialization

Inspirational quotes with socialization.

Advertising

Owing to the shape of a bell curve, the education system is geared to the mean. Unfortunately, that kind of education is virtually calculated to bore and alienate gifted minds. But instead of making exceptions where it would do the most good, the educational bureaucracy often prefers not to be bothered.In my case, for example, much of the schooling to which I was subjected was probably worse than nothing. It consisted not of real education, but of repetition and oppressive socialization (entirely superfluous given the dose of oppression I was getting away from school). Had I been left alone, preferably with access to a good library and a minimal amount of high-quality instruction, I would at least have been free to learn without useless distractions and gratuitous indoctrination. But alas, no such luck.Let’s try to break the problem down a bit. The education system […] is committed to a warm and fuzzy but scientifically counterfactual form of egalitarianism which attributes all intellectual differences to environmental factors rather than biology, implying that the so-called 'gifted' are just pampered brats who, unless their parents can afford private schooling, should atone for their undeserved good fortune by staying behind and enriching the classroom environments of less privileged students.This approach may appear admirable, but its effects on our educational and intellectual standards, and all that depends on them, have already proven to be overwhelmingly negative. This clearly betrays an ulterior motive, suggesting that it has more to do with social engineering than education. There is an obvious difference between saying that poor students have all of the human dignity and basic rights of better students, and saying that there are no inherent educationally and socially relevant differences among students. The first statement makes sense, while the second does not.The gifted population accounts for a very large part of the world’s intellectual resources. As such, they can obviously be put to better use than smoothing the ruffled feathers of average or below-average students and their parents by decorating classroom environments which prevent the gifted from learning at their natural pace. The higher we go on the scale of intellectual brilliance – and we’re not necessarily talking just about IQ – the less support is offered by the education system, yet the more likely are conceptual syntheses and grand intellectual achievements of the kind seldom produced by any group of markedly less intelligent people. In some cases, the education system is discouraging or blocking such achievements, and thus cheating humanity of their benefits.

If one more person tells me that “all gender is performance,” I think I am going to strangle them. Perhaps most annoying about that sound-bite is the somewhat snooty “I-took-a-gender-studies-class-and-youdidn’t” sort of way in which it is most often recited, a magnificent irony given the way that phrase dumbs down gender. It is a crass oversimplification, as ridiculous as saying all gender is genitals, all gender is chromosomes, or all gender is socialization. In reality, gender is all of these things and more. In fact, if there’s one thing that all of us should be able to agree on, it’s that gender is a confusing and complicated mess. It’s like a junior high school mixer, where our bodies and our internal desires awkwardly dance with one another, and with all the external expectations that other people place on us.Sure, I can perform gender: I can curtsy, or throw like a girl, or bat my eyelashes. But performance doesn’t explain why certain behaviors and ways of being come to me more naturally than others. It offers no insight into the countless restless nights I spent as a pre-teen wrestling with the inexplicable feeling that I should be female. It doesn’t capture the very real physical and emotional changes that I experienced when I hormonally transitioned from testosterone to estrogen. Performance doesn’t even begin to address the fact that, during my transition, I acted the same, wore the same T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers that I always had, yet once other people started reading me as female, they began treating me very differently. When we talk about my gender as though it were a performance, we let the audience—with all their expectations, prejudices, and presumptions—completely off the hook.

Marxist writers are generally either indifferent or mildly hostile to the anti-capitalist movement, which they see as no good substitute for the great projects of communism and social democracy. Now, in one sense this is quite justified[…] However, there seems very little reason to believe that a return to the tactics of the twentieth-century labour movement is going to achieve anything in the future… [W]hat is wrong with commodification is not commodification per se… Marxist tradition goes much further than simply recommending that the excessive power of capital be challenged and curbed. Historically, this tradition tends to assert that such a challenge can only be made by virtue of a direct challenge to the existing relations of production, conceived of as the basis for a social totality, and, crucially, that it can only be made by the proletariat, politically mobilizes as a ‘Class of Itself’. In concrete terms, this means that only the labour movement, being organized and mobilized on the basis of its class identity and demanding the socialization of the means of production, can mount such a challenge… This is where I, and the anti-capitalist movement, part company with classical Marxism… [A]nti-capitalist movement is characterized by a certain pluralism, an unwillingness to impose any one model of social organization, and a refusal of neoliberal hegemony not on the basis of a single class identity or even a single universal human identity, but precisely n the basis of a defence of such pluralism against neoliberalism’s tyrannical monomania.



Advertising
Advertising