Just reread this. I know what I mean and people who talk like this know what I meant but I'm not sure that it translates. If it didn't thanks for the effort and if it did then I would be up for more discussion on the list. I don't judge the kid at nine years old and I certainly don't think that brain issues in a normal environment are set in stone. I grew up in an environment with severe heavy metal pollution that is supposed to cause all kinds of terrible things. It does cause all sorts of terrible things and we had them all but our schools and our community changed all of that while the outside world denied its existence. We see the result especially as older people. But it was the education and dedication of parents, business people, religious people and the school administration that made the graduation and success rate almost 100% over twelve years when it had been 15%. I believe in growth and redemption. Just look at Stephen Hawking.
REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell Sent: Monday, May 14, 2012 5:31 PM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] Question? Obviously I disagree with the two posts below on the 9 year old psychopath article in the NYTimes Magazine last weekend. COMMENTS: Using these same "genes" and "blood" in stories the past the English jailed 9 year olds for life or hung them for stealing food. (See Charles Dickens, "Oliver Twist") Meanwhile the barbaric authorities in Florida still jail them for life for being immature, following the ways of TV violence and killing someone younger in the process. It's the Corsican mob's vendetta rules. (See Prosper Mėrimėe: "Matėo Falcone") My father carried the memory of a 13 year old boy lying cold and blue with the hangman's rope around his neck after he had killed someone. He was haunted by this image and it affected his entire life right up to the moment he went into the open heart surgery that would take his life in the end. My father believed in "Redemption" and he was a Christian who had left our traditional religion and become a scholar on Christianity. I too believe in Redemption but I'm not a messianic believer in the ultimate value of someone else's forgiveness. I believe Redemption is the fulfillment of our educational processes and potential. I would diagnose the child in the NYTimes article as needing to learn that the Alpha (Wolf) model is an incomplete one for the human child. In that article about the young "psychopath," the child's father seemed to try to say this at the end of the article but he was still in the "telling" mode of instruction rather than the "experience" mode that is consonant with the tacit structure of the child. (The primal teaching fallacy "I tell you therefore you know.") Such parental assumptions are what John Warfield labeled "Killer Assumptions." Every child is a new opportunity for growth in the parents. It's a tragedy when the parent doesn't treat it as an opportunity but a burden. That is a problem of the economic rules "Foundation" of Western society. We say it "eats their children" and that they would like for us to do the same and that's why they stuck us in the cesspools of Western environments (reservations) and destroyed our educational way of life. Few of them know that it ever existed since they don't talk to us, have no understanding of the only artifact left intact, our language. In just one example: Children's theater is a great tool. If you read "Black Elk Speaks" you will see "Children's Theater" at work as a healing for the youth Black Elk. That healing would later carry him through the horrors of war and decimation of his world. With the "theatrical" ceremonial he was freed to see what had been haunting his growth. Ultimately the battle within each of us, as adults, is the acceptance and integration of the child within from that time in our own lives. In the active child team sports teaches rhythm and coordination but it doesn't do much for the kind of sensitivity that teaches language to the child. In fact I question whether the Western idea of sports doesn't do just the opposite because of its violence. In their second phase of development Adolescence will require desensitization as a part of the natural move into that adolescence. The great Somaticist Moshe Feldenkrais made the point again and again that learning at the wrong time and in the wrong order must always be relearned if the individual is to integrate later in life. System's Scientist and Master Pedagogist John Warfield called it the "Order of least aggravation." (What will come, if they are taught well in adolescence, is the realization that Human children need each other to fulfill their destinies and even their views of what is real. Poor development of this in a feral mode is what makes the William Golding novel, "Lord of the Flies" so disturbing.) In the first phase, what we term the "East" of child development, the mortal sin is always parental and societal stupidity (and the unwillingness to learn) for that is the sin against the "Original Instructions" given by nature. Until the child is 13 or so, they have been given the natural tools of the Lifegiver to learn, break and explore the cultural codes as a part of their nature. When the parents, as the secondary lifegivers, don't facilitate but intrude on that process, we would call that an act of "Idolatry." During childhood it is both the parents and the society's responsibility to guarantee the safety of the divine connection, the child's freedom to explore (without hurting anyone) and to facilitate the discovery and archiving of all psycho-physical knowledge learned through the tacit genius of the child/Creator connection. If society, or parents, stupidly try to intervene rather than strengthening those tools, it creates monsters, ghosts and demons in the process. The tacit knowledge time is environmental and is from peri-natal to age 10 to 13 or so. The only true teaching during that time is the environmental teaching by helping the child to struggle and develop the skills they have due to being a child. If you want to compare it to something I would call it the "Buffalo" time. The time of guarding, helping, herding and making sure that the child has what it needs for growth. You are never wealthy enough, have enough time nor secure enough to do this alone. Family is not enough and certainly the Ayn Rand version, of society, is a stupid model for a child whose only drive is to acquire knowledge or die. Native People call this time the "Time of the Original Instructions." It scared Freud. He too labeled it psycho-pathological but he also saw that if taught well it would pass. For us, it is the time the child is closest to the Creator of All. Subverting that knowledge for "authority" or "power" reasons puts the parents, or public school teachers, at war with the Original Instructions and subverts the development of Tacit Knowledge. Note that when J.S. Mills father did that his son had to be rescued from a pathological depression by the Art of Poetry and Wordsworth in particular. http://enicolson.hubpages.com/hub/Depression-Cause-and-Cure-in-John-Stuart-M ill Diverting the original instructions to the purpose of parents or short term analysis is a litigious political act. It's all in the wrong order. When traditional peoples say "we aren't political" in our faith, that is what we mean. We try to seek the original harmony and processes, not to abrogate them and destroy the student's connection to its personal and cultural foundations. The "original sin" of our systems is the sin of taking the Lifegiver's Instructions and using them for simple manipulative power over another. Today, the Europeans who are the closest to this educational "Integrative Knowledge" are the Italians in their Tuscan Schools and the pedagogical work of Maria Montessori. With the English, its the pedagogy of the Libertarians A.S. Neil and Sir Herbert Read in the Summerhill Schools. Summerhill also acknowledges the "Original Instructions" although Neil used Freud to discover them. I taught in a Summerhill (15th Street School) grade school in NYCity years ago and found that the movement from Summerhill K-6 to the Montessori 6-12 was a successful one compared to the Authoritarian "Wolf" Schools that were the norm. I put my daughter in a Performing Arts school because I knew they would only work from Inner personal motivation for learning as opposed to the Alpha Wolf extrinsic model in the academic schools. It was rough but she graduated able to do the advanced higher educational work because of her inner motivation rather than simple authority. I work hard to do the same with my Foundations classes that I teach in Seminary to people who are much older but still stuck in "authority." "Wolf" teaching works in the human during adolescence when the child needs the stability of authority to give them a foundation for the destruction of analytical thought in the second learning phase. We call that the time of "War and Water." The only organization is vertical (like the military) during that time as the teenager tears their "child- tacit" Knowledge apart and looks at every facet of it. Classes should facilitate that with a strong hierarchical structure that facilitates practice at virtuosity and that gives a lot of physical outlets for their hormones. It is also during this time that the separation and individuation happens. I personally believe that adolescence is the most tough time for a parent because there are no rules about where to put your child on the range from external to internal control of the environment. My daughter was better with less control but it was tough. I personally was also better with less but others who have suffered more with the loss of the Original Instructions, often need more stability and structure. But this high school NOT, anything below 11 to 13 years of age. NOTE that this child is NINE! There are too many scripts that would explain this child apart from genetics and epigenes. Often it is amazing that children are SO resilient in spite of parental incompetence and societal aggression against them. Childrearing is frustrating and we are all incompetent. These parents in that article are what my culture calls "wolf parents." They are loving but based in an alpha parental authority model. That model was well expressed by the Jewish Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm in his book called "The Art of Loving." Loving with a capital "P" I might add. The eldest wolf child is always the one most ready to kill the parent, or their lesser offsprings while they are still pups. and the most harassed for his views. When the second child comes along, what can any prodigious first born do other than identity with the parents since the parents explain that it is now the baby's time to be most favored child and that the older (usually first borne) must now identify and be "like" the parents. If the parents are alpha authoritarians then he or she is dangerous because they don't have the maturity or skills to be so. He gets whacked for doing something natural until he withdraws into a cold, hateful place. That, like sending children to prison, is just training them to be demonic and criminal. It ain't rocket science. But it sure is like a lot of characters in theater. America has replaced the theater with word therapy (the boy's mother) and made the theatrical into advertising for junk products on TV. Even the Chinese Tiger Mother made sure her children had a place to put their hostility after being encaged in the Asian version of the alpha model. Both children were given the intricacy and hyper mind/hand/eye control of virtuosity on the Piano and the Violin and they played duets rather than admitting (as in the verbal model of psycho-therapy,) that they really hated each other. They learned another way. Energy is just energy and, as the Englishman William Blake said: "It comes from the body." I come from a Wolf Clan family as well. My father made sure there were plenty of outlets for us and made sure that we were always in the community and the religious culture. That we were taught that anyone could learn, up until we died, and that we had to pay for mistakes we made. That there was not such thing as "impunity." My music was virtuoso piano, lots of hitting and loud volume, and the marching band and chorus. What would I do with that kid in the article? There's not enough information here but I would spend a year getting to know him 24/7. Then I would give him lots of space to explore and discover his own values and vision from the "Universe." The gift of God is learning, not talent. Talents are habits raised to the level of natural intuition. Most western assumptions talent and traits are "killer assumptions." The parents should go to school but the schools are polluted with the very problems that have created the kid's issues in the first place. What we had on the reservation was our culture in my father and mother, the church as an organized team outlet, music, violent sports and a very proactive school that didn't place academic understanding above the knowledge of performance. Oh yes, you didn't ever put a child in jail and you did "ground" them in performance disciplines that have a strong psycho-physical base and develop strong conceptual habits. But most of all you make them understand the difference between a wolf and a buffalo. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of D & N Sent: Monday, May 14, 2012 11:41 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] Question? I would think this relates directly to the epigenetics so often brought up recently. Perhaps there is a proclivity within a specific pattern of connections (genetic make-up) but as the neuronal connections are constantly changing (both in the womb and after birth), this may be correctable in the early life. When these connections drastically slow after the age of 5, we lose the ability to reteach the brain. So, these "bad traits" are likely taught by the "care givers" parents and/or whoever is in contact with the child. How we live, we teach by action. What we believe, we teach by attitude and action. Now, relate this to the information from Ray regarding the 7 generational period for change (again actions whether family or community or culturally; all stemming from taught beliefs) and - I think we should be dealing with the parents, family, anyone having influence in the very early years and the individual in question. But as there is still only retribution in our society for criminal or abnormal behaviour, no actual retraining or reconditioning of the "psyche" or of what created the abnormality of action, how do we find a "new deal" for those afflicted and those affected? D. On 13/05/2012 11:11 PM, Mike Spencer wrote: Ray wrote: People are blaming the children but where did they learn it? http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/magazine/can-you-call-a-9-year-old-a-psych opath.html?ref=magazine >From the description in the article, the kids in question didn't "learn" to be as they are. All my (more or less informed) intuition says this kind of behavior derives from neurological status that deviates in some critical way(s) from the norm. Given that the human brain is, as they say, the most complex thing in the known universe, one guy can have a crowbar driven through his head with the chief result that he becomes moody and temperamental while another with apparently untraumatized brain evinces no remorse (or even evinces smug satisfaction) over keeping dead babies in the fridge. That says that we're very far indeed from connecting the observations and taxonomies of psychology with the real underlying mechanisms that give rise to the vast catalog of human thoughts, attitudes and behaviors. Psychology is all very interesting. Pharmaceutical psychiatry has managed to relieve or at least palliate a variety of afflictions. But so far as understanding how and why the outlier behaviors (or even the merely borderline harmful ones) occur, we're in a position rather like the the brightest minds of the 17th c. -- Newton, Hooke, Leibniz say -- would be were they confronted with a modern desktop computer. With bare awareness of electricity (200 years before Georg Ohm) and no clue about elemental atoms let alone solid state physics, their only explanations of how a computer worked would rely on interpreting the words and images on the screen and how they responded to keyboarding or mousing. Some, Robert Hooke perhaps, might try probing or stirring the motherboard with various tools or applying heat and cold. These brightest guys would admit frustration while lesser lights would evolve vastly involved and fantastic theories, some of them theological, to make 17th c. sense of what appears on the screen. We're not *quite* that ignorant of the brain because we know a lot about the basic nature of neural and endocrine systems. But we are as yet defeated in the pursuit of such explanations by completely unmanageable complexity. There are 100,000 neurons in each cubic mm of cortex and each makes (at least) thousands of direct synaptic connections with other neurons. *All* of the brains neurons are connected to each other at least indirectly. (Except in the case of those few with corpus callosotomy and anterior commissurotomy, which add yet another chapter of bafflement to an already intractable problem.) I was just reading Patricia Churchland's recent book, _Braintrust_. She has respectable chops in both neuroscience but, despite some interesting neurochemistry, most of the book falls back on her equally respectable chops in philosophy. We have some good *notions* about neural correlates of mothering, cooperating and trusting behaviors, variously in humans or prairie voles inter alia. But we don't really have any explanations for *anything* cultural, whether art, politics, perversity or evil. Okay, most of us learn and internalize stuff from our parents and other adults, be it good or bad, constructive of self-defeating. We internalize it and may, in many cases, never escape it. And stuff that happens to us as kids, even up to 20 or so years of age, may effect underlying neurological development if current understanding of developmental neural plasticity is right. But I'm pretty sure that extremes of behavior as in the article -- outliers -- are due to outlier brains, not learning. --- Jeez, I've digressed wayyy off topic here. But while I'm still thinkng (muttering to myself?) about Arthur's remark of a fortnight ago: Economics has little to say about jobs. It does have much to say about productivity....Jobs are a political objective. I haven't though of anything intelligent to say about it. :-) - Mike _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
