Why do we see very few people from minorities in #meditation circles? Is #zazen a white upper middle class-only activity?
I don’t think so. But because #capitalism makes life so hard for those minorities, they aren’t granted the chance to participate in those meditation sessions, as they have other, more urgent, things to struggle with in the first place.
Therefore, as a monk, vowing to liberate all sentient beings means to offer equal opportunities to everyone to practice #zen and this can’t be achieved under capitalism. Only an #anarchist society, where both #liberty and #equality are guaranteed, can allow that.
@violetmadder@SallyStrange@myoe
It's has to be applied on a case by case basis. For example would you want a student with an IQ of 150 mainstreamed with special education students in the same classroom?
@SallyStrange@violetmadder@myoe
I don't believe in IQ scores quantifying people's intelligence but it's a handy way to give an example. That being said, I don't think we are on the same wavelength.
When I was put into a gifted program it was the worst thing that could have been done to me: I stopped being treated as a human being (let alone a still-developing human being) and started being treated as an exam-mark-maximising machine. This meant "distractions being reduced", an "environment conducive to study" and other euphemisms for things that were not good for my mental health.
When I got good marks on exams, it gave prestige to the school, and that meant I got pushed harder. When I started to break down emotionally and didn't get good marks, that meant the school wasn't getting its prestige any more, and so I got pushed harder.
So yes, I would want me mainstreamed with everyone else, because that places us in an environment where there is no option but to treat me (and everyone else) as human beings.
@passenger@SallyStrange@violetmadder@myoe
We were caught in a catch 22 situation. We wanted to keep our daughter mainstreamed as much as possible, but she would get bored and depressed if she wasn't challenged enough by her studies. Giftedness can be somewhat of a marathon where everyone feels "rode hard and put away wet."
@passenger@SallyStrange@violetmadder@myoe
When she was young she looked up me one day and said, "I just love to study!" Fortunately she's relatively happy (with depression medication and therapy. She has anxiety issues, ADHD, and is autistic.) double majoring in history and mathematics with a somewhat minor in economics at Vassar. Seriously, I worry what effect getting a "B" will have on her.
First time I ever failed a test, I went out to my car and cried harder than I'd ever cried before in my life. My grades were terrible in college. It shattered everything I thought I knew about myself and how my life was supposed to be. "You're so smart, this should be EASY for you" the teachers had been telling me my entire life. It got to the point where now, every time anybody compliments me on my supposed intelligence, I automatically think, "But still not smart enough to make up for what's WRONG with me-- and if I'm so smart, it's gotta be BAD."
I always thought once I got to college I'd be fine. But I'd never actually learned to study. The times I've been smart were the only times I got praised or recognized, so my self-worth was totally tangled up with my ability to perform amazing feats. I took out the big student loans to go to art school, but it turns out that kind of pressure to perform is not so great for creative expression. Anxiety totally destroyed my ability to do art-- I had panic attacks and couldn't sleep before any homework deadline. I can still hardly draw stick figures anymore.
So, when it turned out I wasn't smart or special after all I lost the only value I had as a person. It broke me. I had a nervous breakdown and dropped out. Big student loans, nothing to show for it, worked in food service till my feet went bad and I couldn't even do that anymore, attempted suicide... Yeah. It was bad. Still on a lot of meds. Starting to work in mental health care now after all my time wrestling with this.
The perfectionism that gets cultivated by being "gifted" can be BRUTAL.
I'm so sorry. That sounds awful. I'm glad you survived; so many don't.
When I hear parents who only talk about their childrens' academic accomplishments, I wince, because all too often this is where it leads. (And often the parents and schools will never be willing to understand what they did.)
Heh, I keep thinking of that one demotivational poster that's a picture of a sinking ship and says something like "the purpose of your life may be to serve as a warning to others."
Too many don't survive. That's a big part of why I'm pursuing mental health work right now-- knowing what it's like and how this works, I can warn others of the traps and maybe help them cope.
This is the toxic nature of kyriarchy and capitalism. In order to survive, I had to stop listening to the messages the world is telling to people like me, and build on my own values.
Believing in equal rights means believing in the equal value of human lives. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, and we all have important things to learn from each other. Segregating people by ranking them, pushing them into brutal competitions where some are entitled to live like kings and others are less than bugs, cultivates incredible brutality that gets taken for granted.
I keep remembering that quote from the cult documentary I watched the other day. There's the kids that get broken, and then there's the kids who graduate... "Succeeding" in this system often requires some heavy-duty moral failing that isn't recognized as such.
@violetmadder@passenger@SallyStrange@myoe
When I look back at our journey as a parent, I'm just somewhat numbed by it. We were very lucky. I'm feel so very sorry for you and other gifted children who ran that gauntlet.
It really is lovely that this thread has gone from you attacking the idea of equality to commiserating with others over mistreatment by the education system.
I hope this makes you rethink your hostility to the idea of equality.
@SallyStrange@violetmadder@passenger@myoe
I never attacked equality; you just misinterpreted what I said. The problem was never with equality; the problem is with society waiting for revolution as means to install equality. If anything, equality is a pole star for guiding us toward a more equitable society.
@SallyStrange@violetmadder@passenger
I'm not apologizing for anything. The import of what I said is that people use equality as a cudgel without taking the necessary steps to bring forth equality. People demanding equality isn't enough, they need to take action. I get tired of listening to people talking a good story.
Hey, did you intend this to come off victim-blamey? Because you may not have intended to give that impression, and if so you may want to clarify that, otherwise many people (including me) might think you're an asshole.
@passenger@SallyStrange@violetmadder@myoe
I'm sorry that happened to you. I hope you are doing better. With our daughter, the emotional development was a major concern as it should be for all gifted children.
I'm glad that you've got a bright daughter and I wish the best for her. I trust that if your daughter didn't satisfy some arbitrary external definition of brightness then you'd still love her and want her to emotionally develop.
My parents loved me. They also trusted the system, which means that they expressed that love by following its recommendations. This turned out to be a bad idea. You sound like you're being smarter about it.
@passenger@SallyStrange@violetmadder@myoe
Fortunately, we were close because we homeschooled her and participated in activities with other homeschool families. She had asymmetrical development, her maturity developed normally (thank goodness) but at age 13 she took a calculus based college physics class (to keep her challenged)
She was the brighest student in the class, but didn't have the maturity to do the lab work. So we had to withdraw her from the class.
I don't think I would have survived being homeschooled, so my best wishes to her. I hope she turns out okay.
I understand that people homeschool for many reasons, and I don't want to slam all of those reasons. For me, school was one of the few places where I wasn't under constant suffocating supervision and I could interact in genuine peer environments. The other such place was late-90s IRC (while lying to my parents, and also to the mods about my age.) I think if I hadn't had school as an outlet, the latter would have been far bigger, and that has risks of its own.
My IQ is only about 15 points lower than that, and that's exactly what happened to me as a kid. So, this is not hypothetical. Guess what, I was suicidally depressed by 4th grade.
But you wanna know what my main problem with school was?
It's an authoritarian hellhole built to teach kids how to sit down and shut up, not to help them actually learn anything. That was my problem.
My problem was NOT that I just got tossed in with the special ed kids and delinquents and all the other square pegs who don't fit in round holes, or even that I was bored out of my mind-- it was that nobody in that place was addressing the bullying. Nobody was teaching kindness, cooperation, patience, or compassion.
My score on some silly test doesn't make me "BETTER" than any of the other kids. Everyone needs special treatment, to be understood and respected-- NONE of the kids were getting that. Not with these class sizes, not with this budget, not in a building styled like a prison, and not in a structure based on coercion and indoctrination. It wasn't just me being failed by that rotten system.
No, I didn't belong there. But nobody else does, either!
@violetmadder@SallyStrange@myoe
Thanks. Well said. I have long fought IQ tests. For me, I remember my seventh grade teacher standing at the front of my reading class and asking me loudly, "Were you trying to fail this test?" Years later I learned I was dyslexic.
@Cirdan You say we're not on the same wavelength, but then you declare that IQ is nonsense and join Violet in finding reasons to abolish school.
If IQ were just nonsense, it might be ok to use it as "a handy example." But it's racist, ableist, sexist nonsense that has harmed and is harming people. As evidenced by the post you are enthusiastically agreeing with. @violetmadder@myoe
I mean, I used to be pretty bitter that nobody whisked me away from the cursed zoo to Real Genius college early like the special "gifted" child I supposedly was, but nowadays I figure if that had happened (well, and if my ADHD hadn't still torpedoed me) I might have turned into another one of those excruciatingly arrogant elitists wrecking things for everyone, and... yuck.
@SallyStrange@violetmadder@myoe It's a quick hand way of signalling that I'm talking about a very intelligent person. I understand that IQ scores have all sorts of problems, but it's a common tool used in schools (And, yes I could give you an earful on that too).
Well, you were trying to get me to agree that a highly intelligent kid doesn't belong in the same classes as the developmentally disabled kids, right? Because equity and egalitarianism are oppressive, or something?
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