#compulsory schooling

[shouting-epicenities-at-you]

It isn't always a joke though. In my case, the being pulled aside to learn something they don't teach the rest of the students applies mostly to buttoning buttons and filling in multiple choice bubbles and pronouncing words and making light conversation..... And it pretty much started and stopped with that stuff.

Stuff they should have taught me, and everyone else too in the compulsory stages of school, but didn't

how to transport oneself safely beyond just looking both ways before crossing the street; basic traffic laws

How to cook basic foods from scratch; how to follow and modify recipes; how to add to 'instant" foods to boost flavor, texture, and nutrition

The real-world applications of math.

Caring for plants and animals

Identifying edible VS poisonous plants; Knowing lookalikes

First aid; also basic care for injuries that don't warrant a doctor visit such as pulled muscles and minor burns

Hygiene and grooming (with an acknowledgement that not all grooming is hygiene.)

How to observe, analyze, and either solve or prevent dangerous situations

The idea of consent and bodily autonomy as something that applies to everyone, in both sexual and non-sexual situations

Conversation skills for everyone, not just the kids in speech therapy; manners and elocution; understanding how misinterpretations happen and how to deal with them and prevent them

Potential careers and what they entail

I could go on and on.

Anytime I see someone joke about how they need to teach something in school that I was taken out of class into a separate special ed class to be taught I'm just like. Yeah. They do actually teach this stuff if you've been deemed to person wrong. Extra skills classes exists if you're not the right kind of person.

[envolvenuances]

lesbian masterdoc and the unforgivable damage of making people hear compulsory heterosexuality and think of "can lesbians have crushes on men?" (no) instead of "are heterosexual women settling in unhappy marriages with men bellow their worth because of economic and social pressure?" (yes)

[grishaverse-chaos]

following up on my post from earlier, I'd like to remind all darkl!ng stans that Nikolai faced all the same problems as king (in the kos duology) that the darkl!ng did, as well as several other new problems (the demon, having to find a wife, etc) and committed ZERO mass murders. your fav could never

[fangswbenefits]

do you have a favourite book?

Of all time? Yes. Death with Interruptions by José Saramago. The entire book feels like a fever dream, but it's such a clever commentary on human nature. I highly recommend it!

[katabay]

Just out of curiosity, do you like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, as a play within a play?

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is an all time favorite! the film adaption too. a few years ago, there was a point where I was reading the play and watching the movie regularly enough that I could recite most of it off the top of my head lmao

[vriskaserketdaily]

its so hard to write vriska as an adult because she is So chronically a teenage girl. like a good 30% of her actions can be explained away with "shes a teenage girl"

yeah being 13 is just like that idk what to tell you

this is gonna probably get into "your experiences are not universal" territory but (pic unrelated)

vriska is the kinda chick where, you weren't exactly friends with her, but you ran in the same circles of weird-but-not-too-weird kids. like, neither of you were popular but there were definitely two or three freaks lower on the social scale than her, and unlike you she was a huge bitch about it. anyway, you have a massive but not-unforseen falling out (she is a LOT) and end up going to separate high schools. years later you reconnect with a different friend from the same school, and as you're catching up with them her name comes up.

and your first thought is, "damn, she's still alive?"

let's say, for example, that this is kanaya and nepeta catching up. the trolls' friend group might not have been as freaky as my own, but there are FOR SURE two or three of 'em where looking back it's like "yeah, no way that kid isn't dead/in jail by now." and then, pleasant surprise, ten years later nobody's offed themselves BUT the guy you least expect (karkat) is now a father. go figure. anyway nepeta/kanaya gets curious and asks what the hell vriska is up to, since last she heard vriska was a pretty troubled kid and it'd be nice to get some closure on that front.

same old shit, somehow. except now the police can get involved, and basically her life is a huge mess. does she have a job? no. a degree? well, half a bachelor's maybe, but everyone else who hasn't made a trainwreck of their lives is either thinking about a master's or certified in some trade of choice. does she even have a car? . . . not as such. the perpetual mystery is how is she GETTING into all this insane and petty drama with the most QUESTIONABLE people like how is she GOING to these VENUES with no car??? WHERE is she meeting & dating this BIZARRE rotating cast of shitstain losers and rancid wannabe IG baddies?????

has she like, developed or grown in any capacity? well, now she's cool with tats and piercings and has a big ol anchor on her shoulder she got while dating a hot college chick as a high school freshman, but no, she is in no way a nicer or more mature person. anyway let's circle back to karkat being a teen dad WHAT??? how did THAT happen???

so to answer your question, i prefer to write adult!vriska as "that one chick in your old friend group who never actually grew up past middle school, to the detriment of herself and everyone in her immediate vicinity." the degree to which she completely wrecks her own/others' lives is up to you (i stop short of putting her in jail for vehicular manslaughter by simply not letting her have a car) and whether or not she Can develop into a stable, well-adjusted adult is Also up to you. personally i think she'd make an excellent fake psychic, but singer-songwriter, professional wrestler, vlogger/streamer, and independently wealthy layabout are all viable vriska "careers" (also, most miserable history major on earth, if you truly believe she would get a degree in l*beral arts). hope this helps!

[thrilling-oneway]

random almost 2am thought that's been plaguing me for like a week actually but you ever think about how the original stunt from wonder halloween with the trapdoor and the action under the stage was Really Fucking Stupid (sorry rui).

Literally the first fucking thing they tell you in drama lessons is to not do anything significant behind (or below) the stage. the audience should be able to see everything that's going on. falling through the trapdoor on its own? sure, kill him or bring him back in another scene. having him have to climb back out afterwards to continue the play right into the next scene also creates an issue.

and i mean rui does realise that it was dumb in the next chapter this is just something that bugs me. rui kamishiro what the fuck were you thinking (he saw a trapdoor and got excited). wonder halloween is still a 9/10 go read it now if you haven't already.

[prince-liest]

Question that's about your thoughts on Alove Alastor. I am writing fanfic and I think I may have. Fallen into a little bit of a rabbit hole of thought but like, Alastor was alive during ww1. If he died in his mid thirties in 1933, he would likely have been of age by at the very least the 1918 18 years old third draft. do you think Alastor would dodge the draft.

I'm going insane thinking about this. I am losing my mind trying to figure it out. You don't have to answer but like. I figure you would have interesting thoughts about alastor's character.

Oh gosh, anon, I'm going to be honest: I feel like to answer this question fully, I'd have to do significantly more research than I currently have the time/energy for into how the draft worked during that era, particularly for a Black man, given this is Jim Crow America we are talking about - and then about how draft-dodging would be feasible, and again, how much more dangerous or difficult it would be for men of color. (Though, to disclaim: I do know there were a lot of Black men who served during WWI, but I also know they didn't receive the same permissions and opportunities as white men.)

Putting aside the logistics of it, though, and going purely on the initial gut emotion of it:

I do not think Alastor would have been even remotely patriotic enough to want to go. He is already really fucking upset with himself and the situation at the end of canon to realize that he's put himself at genuine risk of losing life and limb for the Hazbin Hotel, which is a group of people that he knows personally and has outwardly admitted to coming to care about. I cannot imagine that he would be even remotely willing to do that for the country he lives in.

Sure, he was a serial killer: but while we don't know the details of the who and the how, evidence points to him having had some kind of agenda with how he went about his killing, and I think it's not unreasonable to infer based on the old canon comics that it had something to do with people he found personally offensive to his sensibilities. I think that's wildly different from having a willingness to leave his mother, go overseas, and risk his life as a member of a wildly racist institution to kill some random motherfuckers he's never met. And there is no way he's altruistic enough to do it for political reasons.

Who knows! Maybe if there were political propaganda-related exemptions and he was already making it as a radio host, he could have gotten out that way!

[grecoromanyaoi]

i turned 18 in november 2019 and that was supposed to mark the beginning of my hoe era but then covid happened and well. u know the rest.

[etherealstrike]

@jammyjams1910 LOOK AT THIS

[irhabiya]

for a while i didn't really understand why i was so uncomfortable in islamic studies class bc it hadn't set in yet that i'm being taught that i'm the wrong type of muslim

[jupitersflytrap]

sometimes it actually hits me that i'm halfway through my degree like. how is that possible. i've learned nothing.

[soyboyanarchy]

Every time I’m watching something American and someone mentions never having gone to school I am so impressed. Like damn you avoided the law for that long?? Only to then remember that in America it is in fact legal to homeschool your children

[nicklloydnow]

“Mr. Garland’s memo did acknowledge that “spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution.” That is true but doesn’t go nearly far enough. Education is mostly speech, and parents have a constitutional right to choose the speech with which their children will be educated. They therefore cannot constitutionally be compelled, or even pressured, to make their children a captive audience for government indoctrination.

Public education in America has always attempted to homogenize and mold the identity of children. Since its largely nativist beginnings around 1840, public education has been valued for corralling most of the poor and middle class into institutions where their religious and ethnic differences could be ironed out in pursuit of common “American” values.

The goal was not merely a shared civic culture. Well into the 20th century, much of the political support for public schooling was driven by a fear of Catholicism and an ambition to Protestantize Catholic children. Many Catholics and other minorities escaped the indoctrination of their children by sending them to private schools.

Nativists found that intolerable. Beginning around 1920, they organized to force Catholic children into public education. The success of such a measure in Oregon (with Democratic votes and Ku Klux Klan leadership) prompted the Supreme Court to hold compulsory public education unconstitutional.

The case, Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), was brought by a religious school, not a parent. The justices therefore framed their ruling around the threat to the school’s economic rights. But Pierce says that parents can educate their children outside state schools in accord with the parents’ moral and religious views.

Although the exact nature of this parental freedom is much disputed, it is grounded in the First Amendment. When religious parents claim the freedom, religious liberty seems an especially strong foundation. But the freedom of parents in educating their children belongs to all parents, not only the faithful. Freedom of speech more completely explains this educational liberty.

(…)

The public school system, by design, pressures parents to substitute government educational speech for their own. Public education is a benefit tied to an unconstitutional condition. Parents get subsidized education on the condition that they accept government educational speech in lieu of home or private schooling.

(…)

To be sure, Pierce doesn’t guarantee private education. It merely acknowledges the right of parents to provide it with their own resources. And one may protest that economic pressure is not force. But the Supreme Court has often ruled otherwise.

(…)

When government makes education compulsory and offers it free of charge, it crowds out parental freedom in educational speech. The poorer the parents, the more profound the pressure—and that is by design. Nativists intended to pressure poor and middle-class parents into substituting government educational speech for their own, and their unconstitutional project largely succeeded.

Most parents can’t afford to turn down public schooling. They therefore can’t adopt speech expressive of their own views in educating their children, whether by paying for a private school or dropping out of work to home-school. So they are constrained to adopt government educational speech in place of their own, in violation of the First Amendment.

A long line of Establishment Clause decisions recognize the risk of coercion in public-school messages. In Grand Rapids School District v. Ball (1985), the high court condemned private religious teaching in rooms leased from public schools. “Such indoctrination, if permitted to occur, would have devastating effects on the right of each individual voluntarily to determine what to believe (and what not to believe) free of any coercive pressures from the State,” Justice William Brennan wrote for the majority.

Coercion seemed central in such cases because of the vulnerability of children to indoctrination. Summarizing the court’s jurisprudence, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, concurring in Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), observed that “when government-sponsored religious exercises are directed at impressionable children who are required to attend school, . . . government endorsement is much more likely to result in coerced religious beliefs.”

(…)

Rights are “exceptions” to power, James Madison observed. That is, rights defeat power. But contemporary judicial doctrine allows power to defeat rights—at least when government asserts what is called a compelling interest. One might think that a state’s compelling interest in public education overpowers any parental speech right. Yet because such analysis allows power to subdue rights, it is important to evaluate whether the claimed government interest is really compelling.

The U.S. was founded in an era when almost all schooling was private and religious, and that already suggests that any government interest in public education is neither necessary nor compelling. Further, the idea that public education is a central government interest was popularized by anti-Catholic nativists. Beginning in the mid-19th century, they elevated the public school as a key American institution in their campaign against Catholicism.

In their vision, public schools were essential for inculcating American principles so that children could become independent-minded citizens and thinking voters. The education reformer and politician Horace Mann said that without public schools, American politics would bend toward “those whom ignorance and imbecility have prepared to become slaves.”

That sounds wholesome in the abstract. In practice, it meant that Catholics were mentally enslaved to their priests, and public education was necessary to get to the next generation, imbuing them with Protestant-style ideas so that when they reached adulthood, they would vote more like Protestants.

(…)

The inevitably homogenizing, even indoctrinating, effect of public schools confirms the danger of finding a compelling government interest in them. A 1904 nativist tract grimly declared that the public school is “a great paper mill, into which are cast rags of all kinds and colors, but which lose their special identity and come out white paper, having a common identity. So we want the children of the state, of whatever nationality, color or religion, to pass through this great moral, intellectual and patriotic mill, or transforming process.”

The idea of a common civic culture among children is appealing when it develops voluntarily, but not when state-approved identities and messages are “stamped upon their minds,” as the 1904 tract put it. Far from being a compelling government interest, the project of pressing children into a majority or government mold is a path toward tyranny.

The shared civic culture of 18th-century America was highly civilized, and it developed entirely in private schools. The schools, like the parents who supported them, were diverse in curriculum and their religious outlook, including every shade of Protestantism, plus Judaism, Catholicism, deism and religious indifference.

In their freedom, the 18th-century schools established a common culture. In contrast, public-school coercion has always stimulated division. It was long used to grind down the papalism of Catholic children into something more like Protestantism. Since then, there has been a shift in the beliefs that public schools seek to eradicate. But the schools remain a means by which some Americans force their beliefs on others. That’s why they are still a source of discord. The temptation to indoctrinate the children of others—to impose a common culture by coercion—is an obstacle to working out a genuine common culture.

There is no excuse for maintaining the nativist fiction that public schools are the glue that hold the nation together. They have become the focal point for all that is tearing the nation apart. However good some public schools may be, the system as a whole, being coercive, is a threat to our ability to find common ground. That is the opposite of a compelling government interest.

The public school system therefore is unconstitutional, at least as applied to parents who are pressured to abandon their own educational speech choices and instead adopt the government’s.

Parents should begin by asking judges to recognize—at least in declaratory judgments—that the current system is profoundly unconstitutional. Once that is clear, states will be obliged to figure out solutions. Some may choose to offer tax exemptions for dissenting parents; others may provide vouchers. Either way, states cannot deprive parents of their right to educational speech by pushing children into government schools.”

[myauditionfordrphil]

I was glued to the TV for like 2 hours during the whole landing processions and my breath was stuck in my throat as if I was the mission director or what 😂😂 but the relief I got when this one didn't end up like the Chandrayaan - 2 one was amazing.

[daughterofhecata]

1, 2 and 12 for the book asks?

[book asks]

1. book you’ve reread the most times?

Probably either Anne Stuart's Still Lake or Jilliane Hoffman's Retribution. Neither is exactly high literature, but they're comfort food and have been with me for like ten years.

2. top 5 books of all time?

This is really hard because I never know what to go by. Because my favourite books are very different from the best books I've read and all that... Trying to strike a balance between those I'll go with:

Austin Chant - Peter Darling (queer Peter Pan inspired story)

Luke Arnold - The Last Smile in Sunder City (fantasy noir detective novel)

Cornelia Funke - Tintenblut (specifically Tintenblut, it's my favourite of the series, okay?)

James Ellroy - L.A. Confidential (crime novel, I'm just still blown away by the way every single fucking detail ties into something greater in the end)

Hanna Krall - Zdążyć przed Panem Bogiem/Dem Herrgott Zuvorkommen/Shielding the Flame ("Literarische Reportage" about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that's just. A lot. Don't think I'll ever be over that one.)

12. did you enjoy any compulsory high school readings?

Yes! Most of them, actually! Specific mentions for Arthur Schnitzler - Reigen, Frank Wedekind - Frühlings Erwachen, Goethe - Faust & Shakespeare - As You Like It.