Dr. Hilary Cass, retired pediatrician, has issued a blockbuster scientific review of standard transgender care to pre-adolescents and adolescents at the Tavistock gender clinic in England. The findings are understated and well-reasoned, but have raised a firestorm of rabid rage among leftist promoters of transgenderist ideology.
Dr. Cass delivers a scathing indictment of the shaky evidence for guidelines used by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, The American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Endocrine Society; and she exposes their repeated practice of using non-evidence-based guidelines to justify other non-evidence-based guidelines.
… The report advises a U-turn from the “gender-affirming” construct of drugs and surgery toward a model of careful psychological counselling. Critically, this is the very “watchful waiting” approach that got Canadian psychologist Dr. Kenneth Zucker fired more than eight years ago as head of Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.
How did this monstrous abuse of children and adolescents get such a firm foundation in western societies, and grow into this megalithic dementor of young souls?
Jordan Peterson with journalist Michael Shellenberger exposing just one of the vile left’s vicious multipronged attack on modern western societies.
The medical practitioners who profit from the destruction of children and adolescents are firmly ensconced in leftist ideology. The ultimate result is genocide.
If you are planning to relocate to a nation with greater degrees of safety, freedom, or opportunity, you may wish to do some research before you make a move that might be difficult to reverse.
The governments of the purple nations on the map above maintain the prerogative to jail and punish any persons within their national borders at any time. Yellow nations are loosely bound by constitutions, laws, and courts of a rather flexible nature. Green nations have firmer constitutional and legal protections of individual rights under rule of law.
Intentional Homicide Rate by Country
One aspect of personal safety is the national and regional rate of criminality and violent crime. Intentional homicide rates are a proxy measure of violent crime. Violent crime can be highly regional within a nation, down to the neighborhood level. In the US, for example, 2% of counties account for over 50% of murders. Over 50% of US counties have no murders per year, and over 70% of US counties have no more than 1 murder per year.
World Poverty by Nation (comparison by median incomes)
The map above is an estimate of national prosperity by median income levels. It is possible to live quite well in a low-income nation if you are receiving an income from a more prosperous economy, such as pension payments from a first-world country. Or if you interact commercially with the advanced economies, you can live quite well in comparison to the average resident.
If you have secure wealth and a secure income located in a secure location, you can relocate almost anywhere — including Switzerland. The needs of a Dangerous Child in terms of monetary wealth, are modest. Superb training of the mind, body, and spirit can be accomplished at surprisingly low expense. Developing wisdom from first and second-hand experience is the most time-consuming thing.
The human forebrain does not fully mature and myelinate until between 25 and 30 years of age. Development of the prefrontal lobes is critical to independent thinking, resistant to malevolent outside forces. That is why modern social media — such as TikTok — is fatally dangerous to the minds of teens and pre-teens. They are simply not ready.
Dangerous Child training builds the strength and resilience of a child’s body, mind, and emotions while it helps develop the critical skills of flexible thought and the elements of competent action. This kind of training can take place almost anywhere that is secure from malicious and malevolent outside influence.
The maps above are just a start for visualizing possible locations beyond your current country, where you may be able to carry out your life as you see fit.
Corrupt and tyrannical countries such as China — or criminal countries such as Russia — may appeal to some independent-minded persons as alternatives to the DIE-Woke / Climate hysteria that has overtaken most of the advanced world. But such appeal is false, and when you wake up from that trance it may be too late to reverse your course. Pity the children whose parents take them into that trap.
Much better to go somewhere like rural India, Mongolia, or Greenland, if want to escape the current ideological trap enmeshing the western world. Try to avoid any country that is indebted to China or Russia, or somehow allied to those countries.
The world needs more Dangerous Children. Just be sure they have reached the rites of passage needed to apply the levels of independent planning and execution for the places they will go.
Abigail Shrier is one of a new breed of journalist — the independent journalist who is not afraid to investigate and report on topics from a point of view that is not politically correct, but is instead quite rational.
She is the author of the important book “Irreversible Damage” exposing the dark underbelly of the transgender movement. More recently, she published her book “Bad Therapy, Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up“. The recent book is about what the mental health/educational/governmental complex is doing to prevent children from growing up and assuming responsibility.
It is a damned shame what they are doing to the kids, under full governmental authority. Watch the video above and see what you think.
What would a Dangerous Child say about all of this? He would say: “Don’t send your kids to the brainwashing mills they call government schools ( or other mass market child processing centers). Take a proactive approach to making sure your kids are prepared for what the vulture governments are planning for their futures.
Your governments can flood your countries with untrained, uneducated persons who will probably never be able to maintain the complex infrastructures that your societies are accustomed to. And they are doing just that.
But Dangerous Children who are networked into islands of competence, which are themselves networked together to form parallel networks of information, technology, and material exchange, can help to mitigate the dark future that is planned by many of your governments.
In the meantime, we had all best compile lists of people who are sounding the alarm in detailed fashion. People such as Jordan Peterson and Abigail Shrier. Take what they say, and build an action plan for the things that you will need to do for your own sakes and for the sakes of your children and loved ones.
There is a new trend in physical workouts which promises to help open the doors to fitness, flexibility, and automatic fighting awareness for large numbers of people. Called by names like “primal movement” and “animal flow,” these styles of movement aim to make normal healthy physical movements more efficient and natural.
Primal Movement:
Primal Movement is a unique exercise routine that revolves around using the exercises and movements that our bodies are naturally designed to perform.
It centres around 7 core movements that are said to be at the centre of all of the actions we perform in daily life.
These actions are believed to be the basis of human movement and have been the areas we have needed to survive and thrive throughout history, which is where the “Primal” name comes from.
They are also believed to be the areas we need to keep our strength up, in to avoid becoming sedentary and all of the detrimental health effects that come with it.
There are a number of core values that are fundamentally connected to the style and intent of the Primal Movement Workout.
Perhaps the most important is that the functional style of training used in the workouts allows you to directly transfer the improvements you make in your sessions to your day to day life and vice versa. This ensures that both workouts and daily tasks help you to progress as a person.
Animal Flow is a ground-based movement program. It combines elements from different bodyweight disciplines such as breakdancing, parkour, gymnastics, and hand balancing with animal locomotion pattern. The movements can be performed alone, or combined into “flows” where you are linking together different elements into a continuous chain of energy and movement. It can be practiced by individuals of all skill levels, with movements ranging from entry level all the way to very advanced.
These approaches to basic movement can be adapted for children. If a child develops the automatic instincts for natural movements that flow together without thought, he will easily adapt this flowing style to other kinds of movement such as dance and martial arts.
The best time to begin training in natural movement is while the child is still in the womb. After birth, creative use of baby swaddles and wraps allows the careful early introduction of newborns and young infants to natural movements.
These movement styles can be adapted to the child as he grows and develops. Such early training is likely to boost and accelerate coordination and reflexes for more formal styles of movement as well as more active and aggressive forms of reacting to the wider world.
To be human is to be offered the open door of violence. It is one of many legitimate paths for a human being to walk, if they choose. But if they choose that path, they must also learn the ethical way to walk it.
“The Gift of Violence” is a book by legendary martial arts teacher Matt Thornton. The world is dangerous. So should you be.
“For many years, Matt Thornton has been one of the most passionate ambassadors of the martial art of Jiu-Jitsu. His new book, The Gift of Violence, examines violence in the twenty-first century. Matt encourages his readers to apply the lessons he has learned in Jiu-Jitsu to every aspect of their lives. Above all, The Gift of Violence makes it clear that Jiu-Jitsu is not just a sport; it is also a philosophy that makes one strong enough to forgive And, when necessary, confident enough to fight.” —Rickson Gracie, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Mixed Martial Arts legend
When Matt Thornton emerged into the world arena of martial arts training, he made a riveting video about his art that he called “Aliveness.” The video below is a clip from that documentary.
Aliveness Matt Thornton
Matt Thornton was one of the early group of American’s to become involved in the art of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, having been introduced to it in 1991. He was also the first person from the State of Oregon to receive a black belt in the Art.
As a teacher he produced a video set in 1999 titled simply, ‘Aliveness’ which became one of the top sellers of all time within the industry. It set off a firestorm of controversy, and remained a central catalyst in a Martial Arts training revolution that is still taking place all over the world. They were voted as one of the top five self-defense videos of all time by Black Belt magazine.
Martial Arts video reviews said:
“If you buy only one set of videos this year, let these be the ones. If you believe that there has been an evolutionary development in the martial arts over the last few decades, from Bruce Lee to the Gracies to the all-round fighters of then you will want to see these tapes. If you have to sell your body to medical science or your sister to an Arab oil sheik, buy these tapes!”
Thornton brings martial arts instruction alive, and makes it practical for everyday life. Each person has specific aptitudes and needs for which fight training can be helpful. One can never knows which approach suits him best unless he looks, and tries.
Philosopher Peter Boghossian interviews Matt Thornton about his approach to the fighting arts in the video below:
Fighting is one choice out of many in repeated moments of a person’s life. For most people, other choices may be more viable for most situations.
Learning to fight well is a choice every person must decide whether or not to make. There are some situations where knowing how to fight well gives one the only chance he may have to go home to his loved ones that night.
Just as mastering one’s emotions provides a greater fullness and comfort of living within oneself, so does mastering the different aspects of one’s physical movements and reactions give one a sense of greater comfort and relaxation.
Dangerous Children know how to fight. But they aren’t born knowing how to fight. And unless they learn the ways of fighting well that suit them best, they may suffer unnecessarily along the way.
Sentic Cycles to Experience and Calibrate Vital Emotion
We live in societies that are filling up with emotionally unstable snowflakes.
The earlier a child learns to feel at home with his full range of emotions, the better control he will have over himself. Being comfortable with our emotions is just another way of feeling at home and comfortable inside our own skin.
Neuroscientist and musician Manfred Clynes provids us a fascinating look into the workings of our emotions in his book Sentics: The Touch of the Emotions. Clynes discovered a particular cycle of emotions which if experienced a certain way, created a strong sense of freedom and liberation in the participant.
Each emotion is experienced for a minimum period of time before the change to the next emotion in the cycle. In Clynes’ original experiments, the subject is seated alone, in place. Each emotion is fantasized in the subject’s mind while the subject is sitting with physiologic sensors taking recordings of muscle pressures, heart rate, and respiratory rate. This internal fantasy of emotions is similar to what method actors do when they are playing the part of a character who is exhibiting a specific emotion.
In Dangerous Child training the Sentic Cycles can be experienced individually or in a group. The following description is for the group training. The Dangerous Child will visualize a different scenario for each emotional phase
First, participants sit for five minutes to anchor themselves quietly in the simple awareness of their breathing. This can be done with eyes open directed downward, or eyes closed. If any particular emotions are experienced the attention is re-directed to the breathing without self judgment.
Next, at the sound of a soft bell, participants begin to feel the slow in-swell of anger. Some participants will remain seated while feeling the anger, but for others the buildup of energy may induce them to stand.
At the sound of the next bell, the anger subtly alters to a feeling of hatred, as the internal imagery in the participant’s mind shifts to a different scene. Vocalizations tend to be quieter and more ominous with overtones of pain.
The next bell signals the phase of grief, which is a transitional phase. Participants may collapse into their chairs, sometimes weeping. It is crucial for the moderator to allow enough time for each participant to move from the “hate” phase into “grief” before continuing on.
When the bell for “love” rings there is often an audible sigh of relief. Participants mentally experience the love of family, friends, and other close companions. Sharing is tangible and sweet. A hum of contentment is often heard in the out breath.
The next bell signals “Lust.” In the Dangerous Child sentic cycles the idea of “lust” is substituted for sex. Lust can be directed toward many objects including food, recreation, and other treats. Laughter is often heard during this phase.
The bell for “joy” finds almost everyone on their feet, humming and swaying, usually with eyes closed. Smiles and laughter are common.
The bell for “reverence” is actually the bell for “awe.” As in awe for the timelessness and endlessness of the universe. Participants are usually silent except for pronounced breathing sounds. They are often seated with eyes closed.
The final bell is a deeper gong to signal the end of the cycle. Participants emerge from the cycle in their own time, and promptly leave the room before speaking or making loud noises.
Here is the official Clynes Sentic Cycle in the order experienced, with the duration and the number of times that the emotion is experienced within its phase of the cycle.
In Clynes’ experiments with sentic cycles, participants were connected to sensors that measured muscle pressures in the finger, heart rate, and respiratory rate.
Each emotion in the cycle is associated with unique physiological measurements, including respiration and heart rate. The image below (source) provides more information:
Changes in respiration and heart rate during a sentic cycle. Respiration accelerates during anger and hate. During grief the respiration has a gasping character with rest periods at the expiratory end of the cycle. Respiration slows during love, and speeds up markedly for sex. (Inspiration is downward in the figure.) During reverence there is a marked slowing down of respiration with resting phases at the inspiratory phases of the cycle __ From Sentics: The Touch of Emotions by Manfred Clynes
Changes in the muscle pressure of the middle finger of the right hand also reflect a unique response to the imagined emotional phase of the ongoing cycle, as it progresses. Note that the order of the different finger pressures in the image below does not correspond to the actual order of the emotional phases in the sentic cycle.
“Specific emotions — anger, hate, grief, love, sex, joy and reverence — produce distinct muscle movement. They’re the same in Mexico, Japan, Indonesia, and upstate New York.” (.. ) (.. )”I decided to use the expressive pressure movement of one finger as a standardized basic measure of expressed fantasized emotion. In my experiments, the subject sits in a straight-back chair and rests the middle finger of his right hand on a finger rest. I ask him to fantasize a given emotion (say, anger or love) for the next few minutes. Whenever he hears a signal — a soft click — he is to express that emotion as precisely as possible through the single, transient pressure of the finger.” __ Manfred Clynes from Sentic Cycles: The Touch of Emotions
The images above are meant to provide some scientific background for the way the cycles were performed by the experimental subjects in Manfred Clynes’ experiments. The video below provides more information:
The concept of “sentic cycles” is available to the public to be used as people see fit. Clearly there is benefit in experience emotions in a controlled setting — even unpleasant emotions. By placing each emotion in its place inside the cycle, a person’s mind will understand at a deep level that emotions can be felt and then surrendered to other emotions in their time.
Instead of fearing that their emotions will overwhelm them and leave them helpless, the person will feel a sense of empowerment and even rapprochement with their various conflicting emotions.
The group approach to sentic cycles is different for children than it might be for older adolescents or adults in that there is no physical contact between children at all. The children can stand or sit, vocalize or stay silent, sway and tense or remain still and relaxed.
Older adolescents or adults might be allowed limited contact for different phases of the cycle, by mutual consent. But any form of contact would be circumscribed and would have to cease at the end of the current phase so that each participant can remain within the overall cycle as it continues.
Note: Group “anger clubs” and “laughter clubs” are not uncommon in some cities around the world. The concept of “fight clubs” was made famous by the movie starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. The ideas of a “grief club” or an “awe club” are not difficult to conceive. In other words, for mature and stable persons, converting the “club” idea for the different emotions into an active group emotion “phase” that is included in a cycle, is not a far reach.
For Dangerous Child training with children, we do not try to extend the child too far or too fast beyond his natural speed. But it is important for Dangerous Children to be resilient in every way, including emotionally. Building resilience involves the careful stretching of boundaries.
Hansjorg Wyss and George Soros are two of the most active billionaire nihilist turtles who work assiduously to prop up an artificial world of dissolution. Read the stories at the links to understand the nihilism these billionaire turtles promote.
Still, they are only two billionaire nihilists out of several. Like a savvy juggler, the intelligent actor must keep his eyes on multiple moving balls at the same time, when contending with the unpredictable attacks of nihilism threatening to overwhelm the western world.
The US is well along its journey into nihilism. But nihilism is contagious and follows every path it finds to its next victim.
“Nihilism is the religion of the Left. Anarchy is now at the core of the new Democratic Party.”Victor Davis Hanson
Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine is Re-introducing Nihilism to Russia After 150 Years
The nihilism will flow back to Russia with every zinc coffin, with every permanently disabled veteran, with every convicted murderer set free on the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Intelligent Russians no longer trust Russian state sources. Who do they turn to? Woke nihilist western media via VPN, for the most part. Even if they reject the factual content of western sources, the subliminal nihilism penetrates anyway.
TikTok Accelerates the Process of Internalizing Nihilism
Social media leads to a collapsing of attention span — especially in teens and young adults. After immersing in one-minute high intensity videos for hours, a mere ten minute YouTube video can seem like an eternity! And the idea of reading an entire book? Forget about it!
“We’ve already seen that TikTok has affected the music industry because a lot of songs are being made shorter so they can become TikTok sounds and go viral,” he explains. The scope of TikTok’s influence, Axel Anderson believes, can be expected to make similar waves in Hollywood by altering the way movies and TV shows market their content—highlighting short scenes viewed as particularly likely to garner engagement on the app.TikTok Evolves So You Won’t Have To
And isn’t it curious how TikTok in the west just happens to be a different kind of animal than “TikTok” in China?
TikTok for non-Chinese is weaponized for maximal impact. But when the content is provided to Chinese children, it is provided without the malevolent trappings.
Although they’re both owned by ByteDance, Douyin — China’s version of TikTok — offers a different version of the social media app that is unavailable to the rest of the world, especially for children.
“It’s almost like they recognize that technology is influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world,” Tristan Harris, a former Google employee, and advocate for social media ethics, said of China’s approach to TikTok.TikTok in China Lacks the Razor Blades
The fentanyl that is manufactured in Wuhan and shipped to Mexico for packaging by drug cartels on the way to the US and Canada, is more than just analogous to TikTok content that is mainlined into the minds of your children. Both are meant to take generations of young westerners out of the gene pool, so that it will be easier to shift geographic control from one lineage to a different one.
The billionaire nihilists of Europe and the Anglosphere are of one mind with the totalitarian nihilists of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. They are nihilists with regard to you and me. They may have a kinder future in mind for their own.
Either way, they intend to take your children off the playing board. What would a Dangerous Child have to say about that?
Elon Musk as an example of an “anti-nihilist.”
Remember: Nihilists believe in nothing and only want to tear things down. Fortunately, there are still influential people of means who want to see an expansive and abundant human future. Elon Musk is not perfect, but he seems to be one of the few politically savvy billionaires in the world who is not out to destroy your children and your society.
The charity, called The Foundation, plans to use a $100 million gift from Musk to create and launch a primary and secondary school in Austin focused on teaching science, technology, engineering and math. Once it is fully operational, the filing states, the school will focus on creating a university. The school intends to seek accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, a necessary first step to launch the school.
“I remember when one of the kids ran away, they told us the last kid who tried died of exposure in the desert — but we didn’t care, we sat around the radio hearing the progress of the hunt, cheering for him to at least be free,” Malcolm Collins, co-founder of The Collins Institute for the Gifted says, recalling the time he spent at a now-shuttered wilderness program for “troubled teens.”
Collins has a dual message to the more thoughtful and competent persons across the developed world:
Have more children
Educate your children better
To that end, he provides interviews and podcasts on the internet, and in his private life together with his wife Simone, he is developing the Collins Institute for the Gifted.
When we had kids, we took a look at the existing options for education and advancements that had been made to the system since we went to school. We were mortified to find that little been tried in terms of new educational models and, if anything, many school systems had regressed into factories of conformity. Even newer “start-up” school models fundamentally educate in the same basic way, with a gimmick here or there.
The Collins Institute aims to correct many of the mistakes of conventional education, which too often blunts the child’s natural thirst for knowledge and his innate need to grow in competence and achieve.
Every six months starting in middle school, students are given college-level SAT, ACT, and post grad GMAT/GRE tests. This is done to ensure these tests are second nature to students should they choose the college path. Regular testing enables students to benchmark and track advancement relative to themselves while being made painfully aware of areas in which they have allowed themselves to stagnate.
The curriculum involves impromptu elements which to some extent allow each child to generate his own curriculum as he goes. Children are provided with tutors, they learn to take regular tests so as to become accustomed to testing, they learn to make friends in different environments, and they learn how to develop marketable products out of virtually any situation. Experts in many world-moving fields are made available to students for person to person exchange of knowledge. And “around the world boarding” situations are planned to provide students with exposure to multiple cultures and languages.
Some of the curriculum described at the link above are said to have started fall session 2023. Other aspects of the school are still in development. Stay tuned.
We at the Dangerous Child Institute have no direct involvement or interaction with the Collins Institute. But we find it gratifying that a number of bright and creative persons are developing alternatives to the “institutions of incarceration” that one finds too often in government schooling — and sometimes in private schooling as well.
We will attempt to inform readers of new developments in this area as we become aware.
More on the Collins Institute:
Every day, students have complete control over their instruction and instructional materials, though they are required to demonstrate mastery of essential subjects. The Institute’s testing-credit system is designed to prevent students from falling extremely behind in any one area; for example, if a student doesn’t love math and therefore isn’t as far along on the math testing track, the credits he or she earns for a test increase the further behind he or she is in that subject. It’s the Institute’s attempt to address the intrinsic- versus extrinsic-motivation problem.
“Our school is like the entrepreneurs‘ experience, while traditional schools are like the corporate America experience,” Simone Collins says. “Because just as with any entrepreneur, [students will] start their day seeing where they’re most behind.”
“The truth is that kids do need some extrinsic motivation in some areas,” Malcolm Collins says, “and this system organically notices those areas and begins to apply that extrinsic motivation.”
The Collinses recognize that this alternative learning program won’t work for every student — only those who are self-motivated and exhibit an “I will” attitude. “Our big long-term ambition is to be an alternative to public school, fully publicly funded, for the top 20% of self-motivated students with initiative,” Simone Collins says. “I’m not saying IQ. Basically it’s for the entrepreneurs of the world who want to drive their own life.”
Most of the Institute’s students will follow their curriculums at home, or, eventually, at local community partner organizations, but there will also be an option for a “worldschool” component, allowing students to travel and immerse themselves in new languages and cultures. What’s more, the Collinses note that such global exploration won’t be hindered by cost. “New York City annual public school spending per student is $30,772,” Simone Collins says.
Back in South Africa as a child, Elon Musk was small for his age. He was bullied and beaten by the larger kids. He found secret refuge in his home where he could read to his heart’s content, up to ten hours a day. He would read 4 or 5 books a day. He read science fiction books and then more difficult books on technical topics. He played with homemade rockets and coded a computer game that he sold for around $500.
At 17 he moved to Canada and lived on $1 a day as he planned out his new future in North America. As he moved forward he never stopped reading, never stopped thinking, never stopped experimenting, and never stopped making and selling things.
It is important to point out that Elon is much more than a mere bookworm. His best friends were books as a child, and to some degree the same is true now. But he always had a penchant for making things, for selling things, for discovering how things work, and for learning how to leverage larger groups and organizations to scale up his achievements and his profits.
Books gave him a lot of ideas, when he was a tyke. And books continue to help round out his thinking as an adult.
Here at Al Fin we have always admired some of Elon’s ideas and companies more than others. We have never made a secret of that. But for a person to have as many admirable ideas as Elon Musk has had, he could not have been closed-minded — as so many of the ideology-bound swamp creatures who call themselves “elites” tend to be.
For Every Elon, There are Thousands of Potential Elons
Elon Musk is celebrated for being the world’s wealthiest man (on paper) and for his many tangible achievements. His problem-solving ability is legendary. In the artificial world constructed by intellectuals, Musk is viewed as unique. But it is his trajectory that is unique, not the man himself. And certainly he was not unique as a child.
Thousands of children in every generation show the same potential as Elon when given similar opportunities of upbringing. What opportunities, you ask? He was bullied and small for his age, for goodness sakes! Yes. But he had a refuge of safety and he had his books — up to and including the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. He had a computer to code and a market economy that he could interact with. And more.
Most children who show unique potential of this kind are ignored by society. Schools hurry to medicate these boys and classify them as unteachable. Rather than shunting them to gifted learning resources, most schools are rushing to shut their gifted learning programs down in the name of “equity.”
Worse, many of the radical left feminists who have taken over many government agencies dealing with health and education, are promoting the aborting of all autistic fetuses. Better in their minds to eliminate the problem before it can emerge into the open, where it becomes much messier to eliminate.
It is normal for men to excel at the very highest levels of mathematics, engineering, and the hard sciences, as well as the top levels of entrepreneurial startups such as SpaceX, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Oracle, Microsoft, and the many other startups of Silicon Valley and the many Silicon Valley lookalikes spread across North America, Europe, and Asia. And it is normal for many of these men to show autistic tendencies. Call it diversity, but a kind of diversity that seems to favor males of Asian and European extraction. Not politically correct, that particular species of diversity. Leftists hate it.
Even so, for a society to ride the wave of complexity well enough to avoid falling into the deep trough of collapse, these (mostly) men are very much in demand.
Instead of shutting down all the programs that would identify advanced intellects with potentially high drive and help them to achieve their potential, society would do much better to spend just a bit more time and money boosting these odd little undersized and underaged men. Instead of being ridiculed and bullied for their oddness we should give them the refuges they need: the books, the opportunities to show their cognitive and creative worth, the guidance to understand themselves and their thoughts and feelings — in a fertile place of calm safety.
Sure, some of these little guys already have what they need to overcome the prejudice that societies seems to have against them. But most of them seem to get waylaid and often slapped down before their towns and nations can learn what they are capable of creating.
Early reading is a must, as are challenging puzzles and games. Access to a wide range of learning materials is crucial, with progression to as great a depth of understanding as the child is capable of comprehending.
In our societies, girls are given preferential treatment thanks to the feminist overlords of education. That means that promising girls are more often identified and coddled to as great an extent as possible, while a large portion of promising boys are actively discarded and thrown away.
In the absence of any wise counter-force to preserve the futures of young boys of great potential, it is left in the hands of self-selection and innate drive. These things clearly served Elon Musk well, and he seized the opportunities available to him and ran with them.
For the rest, thoughtful persons among us should be thinking of ways to aid these boys’ self-selection and to boost their drive toward constructive creativity. For very young boys of promise, exposure to books is often a good start. Games, puzzles, musical instruments, and tools of art and construction as well.
Anyone at all who can read 10,000 books before age 21 is likely to have a formidable cognitive platform to work with.
Michael Jordan, one of the world’s greatest athletes, has spent years preaching the importance of losing. Jordan has spoken extensively about how perseverance and resilience in the face of challenges on and off the court are what have made him a winner.
Unfortunately, as the world puts increased pressure on kids to be winners, and parents feel compelled to enable them in every way possible, we’re seeing more and more kids who become distraught over even the smallest misstep.
Kids benefit from experiencing failure. We know this and yet it’s hard for adults to accept. In fact, many parents equate good parenting with preventing their kids from struggling.
In The Gift of Failure, author and teacher Jessica Lahey details the consequences of this approach. She says challenging experiences are the only way we develop certain coping and problem-solving skills. If we shield children from adversity, key brain connections cannot develop.
Is This Why the Woke Generation is So Weak and Easily Triggered?
…children that don’t have opportunities to fail or struggle and recover have lower self-confidence and a less developed self-concept. They tend to be more fearful of failure and less willing to try new things because they don’t know how they will handle it.
An entire generation has grown up believing that they are “special” in every way. If they fail, they are told it is someone else’s fault. Centuries-old institutions are overturned in the effort to eliminate any tests or comparisons which may show the child in an inferior light. No wonder these children are stopped cold by the smallest failure — which assumes impossibly large proportions in the child’s mind.
When thrown into the maelstrom of social media and harsh judgments and comparisons of their peers, these children are not prepared. They have not had the opportunity to build inner strength, resilience, and grit. No wonder girls do not know if they are girls and boys do not know if they are boys.
The whole system is stacked to keep them in a weak and easily triggered state, so that authorities and information gatekeepers can tell them day is night and black is white. They become pinballs in a media-sphere of crazy-making. Most of all, they have never learned who they are.
Most kids are afraid to fail and, as parents and teachers, we naturally want our kids to succeed. But what if we recognized failure is good and a crucial step on the path to learning?
Failure is a necessary component of success (NOT the opposite). In fact, our brains grow and develop in important ways whenever failures occurs. When kids understand this concept, amazing things can happen for them (and for us).
Today’s dysfunctional method of child-raising and education is designed to make children fear failure. They are paralyzed by failures they have never been prepared for.
When children instead learn to embrace failure as opportunities to learn and adjust their approach, they become tougher and more resilient. Future failures are more likely to boost them further and higher. This is a lesson they will not be taught in schools, where teachers are more concerned about wokeness and gender-affirming.
Do the best you can. Do that, while understanding that your children are facing genuine malevolence out there in the schools, in social media, on the internet, on the streets, in the marketplace. They need every ounce of that perseverance, grit, and toughness.
Jordan Peterson with Rafe Kelley on Rough and Tumble Play and Parkour
Parents need to play-tussle with children as soon as their musculoskeletal development allows it to be done safely. As the child grows older he needs to be gradually exposed to martial arts training in physical contact styles such as judo, aikido, and jiu jitsu. Wrestling is another excellent training for young children, if taught by coaches who understand how to ease the child into the training safely.
Western societies are currently suffering through a social phase where all forms of competition and touch-based play are forbidden by teachers who have themselves been starved for physical contact over their entire lifetimes.
Boys thrive on rough and tumble play, and often form their closest friendships out of physical competition and tussle.
Children Also Need to Learn “Nice Contact”
Boys also need to learn to dance with girls, in order to learn forms of nice contact and gentle contact. It is paradoxical that both rough and tumble play AND gentle contact dance have the effect on boys of calming them down, ultimately. If both of these contact forms are practised by boys from an early age, the likelihood of developing ADHD is much less.
Teaching Kids Parkour
Parkour involves running, jumping, climbing, scrambling, and more advanced forms of moving over changing terrain. As the child advances in technique over increasing levels of difficulty, he develops parts of his body and brain that cannot be developed any other way — particularly at young ages.
We fall a lot in parkour! In fact, sometimes we fail more than we succeed. It’s such a normal occurrence that we practice falling safety at every session: bounce backs, breakfalls, rolls. For each move, there are a variety of ways you can fall. We have to practice these in order to be safe.
Learning how to fail safely and get back up is crucial for kids’ emotional development. In parkour, failure is not only expected, it’s embraced. Kids, like any other human, can be afraid of failure. Parkour helps children grapple with their fears and accomplish physical and mental challenges they never thought possible.
When children are deprived of rough and tumble play, contact dance, and fast paced competitive sport, they can suffer from an assortment of neurological impairments. More
The video above delves into a large number of related topics and is well worth watching in its entirety.
Acton is a unique school where students self-learn the things they need to be successful as adults. This includes teaching themselves math and English through books and online resources at school, but it also means self-learning to overcome obstacles, to deal kindly with others, and to develop motivation.
You have first chance in educating your own children. If you squander that chance, you take a huge risk with the future of your child’s mind.
Teachers do not generally have your child’s future welfare very high on their lists of priorities. They are more concerned with the immediate problems of their lives. You are your child’s champion, and if you do not do your job, being forewarned, there is no one else to blame.
The video above provides many useful reasons why conventional schools are destructive and out of control, and includes ways in which a better approach can be forged for your own children.
Jordan Peterson has immense knowledge and great insight, but he could sometimes exercise a bit more restraint when interviewing fascinating guests — he could listen more. But he makes up for his occasional lapses with the quality of his guests, as well as with the occasional gems he himself drops within his interruptions.
I suspect that more and more people will become aware that they are not alone in their frustration with the established schools and school systems. Not everyone can establish new schools of higher quality, but if you can, consider it.
Otherwise, look closely into the choices in your community, and you may find an excellent alternative to government education and other conventional “woke” approaches to education.
When training the Dangerous Child, it is important to addiction-proof him at an early age. Children are being exposed to potentially addictive substances while still quite young, by their peers and by older children and adults. If the child already has strong feelings against addictions and dependency, he will be better prepared for those inevitable confrontations that will occur.
Notice the considerable overlap in the definitions above. We are born with the ability to feel hunger (and other depletion states) long before we understand what the feeling means. But as we grow older and join social groups, we learn to expand our list of hungers and needs. If this expansion occurs on the subconscious level only — without any conscious insight into our internal feelings — we will be extremely vulnerable to outside pressures to accept the viewpoint of need that comes with our immediate social environment.
Need vs. Drive
Need
We need to do something that is necessary. We also have needs that are physiological, social, and emotional. There are needs that are pressing and urgent, but there are also needs that are not immediate but also intermediate such as the need for a safe environment, need for recreation, need for insurance etc. There are also other so called needs that are not even needs per se but rather our wants such as a big house, a big car, and vacations in exotic locations abroad, and so on. It is these wants that make us work hard all our life to be able to satisfy these needs. We are motivated to keep working to achieve these goals that we set for ourselves in life.
Drive
Drive is a state of mind that gets arisen from a need. When we are hungry, we are motivated or driven to act in ways that will help us in satisfaction of hunger. However, hunger is a primary drive. It is a state of imbalance that activates an organism to work in ways so as to achieve balance. If we think according to this theory and conceive of a situation when the primary drives of hunger, thirst, and sleep are satisfied, there is no drive for the organism until that achieves some imbalance. This theory called drive reduction was developed by Clark Hull and explained the motivation through drive reduction..
According to Clark Hull, human beings work to reduce the state of tension. Once a behavior is successful in reduction of drive, the likelihood of repetition of that behavior in future increases…
There are both biological drives such as hunger, thirst, sex etc. that dictate our behavior that takes us closer to the satisfaction of these drives and secondary or unlearned drives such as fear and curiosity that make us behave accordingly. In fact, curiosity is one drive that keeps human beings search, explore and learn new things in life.
Such processes evolved to take place below the level of consciousness. That works out fine for ordinary children as long as they are provided with good levels of love and guidance along the way. But for Dangerous Children, life is “speeded up” in many ways. Any child who is provided the knowledge and abilities of a Dangerous Child, must also be given the resilience and strength to resist injurious social pressures.
That means rehearsal games, beginning fairly early. Children can sense an enormous amount of meaning in social interaction, long before they can express themselves in words. As the child grows, he will become more sophisticated in detecting underlying motivations of people around him. Play rehearsal games can accelerate and augment this understanding significantly.
Many of these games will elicit temporary apprehension and fright. As long as these are kept within the bounds appropriate for the particular child(ren) involved, the recruitment of the child’s amygdala in the training can be effective and non-harmful. Children love to be frightened — within bounds and for brief periods of time, with ample time for recovery and explanation, if needed.
As the Dangerous Child grows older, he will provide all the frightening experiences he needs for himself — and more than you need as a parent.
Simply put, while the child is still an infant, parents must understand how natural hungers turn into perceived needs, which are then converted into drives that propel behavior.
It is a misconception to believe that a Dangerous Child should be isolated from his peers until he is at least 16 or 18. But the Dangerous Child should be prepared to interact with outsiders and outsider peers from a very young age. The common language of all children (and most humans of any age) is play. The Dangerous Child must be prepared to deal with situations where play goes wrong. But if he is given an early beginning in his training, that should not be a problem.
Experience is the Best Teacher
Adults are often impressed by children who exhibit large quantities of factual knowledge and advanced vocabulary well beyond their years. But what truly impresses the most accomplished adults is the child who displays skillful use of knowledge, language, AND physical abilities. I have never seen a 3 year old who is capable of skillfully operating a large construction crane for building a high rise. But if I had, I would have been very impressed.
All jokes aside, it is skills that are taught by experience — often complex and intricate experience — that impresses adults who are on admission committees of good schools or who hire new employees for difficult work. Hazardous experiences must first be simulated, as best as possible. Observation, simulation, basic skills learning under supervision, graduating to more and more potentially hazardous skills, step by step as expertise is demonstrated at each level.
Dangerous Children learn to teach themselves didactic material from the age of 8 or 10. They learn to teach themselves practical beginning by the age of 12. And they will have learned at least three ways to support themselves financially by the age of 18. After that, they can put themselves through further schooling as they wish.
Advanced Societies are Losing Too Many People to Addictions
Drug addiction is a highly personal matter. If the person is resistant to the idea of passive dependency on any substance, he is less likely to surrender to an addiction. There are no drug laws or drug enforcement agencies that can keep a person from being addicted, if he is so inclined.
The high numbers of addicts and drug overdose deaths in every country suggests that these societies are losing human infrastructure that they cannot afford to lose.
The answer is almost always to improve the human infrastructure in every way possible. Making young minds stronger, more self-reliant, and more resistant to the outside pressures that try to make them weaker and more dependent.
Not every child can be a Dangerous Child. But in a rational society, most children would be encouraged to acquire strength and fortification against injurious outside social pressure. Instead, most cultural institutions seem to be at work tearing down the personal strengths of children and making them more vulnerable to indoctrination and groupthink pressures.
That is one more reason why training such as Dangerous Child training is so important at this time.
A child is born with innate reflexes, instincts, predispositions, aptitudes, and limitations. When confronted with the outside world, the child begins to assimilate experiences of the world into his internal milieu — and he is permanently changed, every single day.
What Does That Have to Do With Dangerous Children and Politics?
Consider how a child’s experiences combine with his innate dispositions to create knowledge, science, and wisdom — leading to philosophy:
Experience is the first and basic level of knowledge. The Greeks called experience empeiria, which is at the basis of such English philosophical terms as:
empirical: which means based on the data of the senses, especially if that data can be presented in a quantifiable manner. empiricism: the philosophical doctrine that knowledge consists primarily (or only) in sensations, and that ideas are sophisticated combinations of sensations stored in memory. The most radical and thorough empiricist was probably David Hume (1711-1776) empeiria or empiria: sometimes used to mean sense experience in general…
Science is the next level of knowledge. This is a knowledge that does not consist in a store of facts, but in general principles of cause and effect…
Wisdom, which the Greeks call sophia is a knowledge of causes and principles as is science, but it differs from science. Science looks for general principles in a certain defined domain. Every new law that a science is able to understand in turn is treated like a principle (a starting point in explanation). However, the scientist is a specialist. His expert knowledge of principles applies within a certain domain. One reason for this is that different sciences apply different methods, and the same methods cannot be used to answer every sort of question. Wisdom is as knowledge of first principles of all being…
Philosophy is the search for wisdom, the discipline that cultivates wisdom, as the knowledge of first principles known by the natural light of the intellect… __ Philosophy and Wisdom
Politics Falls in the Realm of Ideology, Which is Quite Different from Philosophy
The difference between philosophy and ideology is a crucial distinction, for anyone who wishes to understand the world and the best way for him to live in the world.
There are very fundamental differences between philosophy and ideology. Ideology refers to a set of beliefs, doctrines that back a certain social institution or a particular organization. Philosophy refers to looking at life in a pragmatic manner and attempting to understand why life is as it is and the principles governing behind it.
Philosophy tries to understand the world, and to find good ways of living in the world.
Ideology underlies the construction and propagation of organisations for change, such as religions, political movements, and all types of activist organisations. Look for instances of war, genocide, terrorism, enslavement, and mass murder, and you are likely to find an ideology behind them — for purposes of justification if nothing else.
Not all ideologies are put to bad purpose, of course. But because ideological organisations are put to the use of a small number of controlling elites, they can be easily turned to corrupt and cruel ends.
The Dangerous Child Method is Applied in Unique Fashion to Each Child
The purpose of Dangerous Child training is to facilitate the unfolding of the potential of each child according to his aptitudes, inclinations, and the wisdom he is able to develop. Each Dangerous Child will “go his own way,” according to a unique combination of several individual factors. Networking and cooperation with other Dangerous Children and with Dangerous Communities, will usually be ad hoc in nature, for purposes of establishing critical infrastructure which suppports the building of an abundant and expansive human future.
This is quite different from “saving the world,” which is the oft-stated aim of many ideologies. When an ideologue talks about “saving the world,” he is talking about forcing the world to conform to the strictures of his own ideology.
Each Dangerous Child Builds His Own Unique Ideology
The Dangerous Child “philosophy” can branch and morph to take many forms. But when appled to the world in the form of “ideology,” the philosophy builds a unique ideology of action suited specifically to the one child.
Dangerous Children are contrarian in nature when it comes to established modes of thinking. They are allergic to pre-fabricated thinking systems such as established ideologies, and reject them out of hand. Any attempt to indoctrinate, brainwash, or “consciousness raise” a Dangerous Child is apt to be met with polite dismissal, at first. Continued attempts at programming a Dangerous Child are likely to be met with progressively firmer signs of rejection — and any would-be indoctrinator would be wise to desist before the attempt reaches a certain level.
Dangerous Children Do Practise an Ideology, But it is Unique to Themselves
Because they have so much energy, competence, and aptitude, Dangerous Children are moved to act in the world in such a way as to change it in ways that they see as “better” — creating a more abundant and expansive human future while at the same time building a successful base of operations. Each Dangerous Child has his own ideas for going about this task in a peaceful and generally non-confrontational manner.
Remember, by age 18, each Dangerous Child will have mastered at least three ways of supporting himself financially, and will be more than prepared to face the world on his own psychologically and emotionally. And he never stops learning and developing new skills and competencies. This type of independence inevitably generates a certain attitude toward life, an attitude of confidence built upon multiple strong competencies.
And so, other than for purposes of building critical infrastructure of independent living, Dangerous Children do not often bind themselves together for purposes of “change action.” They will cooperate in enterprises of business, research, exploration, and innovation. But they tend to move and grow far too quickly for any currently known political, religious, or activist organisations and ideologies.
The Life of A Dangerous Child Involves a Unique Lifelong Packing and Unpacking of Knowledge, Wisdom, and Philosophy
Think of it as being analogous to the way that DNA is constantly being packed and unpacked in the cell nucleus, to support all the functions of living. Each tissue type enlists different sets of DNA “competencies,” depending upon whether it is liver, brain, heart, bone, etc. In the same way, each Dangerous Child will combine a unique set of competencies, inclinations, and wisdoms to generate his own way of acting in the world — his own unique ideology.
It is not the same, of course. We are born with our DNA and it functions more or less independently of our conscious control. But a wise parent will begin packing a Dangerous Child’s experience and inclination from before birth — even before conception. And the work begins in earnest at birth. But it is happy work — although intense and unrelenting — because each Dangerous Child is learning to pack and unpack his own experience, knowledge, and wisdom in order to find his own best way of living in the world. And that is something that no one else can do for him.
This is a classic piece by a father who temporarily lost sight of the stages of childhood. It is a helpful reminder for all who have small children, with tender hearts.
Father Forgets
Listen, son: I am saying this as you lie asleep, one little paw crumpled under your cheek and the blond curls stickily wet on your damp forehead. I have stolen into your room alone. Just a few minutes ago, as I sat reading my paper in the library, a stifling wave of remorse swept over me. Guiltily I came to your bedside.
There are the things I was thinking, son: I had been cross to you. I scolded you as you were dressing for school because you gave your face merely a dab with a towel. I took you to task for not cleaning your shoes. I called out angrily when you threw some of your things on the floor.
At breakfast I found fault, too. You spilled things. You gulped down your food. You put your elbows on the table. You spread butter too thick on your bread. And as you started off to play and I made for my train, you turned and waved a hand and called, “Goodbye, Daddy!” and I frowned, and said in reply,
“Hold your shoulders back!”
Then it began all over again in the late afternoon. As I came up the road I spied you, down on your knees, playing marbles. There were holes in your stockings. I humiliated you before your boyfriends by marching you ahead of me to the house. Stockings were expensive‐and if you had to buy them you would be more careful! Imagine that, son, from a father!
Do you remember, later, when I was reading in the library, how you came in timidly, with a sort of hurt look in your eyes? When I glanced up over my paper, impatient at the interruption, you hesitated at the door. “What is it you want?” I snapped. You said nothing, but ran across in one tempestuous plunge, and threw your arms around my neck and kissed me, and your small arms tightened with an affection that God had set blooming in your heart and which even neglect could not wither.
And then you were gone, pattering up the stairs. Well, son, it was shortly afterwards that my paper slipped from my hands and a terrible sickening fear came over me. What has habit been doing to me?
The habit of finding fault, of reprimanding‐this was my reward to you for being a boy. It was not that I did not love you; it was that I expected too much of youth. I was measuring you by the yardstick of my own years.
And there was so much that was good and fine and true in your character. The little heart of you was as big as the dawn itself over the wide hills. This was shown by your spontaneous impulse to rush in and kiss me good night. Nothing else matters tonight, son. I have come to your bedside in the darkness, and I have knelt there, ashamed!
It is feeble atonement; I know you would not understand these things if I told them to you during your waking hours. But tomorrow I will be a real daddy! I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: “He is nothing but a boy‐a little boy!”
I am afraid I have visualised you as a man. Yet as I see you now, son, crumpled and weary in your cot, I see that you are still a baby. Yesterday you were in your mother’s arms, your head on her shoulder. I have asked too much, too much.
There is a period of time in a child’s life when the young heart responds well to love from the object of his admiration and respect. If that period is not made good use of, some children can be lost forever. If the child is very brave or the parent is incurably hardheaded, the parent may never understand what has happened.
There is a school where criminals go to learn the skills of the trade. It’s called prison, and the punishments for not paying attention are severe. One of the most important lessons is how to spot an easy target:
A favorite target of the criminal are those citizens who appear weak or elderly. Just like the lion on the plains of Africa, they will single out the old or infirm, and for the same reason; they are an easier target. Now, we can’t do anything about our age and we can often do little about being infirm. But we do have the power to get in as good a physical shape as possible our particular situation. We can also realize, as the years and miles go by, that we look like easy pickings and do something about it. It may just mean that we rely more on friends and family for support and protection. It does mean that we never give up on training, practice, and finding ways to make ourselves a harder target.
Criminals also like victims who are preoccupied and not paying attention. It is simply easier to slip up on this kind of victim and gain control before they are really aware of what is going on. Some years ago, I visited with an armed robber who told me that his favorite convenience store clerks were young women. He said they would often stand behind the counter, reading a magazine, totally oblivious to what was going on around them. And, today, you might notice how many people you see walking around with their head down, engrossed in their smartphone.
It is also the preoccupied citizen who continually forgets to lock their doors, at home and in the car. They are also the people who wander around the big parking lot because they can’t seem to remember where they parked their car. For whatever reason, they are not paying attention to what is going on around them and this makes them a likely candidate for the criminal.
The young and small are likewise seen as soft targets by criminal predators. But some young, small people are clearly less vulnerable than others. Youngsters with their heads up, always scanning their vicinity, without earbuds or headphones, not playing with their iPhones or videogames as they walk — but constantly aware of what is happening around them and showing no signs of fear.
Dangerous Children, of course, will always be in possession of at least 10 concealed lethal weapons and will be well practiced in their use.
Here’s more on being a hard target:
Walk with a purpose, and when you are alone don’t appear weak.
Speak with authority when a stranger approaches and never negotiate your own security with a stranger in the name of politeness. Avoid soft responses like “maybe.” Or “Sorry.” Or “I think I’ve got it.” Instead, you need to be firm and say “No.”
We live in a world where helicopter parents have made children and young people weak, dependent, and fearful. Instead of having been taught to watch out for themselves, they were instead limited unnecessarily at every turn in their upbringing. Their parents meant well, but by not exposing their children to the rough and tumble of the real world, they have turned their children into likely victims.
I’ve noticed a huge uptick in the numbers of kids who are afraid of trying something new or hard. Many of them are afraid just to think anything that seems new to them, or the least bit difficult. Kids who are learning to walk or talk or ride a bicycle are not naturally afraid of failing. They just keep trying until they can do it. So where are the vile and despicable people who are teaching our kids to be afraid of trying new things?
The “success industry” is full of books, magazine articles, and speakers that tell us how to keep trying. But kids don’t tend to look at things like that. If the parent doesn’t get the idea of “bouncing back from failure” permanently introduced into the child’s mind, it is certain that society and the educational system is going to teach them to be afraid of failure.
1. Optimism. Find the benefit in every bad experience.
Thomas Edison redefined the failures in his experiments as “10,000 ways that won’t work.” He expected failure and counted it as one of the costs of finding a way that would work. By finding the benefit in the failure, he was able to keep attempting something great.
Optimism is not limited to a few people as a personality trait. Optimism is a choice. And while it doesn’t guarantee immediate positive results, it does result in higher motivation and stronger character.
2. Responsibility. Change your response to failure by accepting responsibility.
When we fail at something, it’s easy to blame someone or something else. Perhaps the circumstances or the people that we worked with. But failure is a learning opportunity. If I blame someone else, I’m just cheating myself out of that lesson.
Responsibility is more important than reputation. And it tends to lead to reward, which can lead to more responsibility. Your willingness to take responsibility marks you as someone who’s mature and can be trusted to learn from the failure and keep trying.
3. Resilience. Say goodbye to yesterday.
The ability to move on from failure is key to continuing to attempt great things. The mind can only focus on so much, so if we’re still too focused on what we did wrong, we can’t give all of our attention to attempting to do things right.
Here are five behaviors of people who haven’t gotten over past difficulties:
Comparison. Either measuring your failures against those of others, or convincing yourself that your circumstances were harder than theirs.
Rationalization. Telling yourself and others that you have good reasons for not getting over past hurts and mistakes. Believing that those who encourage you “just don’t understand.”
Isolation. Pulling back and keeping yourself separate from others, either to avoid dealing with the issues, or to continue to feel sorry for yourself.
Regret. Getting stuck lamenting or trying to fix things that cannot be changed.
Bitterness. Feeling like a victim and blaming others for negative outcomes.
4. Initiative. Take action and face your fear.
When we make mistakes and then consider trying again, we all feel some measure of fear. Facing the unknown, we easily come up with a list of things to worry about. But the act of worrying doesn’t help us at all in accomplishing our goals. As Corrie ten Boom said, “Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of its strength.
Just believing that failure can be good isn’t enough to help us succeed. We need to act on that belief and take a step forward again in pursuit of our dream. Only then do we learn from our mistakes and make progress.
Children who have fallen into the fearful traps above are usually easy to spot. By the time these behaviors become fixed, your work is certainly cut out for you in trying to convince him to start taking bigger and bigger risks of failure. But for most kids, learning that the world doesn’t end just because they fail a few times in the middle of learning something hard, is the best path to resilience — and getting back up time after time.
But remember — the child will watch you closely to test your reaction to every failure. If you laugh at him or otherwise show contempt for his sincere efforts to learn, you are making the steep uphill slog even steeper. You have to show the way, for it is your example that speaks louder than any of your words.
The developed world is filling up with cute trophy kids with self-esteem that is sky-high. They have no skills, competencies, or achievements to speak of. But they’ve always been told by their parents how special and how smart they are — why, “you can do anything you set your mind to, you’re so special!”
And so we are filling up schools and universities with narcissists and self-centered sociopaths who expect the world to be handed to them on a platter — but who on their own will never amount to anything.
In the old days, kids had to actually win a competition to get a trophy or a medal. Today’s trophy kids just have to show up and look cute. Their parents will make sure they get a trophy. No rites of passage for these special little things.
Kids don’t know any better. If their parents groom them for narcissism, their trajectories are set — unless a spoiler arrives on the scene in the nick of time to upset carefully laid plans.
An obsession with image, a constant concern with how one is perceived, has the effect of turning life into a performance, demoting others to the role of mere spectators. Nothing is genuine or sincere or authentic, but instead everything is done for the sake of the impression it creates on others. Everybody is Willy Loman, worried about being “well-liked.”
To hell with all that. Life as an endless high-school popularity contest is only interesting to people whose egos are so badly damaged they are consumed with a self-hate which they attempt to mask with sociopathic manipulations. They deliberately cause problems and then blame others for the problems they’ve caused, because their entire lives are an evasion of responsibility. They are incapable of recognizing themselves as the source of their own problems, because this would require them to admit error, a recognition of personal shortcoming that their fragile egos could never withstand.
They may be cute, but they are certainly not special. Not a tiny fraction as special as their parents think they are, parents who are too busy grooming sociopathic narcissists to stop and consider what they are doing.
Here’s what a therapist should say: “too perfect” parents who coddle and overprotect their kids aren’t doing it for their kids, they are doing it for themselves, in defense of their own ego; and that, not the bike helmets, is why their kids end up adrift and confused. The problem isn’t that kids are too wussy to go out and play, but that their parents do not trust themselves, their generation (“if I graduated Wellesley and I’m this stressed out, that other mom must be a pedophile”), their impulses and instincts, so kids must be dandelions made of cotton candy in a rainstorm made of lava, which makes no sense yet it makes perfect sense: paranoia. Ego vs. reality, and you can’t appraise either. And then one day your kid is punched by some bully raised by Nascar fans or baby mommas and you shut down the school because you think the problem is the bully. The problem is you. The bully may have punched your Edward in the belly but you mobilized a school district to DEFCON 2, who has more power? Who is the biggest bully?(3)
The problem is you are in therapy not to become better parents or to do better work but to… to what? Do you have any idea?
More than likely kids overcome all this, everybody finds their own way, but to those who feel stuck the only solution is to forsake all attempts at figuring out who you are, conveying who you are– because you aren’t anybody yet– and just accomplish stuff, yet be ready to discover in 50 years that the sum total of your life’s real accomplishments may be very different than what you expected, and it must be enough. In the irreplaceable words of Marshall McLuhan: “there’s nothing God hates more than some mofo with a cable subscription running out the clock.”
Look at the antifa/BLM riot generation. The generation of snowflakes and perpetual victims. They were always told how smart and special they were. They were told that they could do anything they wanted with their lives. But that was just a lie their own narcissistic parents told them.
For those who are committed to raising Dangerous Children with broad skills and competencies — who will be able to support themselves financially at least three different ways by the age of eighteen — it just means that skills shortages in the overall population will grow acutely worse. Running a business will get harder because competent employees will get much harder to come by. There are likely to be a lot more protests that turn into riots and city-burning fests, because even young adults with college degrees will be unqualified to do anything else outside the fields of protest, agitation, and “community organizing.”
Which means that deciding where you locate your homes and businesses will become much more important. Think it over. Whatever you do, don’t be part of the problem.
Individual children develop quirks of behavior for many reasons. Sometimes the umbilical cord is wrapped around their necks during labor, and sometimes they are dropped on their heads at birth. But in this age of mostly competent obstetrical and neonatal care, curious traits of personality and behavior usually occur for subtler reasons than those.
Complex heredity plays a strong role in the personality that a child will display both early, middle, and late.
… social potency is 61% influenced by genes; traditionalism, 60%; stress reaction, 55%; absorption (having a vivid imagination), 55%; alienation, 55%; well-being, 54%; harm avoidance (avoiding dangerous activities), 51%; aggression, 48%; achievement, 46%; control, 43%; and social closeness, 33 percent.
As mentioned above, heredity of personality traits, cognitive styles, and character, is very complex, and changes somewhat over time — growing stronger with advancing age.
The first law of behavioral genetics is that all human behavioral traits are heritable; the second law is that the effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of genes. The third law merely qualifies that much of the complexity of human behavior is not accounted for by genes or families. Five years later, a team of behavioral geneticists proposed a fourth law, which accounted for advances in molecular biology: “A typical human behavioral trait is associated with very many genetic variants, each of which accounts for a very small percentage of the behavioral variability.” In other words, it takes many genes to create one personality trait.
So are children genetically predisposed to certain traits? “The answer is clearly yes,” explains Philipp Koellinger, who studies how genes influence economics at the University of Amsterdam. “Children resemble their parents both for genetic and for environmental reasons, but genetics contribute to almost all traits to some extent, even for things like subjective well-being or political affiliation.” And those influences only become stronger with time.
Environment also plays a part, as when the darling of the house is “replaced” by a new baby, who seems to get all the attention. Sibling jealousy can lead to murder or it can lead to a more complex long term entanglement often involving abusive behavior patterns that can persist and grow ever more byzantine in nature.
It is the job of parents to monitor inter-sibling interactions. This is not merely to prevent siblings from harming each other, but also to prevent siblings from nurturing an internal personality dynamic which is deeply harmful to himself, apart from others. If the older sibling hones abusive behaviors on younger siblings, he may later turn these tendencies against others that he comes across.
Sibling jealousy, including obsessing over who is “mommy’s favorite,” is one tipoff that unhealthy feelings toward another sibling are being harbored, nurtured, and obsessed over in an unhealthy way. If the obsessed sibling is also given responsibility over the younger sibling during formative times of the younger sibling’s development, one may witness the development of some odd quirks of behavior in the younger child, as a direct result of the older child’s “training” of the hapless younger child.
A wide range of entangled interactions — some benign and some less benign — can develop over the years, if the jealous child can hide his envy and keep its effects relatively subtle and out of sight.
All parents of siblings should be aware of the broad range of personality types which may display in their children — some of them quite different from the dominant personality traits of either parent. And they should always be on the lookout for signs of behavior that originates in inter-sibling combat or hostility of a deeper nature than that of the everyday give and take.
Parents who are attempting to raise Dangerous Children should be particularly on the lookout for potential imbalances in their children which can lead to troubling social behavior — first between siblings, and later in the larger world beyond.
Your children are not your children, and your child is not your friend or confidant.
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness; For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable
Your children are not your possessions, they are not your prisoners, and they are not your friend and confidant.
You are your child’s authority—that’s your role and responsibility. Do you have an emotional relationship with your child? Yes. But if you try to be friends with your child, it comes at the cost of your authority, and it undermines your role as a parent.
Even worse is the phenomenon where the parent tries to fill all roles — including the role of the very harsh disciplinarian at one time and at another time the role of the close friend and confidant of deep and occult secrets.
No matter how much an expert a parent wants to be, it can be easy to let down one’s guard — especially with a favorite child with whom the parent may identify excessively. In such cases, one may forget the necessary boundaries and forget the necessary skepticism and “x-ray vision” with which a parent must always view the words and the antics of children.
Most children are given a horrible start in life. Left largely to the mercy of schools, peers, social media, mass media and mass entertainment, who can blame them for becoming vapid and easily manipulated by “celebrity culture” and by equally clueless peers? But what if kids were given something solid to work with, from the earliest years of their lives? Then they would be the actors, rather than the helplessly acted upon.
Whatever is at the center of our lives will be the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power.
Security represents your sense of worth, your emotional anchorage
Guidance means your source of direction in life
Wisdom is your perspective on life, your sense of balance
Power is the capacity to act, the potency to accomplish something
These four factors are interdependent. Security and clear guidance bring true wisdom. Wisdom becomes the spark or catalyst to release and direct power. When these four factors are harmonized together, they create the great force of a noble personality, a balanced character, a beautifully integrated individual. __ Adapted from Stephen Covey … The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
These are not “all or nothing” factors. They can each be charted on a continuum. Each can be developed and integrated with the others. But everything that a parent says to the child and each activity performed, should be said and done with those factors in mind.
Let’s go back to Covey’s idea of “center of influence vs. center of concern.”
Essentially, at the beginning, our circle of influence is rather small and we can control only a few things, most pertaining only to ourselves. At the same time, our circle of concern is huge and cluttered, leading to a feeling of helplessness/frustration. If we commit to focusing our energy on the things that we can control, we start changing from within. This in turn, changes dramatically the influence we have over others. So, we end up increasing the scope of our circle of influence while at the same time crowding out clutter from our circle of concern.
Try to see things from the child’s point of view.
If you want to raise responsible, self-disciplined children, you have to keep the end clearly in mind as you interact with your children on a daily basis. You can’t behave toward them in ways that undermine their self-discipline or [self confidence]. __ 7 Habits
Imagine new generations of children who are raised to be integrated, harmonized, and grounded in wisdom. Imagine if they are given true competence to act in the world. Imagine the power they might bring to the challenges of the future. Then contrast them with the generations of thugs, arsons, terrorists, and violent insurrectionists who haunt the cities of the modern world.
Much of the chaos of the world is the result of parents abdicating their responsibility to their children — both born and unborn.
Note: It was many years ago that the book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” was recommended to me. But since I had read so many self-help books and psychology books already, I decided to skip this one. Now, after receiving yet another recommendation, I am taking a closer look. And the ideas are proving very provocative.
Sometimes it is not the ideas in a book which are helpful, but rather the way the ideas are put together. And sometimes you just have to read them at the right time for them to have an impact.
Parents who are intent upon raising a Dangerous Child will find helpful guidance in a wide range of sources. Never stop searching for new ideas.
All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits,—practical, emotional, and intellectual,—systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be. __ William James in 1892
Our habits make us who we are. Once learned, these habits tend to be unconscious from start to finish. Clearly it is best to learn good habits well, beginning in childhood. Habits of thought, habits of action — the principle is the same.
The typical “habit loop” consists of a “cue” — a “craving” — a “routine” — and a “reward.” Something inside or outside of us triggers a conscious or unconscious cue. This cue calls up a craving which then motivates us to perform a routine. Successful performance of the routine results in a reward. To set good habits for young children, we need to exercise some ingenuity to make the learning of good habits as easy as possible.
Making a New Habit Easy
Jim Cathcart’s tale of the running shoes:
I needed an action that I knew I could get myself to do, so I set a minimum commitment: Even if I could not make myself run every day, at least I could make myself available for a run. I grabbed a piece of paper, picked up my pen, and wrote, “I will put on my jogging shoes and walk outside to the curb every day, no matter what else is going on.” __ The Self-Motivation Handbook by Jim Cathcart
By setting an easy goal, Jim Cathcart built a lifelong habit of health and fitness that served him for 30 years and counting. Once he was at the curb with his jogging shoes on, it was easy to walk or run some distance on suitable days. This allowed him to drop 30 pounds to his ideal weight, and maintain ideal weight ever since.
BJ Fogg’s tale of dental floss:
I asked myself: How can I make flossing easier to do?
I came up with an answer I didn’t dare tell my hygienist. She would have been horrified.
I decided to floss just one tooth.
Seriously.
After I brushed my teeth in the morning I would floss just one tooth. __ BJ Fogg in Tiny Habits
Once you have flossed one tooth, it is easy to floss the rest.
James Clear’s “Make it Easy” advice on habits:
Habits are easier to build when they fit into the flow of your life. You are more likely to go to the gym if it is on your way to work . . .
The central idea is to create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible. Much of the battle of building better habits comes down to finding ways to [make good habits easier and bad habits harder].
Making the Habit Cue Easy and Obvious Reinforces the Behaviour
Putting a full bottle/thermos of water in plain sight and within easy reach makes it more likely that it will be used. The same principle applies to a toothbrush, a bath towel, dish-washing tools, or any other useful cue that helps to encourage a good habit.
Below is another way to look at the habit loop with the emphasis on the “hook” concept that is popular in writing, advertising, public speaking, and political/religious/military recruiting. In this approach, finishing the “habit lazy eight” with an investment, the author turns the loop into a growth tool.
The trigger is the actuator of a behavior—the spark plug in the Hook Model. Triggers come in two types: external and internal.
After the trigger comes the intended action.
Research shows that levels of dopamine surge when the brain is expecting a reward. Introducing variability multiplies the effect, creating a frenzied hunting state, activating the parts associated with wanting and desire. Although classic examples include slot machines and lotteries, variable rewards are prevalent in habit-forming technologies as well.
The last phase of the Hook is where the user is asked to do bit of work… now that the user’s brain is swimming in dopamine from the anticipation of reward in the previous phase, it’s time to pay some bills.
This approach to habit formation was new to me, but I am beginning to see that what I first thought was a “lazy eight” is actually an infinity sign. Just as in a loop, the infinity loop feeds back into itself, but it includes an “investment” step that raises the performance bar for the next time through — hence the reference to infinity (as in “approaching infinity”).
Remember, once habits are learned they tend to remain largely unconscious as long they fit smoothly into your routine. Newer habits are built on top of older habits or work alongside. Sometimes a new habit will displace an older habit if it seems to serve a purpose in a better way.
Since habit formation is such a crucial part of raising a child, we will be spending more time with the underlying ideas — and findings from cognitive science research that further our understanding of the underlying concepts of habit formation and dissolution.
So far as we are thus mere bundles of habit, we are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves. And since this, under any circumstances, is what we always tend to become, it follows first of all that the teacher’s prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists. __ William James
Some children hide behind a screen of indifference, boredom, or defiance when encouraged to devote time to their studies or to a new hobby that seems too challenging. This is less common in young children, but grows more common in the teenage years.
To solve the problem of a child’s lack of motivation, we need to return to first principles: Children, when they are not angry or discouraged, want to do well. They want to feel good about themselves—and about others. They want to earn our praise and approval, and they want us to be proud of them. Children say that they don’t care, but they do care.
Sustained effort is a different matter. Our ability to work hard, to sustain effort at any task, requires a feeling of accomplishment or progress along the way, and some confidence in our eventual success. All constructive activity involves moments of anxiety, frustration, and discouragement. Children who are “not motivated” too readily give in to these feelings; __ Source
If the milieu of learning incorporates too much “arousal,” if the child feels anxious — or if he is depleted by the environment and feels apathy — he will not feel motivated to learn, nor will he be in a proper state for learning most difficult tasks or concepts.
Most students have experienced this need to maintain optimal levels of arousal over the course of their academic career. Think about how much stress students experience toward the end of spring semester—they feel overwhelmed with work and yearn for the rest and relaxation of summer break. Their arousal level is too high. Once they finish the semester, however, it doesn’t take too long before they begin to feel bored; their arousal level is too low. Generally, by the time fall semester starts, many students are quite happy to return to school. This is an example of how arousal theory works. __ https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-psychology/chapter/theories-of-motivation/
Extrinsic vs Intrinsic Motivation
Motivation to learn or to complete a task is related to the full set of incentives that are perceived by the child. A child may respond well in the short-term to external incentives, but in the long run he will be better served by incorporating internal incentives inside himself.
Intrinsically motivated behaviors are performed because of the sense of personal satisfaction that they bring. According to Deci (1971), these behaviors are defined as ones for which the reward is the satisfaction of performing the activity itself. Intrinsic motivation thus represents engagement in an activity for its own sake. For example, if you are in college because you enjoy learning new things and expanding your knowledge, you are intrinsically motivated to be there.
Extrinsically motivated behaviors, on the other hand, are performed in order to receive something from others or avoid certain negative outcomes. Theorists define extrinsic motivation as “engaging in an activity to obtain an outcome that is separable from the activity itself” (deCharms, 1968; Lepper & Greene, 1978). The extrinsic motivator is outside of, and acts on, the individual. Rewards—such as a job promotion, money, a sticker, or candy—are good examples of extrinsic motivators. Social and emotional incentives like praise and attention are also extrinsic motivators since they are bestowed on the individual by another person. __ https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-psychology/chapter/theories-of-motivation/
Good teachers can provide external incentives for learning — a supportive atmosphere for learning — but one cannot always count on having such support in every learning environment. For Dangerous Children self-teaching is based upon a network of intrinsic motivations that are cultivated inside the child from a time well before he can walk or talk.
Mastery and Performance Goals
Mastery goals tend to be associated with the satisfaction of mastering something—in other words, gaining control, proficiency, comprehensive knowledge, or sufficient skill in a given area (such as mastering the art of cooking). Mastery goals are a form of intrinsic motivation (arising from internal forces) and have been found to be more effective than performance goals at sustaining students’ interest in a subject. In one review of research about learning goals, for example, students with primarily mastery orientations toward a course they were taking not only tended to express greater interest in the course, but also continued to express interest well beyond the official end of the course and to enroll in further courses in the same subject (Harackiewicz, et al., 2002; Wolters, 2004).
Performance goals, on the other hand, are extrinsically motivated (arising from external factors) and can have both positive and negative effects. Students with performance goals often tend to get higher grades than those who primarily express mastery goals, and this advantage is often seen both in the short term (with individual assignments) and in the long term (with overall grade point average when graduating). However, there is evidence that performance-oriented students do not actually learn material as deeply or permanently as students who are more mastery-oriented (Midgley, Kaplan, & Middleton, 2001). __ Source
Grades and test scores are often used as motivators. But for many children and youth, the “knowledge” only lasts until the test or the class is over. After that it is almost all forgotten.
Children who are motivated toward mastery will find ways to tie new knowledge to older knowledge — particularly to relevant knowledge that has already been retained for significant periods of time because of its perceived relevance. Needless to say, new knowledge that is incorporated into practical knowledge skills, competencies, and sequences, are more likely to be retained and refreshed over a longer time scale.
More:
Motivation begins with interest. Interest leads to exploration and learning, and to the development of projects. Projects then become ambitions and goals. Like all of us, children want to do what they are “good at.” They want to shine and feel proud. And, again, they want us to be proud of them.
A child’s motivation is also sustained by ideals. Children want to become like, to learn from, and to earn the respect of the people they admire. Too often, we overlook this fundamental aspect of children’s motivation and emotional development. We do not stop often enough, I believe, to consider our idealization in the eyes of our children—how children look to us and look up to us—and how we remain for our children, throughout life, sources of affirmation and emotional support. __ PT
Young children crave the praise and approval of their parents and others they admire. For the purpose of learning most skills, this is enough motivation. As a child gets older, he tends to grow more critical of adult authority figures, but if the parents have treated him fairly and with respect, he will continue to enjoy displaying skill and competence to them, and will enjoy their praise. But with time, his own approval will be sufficient praise to motivate a continued mastery of more skills of living.
Gauss’ mathematics and
physics continued; general
thermodynamics, the work
of Boltzman Clausius and
Gibbs, Maxwell’s demon,
the inventions of Edison
and Tesla; the work of
Mendeleev and the
beginning of organic
chemistry; probability
theory as understood by
Gauss and Galton
Construction of AC
generators and regulators,
simple radios, light bulbs,
and recording devices;
begin design and
construction of simple
internal combustion
engine; experiments in
organic chemistry and
synthesis of organic
compounds
The life and work of
Charles Darwin and
Wallace, the evolution of
evolutionary ideas, the
theory of natural selection,
and the three laws of
thermodynamics; the work
of Pasteur continued
Each student gathers
evidence for and against
Darwinian evolution,
taking into account basic
genetic knowledge and
probability
10.25
12.25
Non-Euclidean geometry
and statistical mechanics;
introduction to systematic
probability theory and
statistics; continue work in
thermodynamics and
organic chemistry; the
work of W.R. Hamilton
and Henri Poincare is
studied
Continue work of previous
quarter; construct
interferometers and repeat
the Michelson/Morley
experiments; repeat
experiments of Planck to
derive Planck’s constant;
develop and derive the
special theory of relativity;
begin construction of
automobile; continue
internal combustion engine
project
Neo-Darwinian theories of
evolution and evolutionary
genetics up to R.A.
Fisher’s The Genetical
Theory of Evolution;
explain disease and
parasites in evolution
Do genetic experiments
with fruit flies and molds,
giving evidence for and
against neo-Darwinism,
theories of evolution,
bacteriology; systematic
study and laboratory work
10.50
12.50
The physics of the 20th
century, including the
General Theory of
Relativity up to the
discovery of quantum
mechanics, is presented as
a year course in modern
physics (with an advanced
calculus prerequisite) as it
might have been given at
Harvard, Cambridge, or
Gottingen in 1925;
physical and organic
chemistry, also a year
survey course; finish study
of Henri Poincare
Continue work on
automobile; repeat
experiments leading up to
Bohr atom; handmade
basic tubes for radio and
oscilloscope; construct a
more advanced radio and
oscilloscope using tubes;
make photocells,
synthesize organic
compounds
Introduction to cell
biochemistry and advanced
genetics; begin
chromatography and
electrophoresis for
separating common
biochemical constituents of
mammals
The chemical structure of
the constituents of life;
isolating nucleic acids and
proteins, determining their
properties through
chemical and
spectrographic analysis;
create genetic mosaics
10.75
12.75
Continuation of previous
quarter; relate physical
chemistry and organic
chemistry to biochemistry;
theory of x-ray machines
and electron microscopes
Continuation of previous
quarter; finish automobile;
study of x-ray machines
and electron microscopes;
organic chemistry
laboratory; motion pictures
Continuation of previous
quarter; introduction to x-ray crystallography and
electron microscopy for the
study of large molecules
and viruses
Continuation of previous
quarter; use of x-ray
crystallography to
determine chemical
structure; electron
microscopy of viruses and
large molecules
Psychosocial
Integration
Avg.
Level
Avg.
Age
Psychosocial Theory
Pyschosocial Practice
Integrative Theory
Integrative Practice
10.00
12.00
The theories of Marx and
Engels in detail, Das
Kapital and the Dialectics
of Nature; the ideas of
August LeComte and
social science in general;
the psychology of William
James
Critical essay on Marxism
and dialectic materialism;
what is wrong and what is
right about theory, what is
the scientific evidence for
and against the theory; why
is social science so full of
nonsense?
Ethical analysis of Marxist
philosophy and ethics; how
and why Marxism violates
the evolutionary ethic; read
The Brothers Karamazov
by Dostoyevsky
The music of Arnold
Schoenberg, the plays of
Frank Wedekind, the early
paintings of Picasso and
the Cubists; the opera Lulu
by Alban Berg is
performed
10.25
12.25
The philosophy of
Nietzsche and Spencer;
evolutionary ethics as
propounded by Spencer;
ethical Darwinism, an
introduction to the life and
ideas of Sigmund Freud,
the rise of racist fascism in
Europe
Essay comparing the neo-Darwinian ethics with
Marxism; the incipient
Lamarckianism in
Marxism compared to its
ethics; essay on European
racism and fascism
growing out of social
Darwinism
Ethical analysis of neo-Darwinian philosophy and
of social Darwinism; how
and why social Darwinism
and fascism violate the
evolutionary ethic; Freud
as a Newtonian
psychologist looking for
mechanistic explanations
which may not exist;
ethical implications of the
unconscious
The music of Richard
Strauss, Ein Heldenleben,
Also Sprach Zarathustra,
and the opera Elektra; Man
and Superman by G.B.
Shaw is also performed
10.50
12.50
World history from 1910
to 1925; the basic writings
of Lenin and a study of his
life; World War I and the
Russian Revolution, the
world fear of communism,
Leon Trotsky as an
idealized communist;
Freud’s later works
Essay on the origins and
consequences of World
War I; essay on the origins
and consequences of
communism in Russia;
essay on how the brilliant,
ethical Trotsky went wrong
and helped create a
Frankenstein
An ethical analysis of how
the Soviet Union betrayed
its own revolution and
turned into a monster; how
the centralization of power
makes corruption
inevitable; read Darkness
at Noon by Koestler and
Animal Farm by Orwell
The music of Prokofiev
and Shostakovich; the
films of Sergei Eisenstein,
including Ivan the Terrible;
perform the Shostakovich
opera Lady Macbeth of
Murmansk and
Mussorgsky’s Boris
Gudenov
10.75
12.75
World history 1925 to
1939; the basic writings of
Mussolini, Hitler, fascism,
Stalin, and Soviet
communism; a study of
Hitler and Stalin as
complementary
personalities who changed
history; early works of
Pavlov and Jung
Essay comparing the
conflicting ideologies and
economic factors leading to
World War II; what could
have been done to prevent
World War II; why the
United States was so
immune to both
communism and fascism
An ethical anlysis of how
capitalistic greed and the
political cowardice and
vindictiveness of the
European democracies
made World War II
inevitable; Read Winds of
War by Wouk
The music of Stravinsky,
the early art of Dali, the
films of Chaplin, Bu_nuel,
Lang, and Pabst, plus
Academy Award winners;
perform Hindemith’s opera
Mathis der Mahler and
Brecht’s Mahagonny
Begin advanced calculus
and partial differential
equations; detailed study
of the work of Lagrange
and Euler, the calculus of
variations from Newton to
Lagrange, elementary
probability theory from
Pascal to Cauchy and
LaPlace; applications in
optics, astronomy, theory
of heat
Begin construction of
simple steam engine,
making from scratch, doing
all machining of parts by
treddle-driven lathes and
water and windmill power;
check the detailed
mathematical models
against astronomical
observations
Conclusion of the study of
human anatomy and
embryology
Conclusion of dissections
and microscopic
observations; the general
functioning of the human
body has been observed
9.25
11.25
Continue work of previous
quarter; detailed theory of
steam engine, the work of
Lavoisier, Priestley, and
Dalton
Continue above project,
switching to electrical
machinery; do early
experiments in electricity
by Gauss, Coulomb,
Amp^ere, and Volta; the
atomic model of chemistry
and experiments
Begin study of animal
physiology and describe
biochemistry through mid
19th century; repeat
experiments of Helmholtz
in biophysics
Experiments in basic
physiology showing how
human body consumes
oxygen and produces
carbon dioxide; human
body as a heat engine
9.50
11.50
Continue work in
chemistry; the work of
LaPlace and Carnot, the
laws of thermodynamics,
the experiments of
Faraday; advanced studies
in partial differential
equations; wave mechanics
in optics; begin study of
the works of Gauss
Continue chemistry
experiments; finish work
on steam engine; test
efficiency using Carnot’s
concepts; begin repeating
the experiments of Faraday
and empirically derive the
basic laws of electricity
and magnetism, including
Ohm’s law
Animal physiology and
biochemistry continued;
the work and life of
Pasteur
Experiments in animal
physiology and
biochemistry continued
9.75
11.75
Maxwell’s work on the
wave theory of light and
the derivation of Maxwell’s
equations and their
applications; continue
study of Gauss’
mathematics and physics
Electromagnetic motors
and generators,
construction of batteries,
transmission of
electromagnetic waves,
early work of Tesla, the
telegraph and the wireless
constructed
A course in botany and
plant physiology; begin
experiments in plant
genetics after Gregor
Mendel
Study and dissection of
major plant species; field
studies, microscopic
dissection, plant breeding
per Gregor Mendel
Psychosocial
Integration
Avg.
Level
Avg.
Age
Psychosocial Theory
Pyschosocial Practice
Integrative Theory
Integrative Practice
9.00
11.00
Detailed analysis of the
American and French
Revolutions; detailed
analysis of the writings of
Jefferson and his
correspondence;
comparisons between
Jefferson, Washington, and
Napoleon; how Napoleon
betrayed the French
Revolution in the pursuit
of personal power; how the
U.S. government betrayed
the Libertarian ethic
Write essays comparing
the ethical course of the
American and French
Revolution; relate the
ethics of Spinoza to these
revolutions; relate to
evolutionary ethics and
show where they went
wrong
Artistic synthesis in the
early work of Goethe and
the music of Beethoven;
ethical synthesis in the
philosophy of Lessing,
Goethe, and Moses
Mendelssohn and their
interpretations of Spinoza
Reorchestrate and perform
Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue
for octet; read Goethe’s
prophetic poetry; write a
sequel to the Sorcerer’s
Apprentice
9.25
11.25
The philosophy of Kant,
biography, The Critique of
Pure Reason and The
Critique of Practical
Reason; compare to
Spinoza; Kant’s cosmology
compared to LaPlace;
explain Catholic hostility
Write essays on the
scientific and ethical
implications of Kant’s
philosophy; analyze in
terms of the evolutionary
ethic
Artistic synthesis
continued in the work of
Goethe and Beethoven;
Goethe’s Sorcerer’s
Apprentice and pessimism,
the romantic hope and self-delusion
Produce as a group project
Goethe’s Faust and
performance of
Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony for several
octets
9.50
11.50
The philosophy of Hegel–how he could be so wrong
and so influential; Hegel
and the misinterpretation
of Spinoza; Hegel’s theory
of history and ethics; Hegel
as the father of Marxism
and Naziism; de
Tocqueville as a visionary
and prophetic historian
Essay explaining Hegel’s
influence through present
times; a comparison of
Spinoza and Hegel–how
could Hegel so
misunderstand Spinoza
and deceive himself and
others? Why was de
Tocqueville so accurate in
his predictions?
The romantic poets, Byron,
Shelley, and Wordsworth;
the art of Watteau,
Houdon, David, and
Degas; the music of
Berlioz and Liszt; Wagner
as the musical equivalent
of Hegel
Write epic poetry on a
hopeful future from a
romantic perspective; do a
musical satire on a Wagner
opera; paint a heroic
romantic painting
9.75
11.75
A history of the world
from 1775 to 1910;
development of major
ideas and philosophies,
with particular attention to
USA, Britain, France,
Germany, Japan, and
Russia; basic economics
from Adam Smith to Marx
and Engels
An essay explaining the
Newtonian model and its
influence on the intellectual
history of the world; why
Islam, India, and China
were so far behind, why
Japan was able to catch up
An ethical analysis of
European and American
imperialism; libertarian
and socialistic ethics; the
ethical turmoil of the age
of liberty and social
obligation; read War and
Peace by Tolstoy; the
paintings of Turner and the
Impressionists
Read and analyze Pushkin,
Melville, Dickens, Hugo,
Balzac, Dostoyevski,
Tolstoy, George Eliot;
study the music of Mahler
and perform Das Lied von
der Erde
The Dangerous Child 