198: The connection between your ideas about childhood and politics with Dr. Toby Rollo
A couple of years ago I was watching a session of the Alliance for Self-Directed Education's online conference by unschooling advocate Idzie Desmerais. At some point she dropped a quote into her presentation that I jotted down but didn't think much of at the time: What if your ideas about politics were just your ideas about childhood, extrapolated? I returned to my notes some months later, having spent much of that time immersed in writing the first draft of the book, the quote almost took my breath away. There, right in front of me, was a single sentence that encapsulated so much of what I'd been thinking and writing about. On the surface, it may seem as though these topics are completely unrelated but they are actually intimately connected. We use politics set up systems that support the culture we want to live in. We create systems that make it harder to vote because we don't think everyone should be able to vote - especially if you aren't White, male, or at least middle class. We abolish Affirmative Action in college admissions because we think everyone has the same basic chance to succeed, so there's no reason to support some more than others. Government policies establish the conditions of capitalism - like manipulating interest rates, regulating companies' ability to engage in certain business practices, and offering tax cuts for activities we collectively think are good, which ends up transferring wealth from people with less money who rent, to people with more money who buy homes. And we shape them to try to ensure their success in these systems. If we believe that people should basically take care of themselves rather than relying on support from others, since we all have equal skills and freedoms, then we're probably going to raise children who do things for themselves without relying on other people. If we see that boys get punished for 'being soft' and that girls get punished for expressing big ideas (Clementine Ford's Boys Will Be Boys, which discusses online take-downs of women who express ideas, is one of the most depressing books I've ever read), then we're probably going to raise boys who don't express weakness, or girls who express big ideas. (Little ideas are OK...but nothing that could rock the boat too much.) If we think that there are limited resources in the world and our child has to get their place in school, university, employment or someone else will, then we're going to work to get our child ahead in that system. And because all of those systems out in the world rely on one person or group's power over another person or group, we practice that at home as well. In this provocative episode, Dr. Toby Rollo...