adults, while forcing all children above the age of 5 to sit still, be silent, and obey orders for 7-8 hours a day with minimal breaks, reducing their exposure to fresh air and sunlight to almost nothing, forcing them to alter their natural sleeping patterns to increase productivity, and repeatedly telling them their self worth depends on their being able to follow these instructions perfectly for 13 or more years: kids these days are so lazy! they never go outside! they never want to do anything! clearly it’s not because of us!
The way we treat children is extremely inhumane, but so many adults want to dismiss it because it’s so normalized
You… You do realize that’s what it’s like to be a working adult…? And our days are even longer.
thats because an 8 hour work day is extortion and should be illegal. next question.
Either you’ve never had a job or you’re just lazy af. There’s nothing wrong with 9 to 5 jobs. Nobody is forcing people to work them and people need the hours to make more money. People get breaks too.
Please take a biology class & get some help. People shouldnt have to do work 80% of the day to survive.
2. capitalism is forcing people to work. i could just quit my job and hang out at home – but then i would lose my house and most likely starve to death, because of the way our economy works.
3. breaks for most establishments are a mere 30 minutes for an 8-hour shift; at my first job, for a 6-hour shift, your break would only be 15 minutes and any longer shift would only get 30. studies say people are more productive if for every hour you work, you get a 15-minute break – meaning, for an 8-hour shift, you’d need an hour-long break, and so on and so forth.
the way modern society views work is unhealthy for loads of reasons, not just what i mentioned here. the fact that we’re preparing children for such a torturous lifestyle is horrific.
Also like…. small children are not adults. Small children should not be held to the same standards as adults. Even if the 8 hour work day WAS healthy, it would be inhumane to hold a small child to the same standard.
The school system was literally designed to train people for factory work back when child labour was legal so that should tell you how fucked that is
gotta love how these conversations always go like
“hey this is a shitty way to treat small children”
“excuse you, adults have it even worse!”
“cool, you shouldn’t have to struggle that hard, we should work to fix that”
“what the hell no this is fine and natural”
if it’s fine, then why were you complaining about it! you can’t pull the “we have it worse” card and then turn around and defend that same situation, that’s not how this works
the whole idea of “stay in school!!!!” is great and all but hard to hear when you’re someone who couldn’t stay in school
so here’s a post for every person who’s had to drop out of school. whether it was do to illness or money or just because you didn’t want to be there, you’re no less of a person for dropping out. you own your own life, and you’re just as important as people who were able to graduate
In 1969, a group of children sat down to a free breakfast
before school. On the menu: chocolate milk, eggs, meat, cereal and fresh
oranges. The scene wouldn’t be out of place in a school cafeteria these
days—but the federal government wasn’t providing the food. Instead,
breakfast was served thanks to the Black Panther Party.
At the time, the militant black nationalist party was
vilified in the news media and feared by those intimidated by its
message of black power and its commitment to ending police brutality and
the subjugation of black Americans. But for students eating breakfast,
the Black Panthers’ politics were less interesting than the meals they
were providing.
“The children, many of whom had never eaten breakfast before the Panthers started their program,” the Sun Reporterwrote, “think the Panthers are ‘groovy’ and ‘very nice’ for doing this for them.”
The program may have been groovy, but its purpose was to
fuel revolution by encouraging black people’s survival. From 1969
through the early 1970s, the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast for School
Children Program fed tens of thousands of hungry kids. It was just one
facet of a wealth of social programs created by the party—and it helped
contribute to the existence of federal free breakfast programs today.
When Black Panther Party founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby
Seale founded the party in 1966, their goal was to end police brutality
in Oakland. But a faction of the Civil Rights Movement led by SNCC
member Stokeley Carmichael began calling for the uplift and
self-determination of African-Americans, and soon black power was part
of their platform.
At first, the Black Panther Party primarily organized
neighborhood police patrols that took advantage of open-carry laws, but
over time its mandate expanded to include social programs, too.
Free Breakfast For School Children was one of the most
effective. It began in January 1969 at an Episcopal church in Oakland,
and within weeks it went from feeding a handful of kids to hundreds. The
program was simple: party members and volunteers went to local grocery
stores to solicit donations, consulted with nutritionists on healthful
breakfast options for children, and prepared and served the food free of
charge.
School officials immediately reported results in kids who
had free breakfast before school. “The school principal came down and
told us how different the children were,” Ruth Beckford, a parishioner
who helped with the program, said later. “They weren’t falling asleep in class, they weren’t crying with stomach cramps.”
Soon, the program had been embraced by party outposts
nationwide. At its peak, the Black Panther Party fed thousands of
children per day in at least 45 programs. (Food wasn’t the only part of
the BPP’s social programs; they expanded to cover everything from free medical clinics to community ambulance services and legal clinics.)
For the party, it was an opportunity to counter its
increasingly negative image in the public consciousness—an image of
intimidating Afroed black men holding guns—while addressing a critical
community need. “I mean, nobody can argue with free grits,” said
filmmaker Roger Guenveur Smith in A Huey P. Newton Story, a 2001 film in which he portrays Newton.
Free food seemed relatively innocuous, but not to FBI head
J. Edgar Hoover, who loathed the Black Panther Party and declared war
against them in 1969. He called
the program “potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities
to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for,” and gave carte
blanche to law enforcement to destroy it.
The results were swift and devastating. FBI agents went
door-to-door in cities like Richmond, Virginia, telling parents that BPP
members would teach their children racism. In San Francisco, writes
historian Franziska Meister, parents were told the food was infected
with venereal disease; sites in Oakland and Baltimore were raided by
officers who harassed BPP members in front of terrified children, and
participating children were photographed by Chicago police.
“The night before [the first breakfast program in Chicago] was supposed to open,” a female Panther told historian Nik Heynan, “the Chicago police broke into the church and mashed up all the food and urinated on it.”
Ultimately, these and other efforts to destroy the Black
Panthers broke up the program. In the end, though, the public visibility
of the Panthers’ breakfast programs put pressure on political leaders
to feed children before school. The result of thousands of American
children becoming accustomed to free breakfast, former party member
Norma Amour Mtume toldEater, was the government expanded its own school food programs.
Though the USDA had piloted free breakfast efforts
since the mid 1960s, the program only took off in the early 1970s—right
around the time the Black Panthers’ programs were dismantled. In 1975,
the School Breakfast Program was permanently authorized. Today, it
helps feed over 14.57 million children before school—and without the radical actions of the Black Panthers, it may never have happened.
silent lunches were so….weird. like the entire cafeteria was expected to be quiet and it usually was a punishment for something super dumb tbh like i remember a bunch of kids popped plastic bags one day so we got silent lunch for a week and everyone was just….sitting there all quiet. it was duuuumb
the only funny part tho was sitting around ur friends and all of u trying VERY VERY HARD not to laugh when someone makes a face or something like that, or trying to sneak into the bathroom so u can talk…even then tho fuck silent lunches
ppl keep going “what the FUCK is a silent lunch why would schools have that” and im like. genuinely so forgetful abt the fact that silent lunches are one of those american public school things that literally dont make any sense
I went to public school in America, and it was always loud as HECK in the lunch rooms, this is not a universal experience, and I’m a little baffled and concerned???
Usually (in my experience anyway), “silent lunches” happened when the teachers and/or lunch workers forced all the students to sit in silence during lunch as punishment for being too loud and “disrupting” the other students who weren’t at lunch at the time. Sometimes they would even turn off all the lights, which made it difficult to eat.
I never quite understood the utter OUTRAGE from teachers and lunch workers when it would get “too loud” during lunchtime. Literally, the reason it was so loud is because the sounds of children talking at normal levels to each other echoed off the walls and seemed to be amplified when you got 50 or more kids together at one time. It’s not like the kids were screaming or even talking loudly on purpose. We were never doing anything wrong – literally just having normal conversations with each other during one of the ONLY times we could (because we would get in trouble for talking during class). Yet the teachers would get SO INTENSELY ANGRY they would literally scream at us to be quiet or face the consequence of sitting through a silent lunch.
Once, in middle school, they made a boy-girl seating chart (to make it so friends couldn’t sit together), forced us to sit in silence, and turned off the lights. They treated us like we committed a crime when we were deemed too loud.
Also, in elementary school, they installed this giant stoplight contraption that detected noise levels. If the noise got to a certain level of loud, the light would move to yellow, and if it went beyond that, it would go to red and blare a really loud siren (so much for keeping lunch quiet…). If the siren went off three times during a lunch period, the lights went off and talking was prohibited.
oh my god this would have made my life so much easier
My brother just said to hook these up to generators. Power the school by small children.
going against my no-reblog policy because this can help in so many ways from learning disorders to obesity
Shit would motivate me to stay awake too
imagine getting a really hard test and everyone just starts stressing out so for the next 45 minutes or so the only noise you can hear is rapid and panicked peddling.
School just really sucks cause they take this wonderful concept of learning and discovering new things and just completely ruin it with the atmosphere of judgement and suppression of creativity and strict deadlines and basing your intelligence on a letter and wow you ruined it nice job
i will never not reblog this
Fun fact: there’s been research proving that grades and traditional testing are detrimental to learning for decades now, but changing the education system to reflect that research would cost far more money than most people want to spend on education, so we’re stuck with the shitty outdated system that we’ve known is broken and terrible instead!
Like literally, us teachers, especially us younger teachers still fresh out of school, but older ones too, who have been doing this for years and know what works and what doesn’t, we all know all these cool ways to make learning more interesting, or make the school system better, or make core material actually engaging. But you’ve got your federal learning standards and your standardized tests and your outdated school day structure and your political administration resistant to change and unwilling to fund so we’re running around like chickens with our heads cut off trying to work in a system that we know doesn’t work but have to use anyway.
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