Meditating on Educational Abuse

Sometimes, the idea of abuse goes too far. You can sense it in extreme usages which are now much more common than they used to be. This is probably an unpopular point of view, but people ought to realise that when we say people can be abused, this presupposes that people ought to be used in some normal and acceptable way in the first place.

This is because 'abuse', with the same prefix as 'abnormal', 'abject', or 'ablative', means 'away from (normal) use'. (The others literally mean 'away from normal', 'thrown away', and 'carried away' respectively.)

Recently, I read about a Chinese mother who inflicted a rather unusual ('not according to common use') lifestyle upon her children, thus leading them to be abnormally successful. Immediately, the responses began to pile up. Most of them assumed a) that the children were unhappy, b) would likely be suicidal in future, c) were uncreative rote-learners, d) had no social life (see previous points), and so on.

The real point is that children are very malleable. They can be programmed and they can be trained, they can be taught, they can be shaped. 'Education', in fact means 'to draw out' and is related to the word 'ductile'. They only become resistant and cynical later in life, as their youthful flexibility is retarded by endless adult pressure.

You can show different kinds of success — and failure — for almost every kind of regimen that children have been put through, short of actual physical damage and the kind of psychological trauma that leads to observable brain shrinkage (yes, these almost always lead to failures). Most of the time, their social environment is what determines the outcome.

What the less-disciplined adults among us would like to believe is that cutting children some slack will make them better people; what the more-disciplined adults among us would like to believe is that enforcing discipline more will make them better people. The truth is on both sides — and is heavily socially-dependent.

If you have a society that says everyone is a success, you probably have a society where discipline has a social cost and the bar for success is low. If you have a society that says only some rare achievements are considered successes, you probably have a society where slackness has a social cost and the bar for success is high.

Because 'use' (as discussed here) is defined by utility value in a social context, 'abuse' would have different meanings in these two societies, apart from extreme cases in which all would agree abuse had occurred. It is actually both not-easy to abuse a child (as in have a philosophy of child development that's outright bad for the child) and easy to inflict abuse on a child (because they are physically smaller and have less access to power and self-determination).

What I observe in practice, from my qualitative-researcher perspective, is that my friends span the entire range. If you ask them to describe their parenting paradigms, and then look at their kids' behaviours without figuring out whose kids are whose, you would be hard-pressed to determine which parenting paradigm goes with which set of behaviours.

Last night, I observed some young people (under 10 years old) who were actually scolding their parents for having too much fun and not being serious enough. Ho ho.

And yet, all the adults in that room were extremely high-achievers (I think there were more advanced degrees than people there). How did the parents get that way? I'd suspect part of it was what liberals would call 'abusive discipline', and part of it was what conservatives would call 'indulgent slackness'.