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Comment by x-complexity | Hacker News Reader

> The idea that lunches can be freshly made, on site, out of healthy ingredients and children are active participants in serving and cleaning up is just crazy.

> When I encountered it for the first time I felt like a big part of my childhood had been sold to the lowest bidder.

....I share the sentiment, but I also see the chasm between the requirements to get to what's desired, & what's actually given to meet those requirements (which is almost nothing).

To have this program exist requires children that can be trusted to not waste the food that they're given, to behave, & to learn about preparing their own meals.

It's a bootstrapping problem, trust problem, & expectations problem, all at once.

Japan was able to do this by pressuring its citizens & youth to pay the cultural toll needed to get there, and it was a toll that *everyone* had to pay into. No exceptions.

Whilst there can be pockets of local communities that can do this, the probability that the same thing can happen *everywhere* in the US is close to zero, given the cultural emphasis placed on individualism.

It is also from this emphasis of individual exceptionalism where there can be no guarantees that *everyone* will pay the cultural toll. It must be *everyone*, or this proposal won't work: It'll just be another form of subsidization by another name.

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Note: This doesn't mean that it can't happen, just that the amount of effort needed to get there is monumental, and that certain axioms have to be relaxed significantly to do so.

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To have this program exist requires children that can be trusted

you got that completely wrong. it requires adults that teach children how to behave.

Japan was able to do this by pressuring its citizens & youth to pay the cultural toll needed to get there, and it was a toll that *everyone* had to pay into

now that is just offensive.

this is how japanese culture developed. there was no toll to achieve it. (there are some downsides, but they are mostly in the behavior of men towards women, which is a global problem). this is how most asian cultures work. and african too. children learn to do these things, and they learn how to behave properly.

The idea that there are no negatives to this social pressure to behave is hopelessly optimistic.

Just in my direct environment are two elementary schoolers that despair of going to school (and one stopped entirely).

It really kills me that kids come out of school looking like that.

compared to going to school in the US?

lack of social pressure doesn't eliminate bullying for example. actually, bullying is a form of social pressure too. i do agree that social pressure is bad. pressure to conform is bad. conforming itself isn't. but the point really is that the social pressure in japan is actually just of a different form compared to the pressure that exists in the US. it is an illusion to think that there is no social pressure in the US. and i understand that in japan this is extreme. but learning to prepare food or clean is not the problem here.

the big downside in japan is that it is more difficult for victims to speak up. but it wasn't much better in the west until recently. that child you mention has no one to talk to to get help. social pressure to conform is only part of the problem here. it's also lack of awareness and understanding. but i have the impression that this is changing, so i am hopeful.

Of course there’s social pressure in the US too. But it’s different. I’d argue that the US has a lot of issues, but social pressure to conform isn’t anywhere close to the worst.

My son here gets stressed out if he’s not brought a hairnet in the proper color for swimming lessons.

Never mind that there’s no requirement to wear a hairnet in my home country, the idea of requiring a specific color, or the teacher getting upset if it’s forgotten is bizarre.

Nonetheless, everyone thinks this is a major problem here, and so kids internalize that and perpetuate it.

In regards to the speaking up thing, I think a major component there is that it’s often considered a you problem. All these other kids go to school just fine, so the problem must be you.

Kids don't go to all schools: they go to their school.

So by fixing things in one school, any school, you're really fixing things for all the kids that go there.

This is why the wealthy should be required to use public schools.

The wealthy do use public schools. They pay huge amounts to live in upper class neighborhoods with wealthy peers, where a lot of tax money goes into the schooling system so the kids can take all sorts of extracurriculars and AP classes. It gets the same results as private school but the cost comes from living in that neighborhood rather than paying the school directly

California actually has a pretty solid school tax-redistribition system that more or less solves this problem (of course districts still can and do fundraise for direct donations to the PTA/music fund and bond measures to upgrade facilities, but it's still vastly more fair).

In a completely unrelated phenomenon, private schools are incredibly popular among Californians of means.

Most wealthy people in CA don't send their kid to private school. That's a rarity even among the wealthy.

There are plenty of good public schools in CA. There are only a handful of good private ones.

I am dating someone that has a child in private school. First grade costs $4k+ a month, maybe even 6k I forget. Nothing in the parking lot or talking even screams wealthy. Every person I've met in the social circle, also send their kids to private school in the SF bay area. I haven't even met another adult that sends their kids to public school. These are people that make $250k-$600k probably. But that's not "wealthy" in the SF bay area.

That's very believable; the kind of people who unnecessarily send their kids to an expensive private school when some of the best public schools in the country are nearby are the kind of people who would generally socialize together.

And $250k is wealthy. That's literally top 1.5 percentile in the U.S. They don't have to blow half of their income sending their kids to an expensive school. They choose to do so and that is the hallmark of wealth.

It doesn't matter what percentile in the US it is, when a 2 bedroom apartment is $3k+ and the average small house is $6k to rent.

Also. If you haven't been to a public school in California recently you really don't know what has changed. I went to public school all my life and then ended up in Berkeley. I'm 40. It was borderline negligent for my parents to send me there in my opinion as a kid knowing what I know now. But we were pretty hard up for money.

But if you told me, should someone lease two luxury cars or send their kid to private school.... You'd have to be nuts to think you'd gain more from the cars than the school.

After taxes (assuming single income, CA residence), $250k is $150k of spendable income. $6k on a house is $72,000 a year, leaving $78k to spend on food, utilities, etc. Assuming for some reason you spend $1000 on utilities each month (presumably you run a cryptofarm in your closest and a weed farm in your backyard), you still have $68k to spend on food. Assuming you spend an average of $20/meal/person on 3 meals/day every day of the year that's still leaves $2000 for other stuff.

Or in other words, even with profligate spending you still have money leftover. Which brings us back to this: techies apparently are good at code but very bad at basic finance.

If you haven't been to a public school in California recently you really don't know what has changed. I went to public school all my life and then ended up in Berkeley.

Berkeley is considered one of the best universities in the world. If you don't think it's a good school, the problem is you, not the schools.

If you haven't been to a public school in California recently you really don't know what has changed.

I volunteer coach to various local schools (changes every season). My alma mater is (now) considered one of the best public schools in state and occasionally makes the national list; it sends a higher % of students to the prestigious colleges (Ivy League, Berkeley, Stanfurd) than the famous local private schools (Troy and Harvard-Westlake).

But if you told me, should someone lease two luxury cars or send their kid to private school.... You'd have to be nuts to think you'd gain more from the cars than the school.

This is a nonsensical strawman...which supports my first point.The choice is not to lease two luxury cars or send their kids to private school. Both choices are the wrong choice. The correct choice for someone making $250k who claims that they are living paycheck-to-paycheck is to send their kid to public school, and address any deficiencies with tutoring or extracurricular activities (both of which are more likely to benefit college admissions and academic performance than private school and cost a fraction of private school tuition).

TLDR: if you are in the top 1.5 percentile you are not, nor will you ever be considered living paycheck to paycheck. If you tell someone that, they'll smile at you politely and assume you have a severe mental defect.

I told you I went to public schools and made it into cal...while talking about people spending $4k a month of 1st grade.. And you decide to talk about the quality of UC Berkeley instead of the average 1st grade school in the SF Bay Area. But yes, I have the mental defect.

> These are people that make $250k-$600k probably. But that's not "wealthy" in the SF bay area.

This is absolutely batshit to someone living in the midwest. I could save enough to retire in 5-7 years if I were making that much.

It's all relative. Someone making $250k with a family in the SF Bay Area could be basically living paycheck to paycheck if they just try to appear casually financially well-off. Nice house, nice car, electricity is 4x more than Idaho for example so add bills, eat out a few times, and send one child to a $4k a month 1st grade and you're living paycheck to paycheck.

No, that's just bad financial management. Spending $48000 to send your kid to a private school is a choice that parents can make when they're wealthy enough to do so.

"Living paycheck to paycheck" means that you just barely make enough to pay for food and rent, and don't have any spare money to cover unplanned costs like medical care. Spending a ton of money on vacation and private school is by definition not living paycheck to paycheck.

No it doesn't. Living paycheck to paycheck means you don't have any left over each paycheck, and the worse version of it is that you don't even have emergency savings left over in case unforseen costs come up.

I assume you forgot /s on the unrelated part

The underlying issue too is "Sorry Timmy, cause we're not rich and live in a poorer district, your schooling is worse and you have access to less choice."

And that goes back to how taxes for public schools are driven. The problem seems too engrained and too massive to fix. And since schools are state controlled, you'd need 50 solutions, not 1.

This really isn't true anywhere in the US. The highest spending per pupil will be the city school district. The people who live there may be relatively poor but there's a lot more commercial real estate to tax.

The wealthy should not be required to go to public schools. They should be able to choose whatever schools they think is the best fit for their children. Same for everyone else.

Sounds good to me, so long as they pay for it.

Not only do they pay for it, they pay for public schools too.

I am, by any measure, at least upper-middle-class (though I do have to work for money; it's not free in my mailbox). I don't have kids, so I wouldn't be taking advantage of the public schools I pay for, but I also grew up in a very median-income household and went to private schools (which were much less expensive at the time, though still not cheap). So my parents paid for public schools that neither of their children ever attended.

This right here. This is the problem. Faulty logic like this is why we are stuck with underperforming schools.

No, no, no. If you want better schools then vote for school choice.

People who send kids to private schools pay taxes (which fund schools) but don’t take resources from public schools.

Forcing them to use the public schools would further divide the tax funding across more kids, reducing the funds available per kid.

This suggestion is reminiscent of California trying to reduce educational inequality by eliminating advanced math classes and putting everyone together. It was a terrible idea, but it made sense to someone looking for what they thought was an easy solution.

> People who send kids to private schools pay taxes (which fund schools) but don’t take resources from public schools.

They're working very hard to change that. https://apnews.com/article/texas-school-vouchers-ec901398f7f...

"Texas will implement a $1 billion school voucher program, one of the largest in the country, that uses public dollars to fund private school tuition under a bill Gov. Greg Abbott signed Saturday, capping off a yearslong effort by Republicans… Texas joins more than 30 other states that have implemented a similar program, of which about a dozen have launched or expanded their programs in recent years to make most students eligible."

I get your math and appreciate the insight within it.

At the same time, PTAs accept cash which when not being spent on private school is available. The challenge is getting those parents to allocate it when it will be spread across the entire student body. Far more impactful is the factor of alignment of incentives that given wealthy families' generally greater proximity to power can deliver funding.

I liked this: it's not private school vs public school, it is private school vs public school plus a tuition's worth of enrichment.

Your other comment does get at why my kid is in private school: you can't ignore special education needs.

> At the same time, PTAs accept cash which when not being spent on private school is available.

I think this is magical thinking underlying the concept: That wealthy parents will step up to provide money to privately fund the public schools for everyone.

We have plenty of evidence that the is just isn’t the case, though. People spend that money on things like sending their kids to school with their own lunches and hiring private tutors.

When parents have lost faith in a school’s ability to provide good education (or lunches, or activities, etc) they don’t think the best course of action is to send the school a lot of money and hope for the best. They take matters into their own hands, outside of school.

The entire concept is built on layers of wishful thinking that just aren’t supported.

We are wealthy parents who stepped up and gave substantial amounts to the PTA

We made our decision (noted before) when the school spent its energy to manage us rather than fix problems and serve our student. To be fair, there were ties they had no control over but they definitely failed in ways they could have done better too. When things that matter to us are out of our power we put them back under our power to the extent we can.

The problem with defection is the large scale/long term reduced prosperity trajectory.

> things like sending their kids to school with their own lunches and hiring private tutors

And summer "enrichment". That was popular among the small group of well-off families that insisted on sending their kids to public schools (in, essentially, a school-within-a-school that actually taught the kids instead of warehousing them for six to eight hours a day). Expensive camps, summer programs in Europe, that sort of thing.

The idea is around the wealthy having the incentive to financially support public schools.

Public schools are funded by taxes. Wealthy people already pay those taxes.

If you force everyone to use the public schools, you’re just dividing the tax money across more students.

In the context of school lunch, they would just send their kids to school with a packed lunch.

The whole concept of forbidding people from taking advantage of other educational opportunities is half-baked class warfare fodder. It doesn’t make sense if you think about the numbers, but it appeals to people who are more interested in punishing wealthy people than fixing the situation.

Full disclosure, am a parent who sends their kid to a charter school and strong advocate for parents to be allowed to choose where to send their schools.

That being said, the strong version of the argument being made is that if all schools are funded nationally (so that schools in more affluent areas don't automatically get more money) and rich people and people of influence were forced to send their kids to the same public schools as every body else, then those people would be more inclined to use their influence to try to make public schools better and would be less inclined to fight against raising taxes to improve public education. Of course this would go against those peoples narrow self interest (since many of their kids would probably end up getting a worse education) so it is unlikely to happen

I understand the argument, but I’m trying to point out that similar claims were made about eliminating advanced math classes in California and it did not work at all.

I think the claim appeals to some people because they’re bought in to the idea that a small fraction of wealthy people control everything from school budgets to taxes, and therefore if you force them into your space and restrict their rights to other options they will use that extreme influence to improve the situation for everyone.

Yet in practice it doesn’t work, and we’ve seen it play out. In California the parents who cared about their kids’ math scores just gave up on school math classes and hired tutors or did their own at-home tutoring (at great sacrifice, especially for the non-wealthy). With school lunches you would just see parents with means sending their kids to school with good prepared lunches. I suppose the next logical extension is to ban wealthy parents from sending their kids in with lunches and hope that it will set off the chain of events that’s supposed to make them fix the problem for everyone.

Where I live our school budgets and funding are partially up for vote on the ballot every election cycle. It’s not for the wealthy to decide, it’s just a public vote. And things still aren’t passing easily. I think people reach for the wealthy as an easy excuse for who to blame, but whenever I look at the ballot results it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the general public is averse to increasing school budgets right now.

> the idea that a small fraction of wealthy people control everything from school budgets to taxes

It's not control.

It's simply that there exists a (relatively-speaking) small fraction of wealthy people. To wit, income inequality.

If we had less income inequality in the US, there wouldn't need to be nudges to align wealthy people's interests with everyone else.

If we're fine with large amounts of income inequality, then we're going to need to put in some utilitarian guardrails, given that $ = political power and political power controls school funding.

The wealthy have much more influence on the politicians that write the funding bills than poor people do. Surely you realize this.

Every other part of the school operates on the assumption that kids can behave, learn things, and do stuff.

There is no need to paint it as some kind of cultural/racial narrative. American children could, in fact, have more civilized lunch behavior if it was desired by the adults in charge.

> To have this program exist requires children that can be trusted to not waste the food that they're given, to behave, & to learn about preparing their own meals. > > It's a bootstrapping problem, trust problem, & expectations problem, all at once.

In Austrian civil service I worked with kids who had special needs and were predominantly from poor social backgrounds. I made homework with them, drove them to school and back from day care in a bus, and I prepared food with them, had them deal with the dirty dishes, etc.

Most of the kids totally crazy behavior immidiately made sense once you met the parents. In fact there were only two kids where this wasn't the case and the first had PTSD of a life-changing magnitude (fled the Syrian war) and the other had good parents but a mental condition (I suspect severe ADHD).

Most of those kids would have been classified by the general public as hopeless cases.

I cooked with them, did the dishes, baked, regularily. Even kids that get beaten at home or were riddled with war trauma are surprisingly reliable if you just give them a task they understand. And turns out tasks they do every day are easy to understand after a week.

If those kids could make it, I am not the least worried about kids in better circumstances. Will it always be 100% perfect when kids do it? Will every kid be at it with full effort every day? Will a new kid grok it instantly? No. But that is okay. What is the worst that can happen? They go without food as a consequence? Other Kids show them how?

You're making it sound as if preparing food together is some unnatural herculian challenge while preparing food together was probably the most common act humanity has ever shared doing throughout its history.

No it must not be everyone. Prepare food? Get food. Pretty simple. Waste food? That was yours. And the other kids also don't like to see that.

The rason for having a society is to deal with those kind of differences. If you teach kids how to get structure into their lives and how to eat healthy the wasted food will easily be saved in future costs in the health and social systems.

Also: my kids could do this, US kids can't. What does thst mean for the US economy 4 decades down the line in comparison? You really think the US can afford to "educate" kids that way?

This "cultural toll" you talk of, is just another form of conformist behaviour that all societies have in different forms. Some countries have class/caste strata, others have a laissez-faire attitude to expectations in general, others have a rigid societal code, others appear to be less so but the moment you go near guns, abortion or taxation the societal codes and hierarchy spring into action and snap shut around the ankle of the idiot who went near them.

Japan may look different to the society you are used to or grew up in, but it's no less or more conformist, it's just different.

As a very simple example, in the US, people work for tips and often struggle to make ends meet in minimum wage jobs: that's a form of cultural toll. In Japan, nobody needs to work for tips (you may be followed out of the restaurant to have your tip returned to you), most people can make ends meet more easily, but there are other expectations around work and family: that's cultural toll too.

What's interesting to me is that you seem to think that the status quo in the US is rightly defensible. Looking in from afar with limited skin in the game I'd argue it looks really, really dumb. This "individualism" (but where the courts get to tell people who they are and what they can believe when it comes to certain issues that have religious or historical undertones), seems to be leading to a fractured partisan nation where everyone hates anyone who even slightly disagrees with them. Not a great way to bring kids up... perhaps y'all could try something else for a while, hmm?

"...seems to be leading to a fractured partisan nation where everyone hates anyone who even slightly disagrees with them."

This, 100x times over. The cultural toll of 'conformity' sounds bad until you realize it's a construct enabling everyone to 'play nice' in the general sense and work towards a greater good, collectively. We are losing that conformity. The average US citizen person is socially crippled by their outrage. Nothing else matters. If you have doubt in yourself, get back in that echo chamber that probably made you into what you are and reassure yourself. It used to be ok to disagree, have intelligent debate, vote on it, and lose.

In today's US, if you want to be heard, it's more about how emotionally outraged you are, not how good your ideas actually are. The more dire you can make the outrage, the better. Come up with a sound bite for your movement, catchier the better. Misrepresent anything your oppositions says, retire objective and reasonable critical thinking to 'dinosaur thinking'. Then, convince people your group/movement/lifestyle has been marginalized. Then, if your subject agrees with you, make sure they're at least as outraged as you. Use any guilt that they have to steer them current or future causes. Next, if they won't comply, publicly shame and label opposition so that you can associate them with bad things/people/events. When you dont get what you want, attack the process, call them bigots, etc. Rinse and repeat until you get what you want.

As our "cultural tolls" are avoided or erode, the more divided we become as a people. The more divided we are, the more we are seen as individuals. Everyone becomes marginalized when everyone is an individual. The more divided we are, the less we hold open doors and the more we slam that door in their face, because you know... they're a bigot or whatever, so you dont have to feel guilty for hurting that evil person.

> It used to be ok to disagree, have intelligent debate, vote on it, and lose

You are operating under a model that every view of the world is equally valid, moral, and unworthy of emotion. That is not where we are as a country. People have made decisions to actively harm people I love, and they cheer it on to my face. This is not an emotion, it's a fact.

I'm a white man. I am polite to my friends and family, and I am good at getting people to share what they really think. I have family all over the country. They talk a lot like you in public, decrying a vague sense of union we used to have in a fictional time of American history. But they whisper a different tune to me in private. I have heard some absolutely vile beliefs from people who used to bounce me on their knee. I don't speak to them anymore. Not because I'm in an echo chamber, but because I cannot reconcile or stomach the things I know about them. My extended family believes others should bleed so they don't have to scuff, and I believe this reflects a large portion of the country.

You have it completely backwards. It's not that we are so angry with each other that we can't establish a cultural toll, it's that much of the country never wanted to pay this toll, and that's what makes the rest of us angry. We cannot live collectively without sacrifice, but many refuse to. The many debates regarding this article is evidence of that.

> "... it's that much of the country never wanted to pay this toll, and that's what makes the rest of us angry."

Thats a good observation. I wouldn't say I had it completely backwards, after thinking on it, I still feel that many people can't/won't get past their anger and that prevents them from paying into the toll. You didn't specify why they don't want to pay into the toll and anger/resentment could be part of that.

> "People have made decisions to actively harm people I love, and they cheer it on to my face. This is not an emotion, it's a fact."

Does that fact make you angry? Emotional? I suspect you are passionate about the issue. Wouldn't your feelings towards your loved ones and the harm done to them galvanize your stance and give you a sense of conviction? If so, why aren't you doing more to help them, don't you care? Why are you on hacker news talking to some rando instead picketing for your cause, raising awareness and funding?

Apologies, I was being intentionally abrasive, trying to make the point that it is relatively easy to fan the flames of someone's passion into outrage. One can be supportive and encouraging about it and push you towards that conviction/outrage, but it takes more time. If one were to be an ass about it, I bet a dollar your conviction/outrage would be near instant and an order of magnitude greater.

Passion is healthy. Outrage is not. With passion, you are happy with yourself and your effort, perhaps a "live to fight another day" mentality. When you slip into outrage, you are never happy until YOU get what YOU want.

So, if given the choice to feed a group of people, but some of them hurt your loved ones, what do you do? What if it's their kids?

Do you feed the people you hate? Weigh the options? Figure out the percentages? Try to heal? Find a way to exclude the offenders? Or do you just bail completely? Do they have to be near death before you'd offer help? I gander the result depends how outraged you are.

My point is that the more outraged you are, the more morality and validity go out the window, and less likely you are to donate to a school to pay off lunches because you might be doing something to benefit someone you disagree with.

The "vague sense of union" we had was the social tolls that we paid. Like universal praise for donating school lunches. But in today's world, you'll be criticized for donating to the wrong school because there wasn't X, Y or Z. You'll be shamed, maybe doxxed, hated and maybe even physically assaulted. All because an outraged group or person felt like something was taken from them.

So, my model of the world isn't that every view "is equally valid, moral, and unworthy of emotion", it's an awareness that emotions greatly affect people's judgement around validity and morality, for better or worse, and that needs to be accounted for.

I upvoted this but it could really do without the last paragraph. Courts aren't telling us who we are or what we can believe. Trying to summarize our mess in so few words isn't something I'd attempt. Finally: many of us live differently and are doing our best to shift things more broadly.

Courts are not meant to tell us who you are what you can believe, but they are - by the SCOTUS' own admission - swayed by public opinion, and often support a narrative they perceive within wider society. The back/forth on abortion rights is a reasonable example.

As noted by an earlier reply (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43905660), I agree with the first 3 paragraphs. The last paragraph, however, is a launch in accusations, and will be treated as such.

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> What's interesting to me is that you seem to think that the status quo in the US is rightly defensible.

You're already reading into something that doesn't exist.

The underlying cultural axioms of the US are, in a reductive sense, focused more towards individual pursuits, with the accompanying effects that came from such a cultural choice being made self-evident. No defense was made towards those axioms, only that changing them requires the same toll that Japan paid to also be done by the US.

> Looking in from afar with limited skin in the game I'd argue it looks really, really dumb.

I've lived my entire life within a "3rd world" (S.E.A). To that end, I will say that I have isolated pockets of envy for what's allowed within the US. Other parts... I could do without, but I recognize that they're part of the "US' whole deal" bag, and adopting it requires taking on the whole bag, without exceptions.

The cultural choices made are a mixed bag, and should be treated as such. Prescriptivist blanket statements like that serve no purpose other than tribal in-group signalling that can be done without.

> This "individualism" (but where the courts get to tell people who they are and what they can believe when it comes to certain issues that have religious or historical undertones), seems to be leading to a fractured partisan nation where everyone hates anyone who even slightly disagrees with them.

This is not something that's wholly exclusive to individualism.

The same kinds of partisan rhetoric can similarly be achieved with "anti-individualism" cultures, simply because humans came from a tribal background: When more than one non-immediately-societally-lethal path exists for people to choose from, partisan support for a given path X will happen as a side effect of advocacy for X.

The partisan rhetoric that comes when A clashes with B (and/or C, D, E...) is the conclusion of (1) only being able to choose one choice, & (2) that anything that is not A being chosen feeling like a loss.

"Individualism bad because partisanship" does not mean that its alternatives avert this phenomenon.

> Not a great way to bring kids up... perhaps y'all could try something else for a while, hmm?

This is mud slinging, given the most charitable interpretation possible.

The comment I replied to defended US individualism and criticised the Japanese "cultural toll". I am not "reading into something that doesn't exist", it's what I'm specifically replying to.

Cultural choices are indeed a mixed bag, that was my point: everyone has them, and they're different, and you have to make choices.

You might be right that partisanship occurs in alternatives to individualism, but my point is that individualism without a shared sense of society can accelerate partisanship. In the US, ironically there is tribalism (we now call them echo chambers, due to the dominance of media in this conversation), telling people that their individualism is being taken away. It's both what I'm worried about, and what you mention, in a feedback loop.

I maintain that compared to every other Western liberal democracy, this is not a great way to bring up kids. That isn't mud slinging, it's an opinion.

> The comment I replied to defended US individualism and criticised the Japanese "cultural toll".

The comment you replied to came from *me*. It was *me* that you replied to with:

> > > What's interesting to me is that you seem to think that the status quo in the US is rightly defensible.

In response to:

> > Whilst there can be pockets of local communities that can do this, the probability that the same thing can happen everywhere in the US is close to zero, given the cultural emphasis placed on individualism.

> > It is also from this emphasis of individual exceptionalism where there can be no guarantees that everyone will pay the cultural toll. It must be everyone, or this proposal won't work: It'll just be another form of subsidization by another name.

What was written noted the significant costs needed to get the program to both be (1) off the ground, and (2) self-sustaining via the community, *because* of the emphasis placed on individualism.

Nowhere in the given statements *from me* was there a defense for US individualism. Despite my general positive attitude (approx 0.3, within the range -1 to 1) towards the ideal of such a cultural axiom, *in this specific case*, it hinders the adoption & maintenance of such a program.

> I am not "reading into something that doesn't exist", it's what I'm specifically replying to.

What you replied to was not there to begin with.

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> Cultural choices are indeed a mixed bag, that was my point: everyone has them, and they're different, and you have to make choices.

Any attempts at conveying such a point were torpedoed by these 2 sentences:

> > > Looking in from afar with limited skin in the game I'd argue it looks really, really dumb. This "individualism" (but where the courts get to tell people who they are and what they can believe when it comes to certain issues that have religious or historical undertones), seems to be leading to a fractured partisan nation where everyone hates anyone who even slightly disagrees with them.

Both stances cannot be maintained simultaneously: It's either the negative stance that was originally posted, *or* the more neutral stance given afterwards.

Again, and as noted by another user, you mangled your own argument with the last paragraph.

Imagine paying the kids a small amount for their work.

Outliers will be everywhere, you only have to select the right ones, and not fix an entire suburbs culture, and ofc the obligatory: tax the rich.

Part of the point of the Japanese way is to communicate that keeping public spaces clean is everyone’s responsibility. Paying kids for it communicates the opposite.

Yeah the op doesn’t get that. If you pay the kids then kids from wealthy families will think it’s not worth doing

> Outliers will be everywhere, you only have to select the right ones

You have pushing (social pressure) and pulling (payment) motivators and there are small didactive tasks to teach children the worthyness of effort up to large societal goals, taught with them. Your comparison is weird.

Expecting payment does not make you a self centeted capitalist. Children could become one if they seen the normalization of exploitation all around, when payment is more then just fair compensation but someone elses dire expense and you cant have nice things otherwise.

Nobody is talking about being a self centered capitalist except you.

The relevant aspect of Japan that is special here is that beyond the classroom, in all aspects of society, people take care of the commons, without compensation. Paying kids for cleaning means that they’re off the hook when you don’t pay them; Japanese society has everyone taking care of public spaces because it’s a common social expectation, not because they’re compensated or rewarded in any way for it.

> the cultural emphasis placed on individualism.

That's just a roundabout way to spell diversity, isn't it?

It's not, they are different things. Diversity refers to people of various biological backgrounds, mental makeups and opinions, financial powers, etc. Individualism refers to the idea that everyone lives for their own benefit primarily, and for "the group" (town, country, club, etc.) secondarily. (In Japan, one lives for the group primarily — barring exceptions, of course. Just like you have exceptions to individualism in the West.)

You could have a society that's diverse but not individual, or a non-diverse one that's individual. Though there is a correlation.

Individualism is a concept that emphasizes prioritizing oneself above all else, including family, friends, and your local community. What does that have to do with race or country of birth, or your gender?

People who follow individualism, from what I've seen and experienced, are simply the ones who are not joining the tribe that has managed to get them hating the other tribes the most. They actually have at least one belief they could agree on with each tribe, but also have one or more beliefs that would get them attacked or banished by each tribe. The latter always wins, so all tribes hate the individualist for not hating the other tribes enough.

Tribes that talk about individualism as being a great strength and then punishing you for not conforming are not really that individualistic, in my opinion.

It's not the individualists who are the problem. They are the ones getting ostracized by all for daring to have a set of beliefs that don't conform precisely with any of the tribes warring with each other. They would prefer that the tribes disbanded and everyone was free to believe what they wanted without fear of pissing off people they have never met. Most people, as far as I've seen, just want to live their lives believing what they like without getting attacked out of the blue one day. I remember when you didn't know what others believed and could spend a lot of time with your favorite drink in hand finding out, arguing, agreeing, and leaving in peace. Well, at least most of the time.

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