Having a social life vs not being bullied is a false dichotomy.
As per my recollection, when my mother discovered this after it had been on-going for 3 years, she asked me why I did not ever say anything. At the time, I simply thought that was normal, since I had no recollection of a recess period where I had not been beaten. I also was not very good at explaining that, since not only had I had no idea that this was abnormal, but I had also repressed the memories to be able to function during the day. It did not stop me from having horrific nightmares seemingly every night from which I would often awaken screaming for years, but how was a young child supposed to know that any of this was not normal when it was all that he had ever known?
* One teacher lifted me by my tie off the floor (to the point where I was on my toes) and yelled at me for the audacity of trying to help her with a computer issue. I forget what the issue was (although I believe it involved printing), but I recall that I had encountered the problem in the past and had regurgitated the solution in an effort to be helpful.
* The same teacher hit me repeatedly on the head in class while telling me that until I had a college degree, I was not to tell her how to do her job, again for having had the audacity of telling her to how solve a computer issue. She later took my advice and solved it, but tried to hide that she had taken it. Either this or the previous incident had been over my telling her to press the insert key to disable overwrite mode in Microsoft Word. She had been puzzled on how to disable overwrite mode until I tried to help her. I am not entirely sure which incident correspond to which issue.
* Another teacher, upon hearing that I could solve all of the math problems given to us in class mentally, started yelling at me while the class jeered. Then she wrote a bunch of numbers on the board and demanded I tell her the average while she loudly counted down and the class was making a racket. All of the noise caused an off by 1 error in my computation and she then concluded that I was incapable of doing mental math. I had known that I might be off by one, but I did not have enough time to repeat the computation, so I picked one of the two possibilities and unfortunately picked wrongly. Ironically, I later won a mental math competition in the school that had people solve questions that far exceeded those the we were expected to solve using a paper and pencil.
That said, my mother somehow learned about the incidents involving the computer teacher. I had no idea at the time why she was upset and threatened legal action if it ever happened again. Many of these incidents were a blur when I was a student as I had repressed them. My mother had to learn about what had happened by asking my classmates before she was able to pry the details out of me. I started to remember many of these things years later when my circumstances had improved and the memories had resurfaced as intrusive thoughts, which in a way, victimized me again years after the events were long past. There is nothing quite like going about one’s day only for memories of past abuse to resurface for an attack on one’s psyche.
how are you in finding friends? this sort of experience really ruins your trust in others. for you it's probably worse than for me.
i don't trust people to be supportive which limits most friendships to the level of friendly acquaintance. i always hope for the best but when they let me down then i just shrug it off as if i had expected it. that's the self defense mechanism i developed. (btw feel free to contact me at the email in my profile if you prefer to talk in private)
> As far as I was told, this was good for me because to use your words, it gave me a social life.
No. I can see you don't want to discuss in good faith, so I'll leave you to wallowing in self-pity. I was bullied at school too.
Even if bullying remains a fixture in one's life, having something to look forward to after the hell they call school is much better than having nothing. And the "something" can be learning to program, tinkering with Linux, or talking to friends from around the world online. Having screen time vs having a social or intellectual life is a false dichotomy.
When in human history would teenagers spend most of their time surrounded by other teenagers?
Yet another thing we can credit to Christian expansionism. We have never put our kids in school- no bullying, just balanced happy healthy kiddos.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calmecac
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C4%93lpochcalli
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_education#By_countr...
The institutionalized mass factory-farmed education system was a direct result of western Christian imperialism and the desire to enforce and spread biblical teachings.
Please tell us what country anywhere in the world in the past 200 years had an education system that was good, instead of bad. Please explain what the differences were.
Yeshivahs and madrassas are nothing new; in Bhutan, there monasteries brimming with young boys spending their days studying voluminous Tibetan Buddhist scriptures.
The biggest factor in the growth of schooling in modern period hasn't been any religion – it is the idea that education is a universal right for every child, as opposed to a privilege for the children of the elite.
Public schooling can be directly traced back to protestants - the idea of state-wide mandated education was to ensure the Bible was taught and spread.
Education and public schooling are different things.
Of my 13 years of K-12 education, I spent 2 years in a public school, the other 11 in three different Catholic schools. Whatever the merits of your complaints about school systems, I think many of them would apply to many private schools too
There are at least four countries/territories worldwide (Aruba, Bangladesh, Sint Maarten, and Macau) where over 90% of secondary students attend private schools, public schools enrol less than 10% of secondary students – you think none of the private school students in those countries would sympathise with any of your criticisms?
> Public schooling can be directly traced back to protestants
You think Catholic majority countries don't have public education systems? In Brazil 86% of secondary students attend public school; in Portugal, 81%; in Argentina and France it is 74%; in Spain 69%; by contrast, Australia, a country in which historically Protestants have outnumbered Catholics by as much as 3:1, the percent of secondary students in public education is only 53%.
Sources:
- Public education rates worldwide: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.SEC.PRIV.ZS?most_rec... (okay, that's percent private, but subtract from 100 to get percent public)
- Australia historical religious affiliation statistics: https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/2f762f95845417aeca2...
As an aside, although Australia's Protestant:Catholic ratio was around 3:1 in the first half of the 20th century (and I believe through the 19th century too, although I don't have hard figures handy on that), nowadays there are only slightly more Protestants in Australia than Catholics – this is because, while both branches of Christianity have lost huge numbers of followers to secularisation, Catholicism has always partly compensated for that by immigration from Catholic majority countries (most recently the Philippines), Australia's post-1950 immigration patterns have left Protestants at a comparative demographic disadvantage – which I believe is true of the rest of the Anglosphere too
I am referring to the broad modern standard of putting every child in school... which is traced back directly to protestants wanting to have the state enforce bible study to every child.
In American English, and most other English dialects, "public school" means "school run by the government". However, in British English (and also I believe Indian, maybe Irish too), "public school" has a rather opposite meaning – "expensive private school for the children of rich". In no major dialect of English does "public school" mean "the broad modern standard of putting every child in school"
What you are really talking about is compulsory education – laws that oblige parents to send their children to a school, whether government-run or private.
Are Protestants responsible for compulsory education? It is true, that historically speaking, Luther and other Reformers did play an important role in promoting the idea in the early modern period - but they didn't invent it. It existed in ancient Sparta, for boys. Plato, in his Republic, advocated compulsory state-run education – not just for boys, but for girls too.
It is true the first few states in modern Europe were to enact it were Protestant, but Catholic Europe soon copied the idea – Protestant Prussia introduced it in 1763, but Catholic Austria followed suit only 11 years later (1774), while it took Protestant Sweden another 68 years (1842). The Ottoman Empire made education compulsory in Istanbul in 1824 (they planned to gradually roll it out empire-wide, but that took far longer to achieve than they'd initially anticipated); at that point, no US state had yet done so, the first being Massachusetts in 1852. (Although publicly funded education was established in Massachusetts over two centuries earlier, it wasn't compulsory, there was no legal obligation on parents to send their children to school until then.)
So, while certainly Protestants played an important role in promoting the idea at in the modern period, they didn't invent it, and some Catholic and Muslim jurisdictions introduced it before many Protestant jurisdictions had.