if you worked hard things would work out for you
Yep only true for very specific things. And jobs definitely aren't always one of them anymore (unless you're lucky/conveniently into something high demand). Additionally things are always going to be a struggle if you don't have the right type of brain. Your school experience (and my very different one) was why I homeschooled and pretty much the same thing happened (and youngest has finally stopped insisting that he doesn't know a lot of things some of his schooled peers know and that I didn't teach him things when I remind him that he actively refused to learn a lot of things I was trying to get him to learn because he wasn't interested XD).
avoid manipulating people
One of the interesting/annoying philosophical discussions that happened here was whether or not every interaction was technically a form of manipulation though the word is associated with the negative side of things. I don't know if a consensus was reached because I fell off the discussion (either ended up in Minecraft with sibling dearest or remembered I hadn't finished lesson planning x_x).
My brain is super right though, it does things! Cool things!
I think one of the problems I had growing up was that I needed a convincing reason to do something, and I never got one so I felt ANGRY about having to do all this nonsense that no one could give me a good reason for.
I stand by the idea that if they had called it socialization instead of education and said “we do this to make sure society doesn’t has fewer psychopaths and learn to socialize and complete tasks, I would have been like “cool” ok, let’s do it and been more proactive. Instead it was always “education is so important, think of all the poor kids who don’t have it, this will help your future!” But why will it help my future mom?
I think the unwillingness to discuss this in a respectful way by every single adult is what made me so reluctant to do anything. Like I see chocolate on your shirt, don’t tell me you don’t know what chocolate is.
I acknowledge that it’s not easy for parents too. God, if I had to deal with classmates and the dumb things they told my kids and showed my kids…
And on manipulation… i mean words are sticky. You could say our hands are manipulating the enviroment.
Self serving? I believe we need to see the interconnectedness of all life in order to be decent people because we are ultimately self serving, but what’s wrong with serving yourself if you can see others as an extention of yourself? I don’t see self serving as bad if it’s done right.
Most brains are super right, just not necessarily right for whatever learning environment they find themselves in. At work I think half our coaching time is spent trying to find ways to explain the same thing to different brains XD
we're at a point where my boss has decided that eldest and I warrant our own language
I have a very vague memory from school hearing a teacher tell either the class or part of the class that we were there to learn not socialise so the "socialisation" argument in a school setting where you're age segregated has never had any weight for me which helped a bit when homeschooling even though by that stage the opinions at least in this general area were shifting and most people thought I was "doing the right thing" because [insert whatever it was they weren't happy about with their kids' school] but they could never homeschool because [reasons] (usually related to the fact they had jobs and a lot of them were single parents).
I don't know how much I learned from school, at least of the things you're supposed to learn at school, so I spent a long time contending that as well before I learned that there were different types of learning styles and that my opinions/feelings/experiences weren't universal XD
Not only that, I think most people never mind kids don't really have the experience/context for that to ever be relevant even after it's explained x_x You may well have had the maturity to get it at that age but a lot of people (possibly even most) don't get it at my current age. Maybe your parents didn't get it, just knew of it as A Good ThingTM hence the clumsy non-explanation.