P.S.
If this does not accurately reflect your views, I would not suggest you speak this to him, but how can you see this any other way?
I already answered that:
School is an institution that is seen as an authority to which one is in conflict. Precisely because it is, it is a good proxy for the government.
I do not believe he should make them his enemy, but they have certainly made themselves his enemy (in practice if not in intent). There is no virtue in hiding or obfuscating the truth in order to spare his feelings, or in attempting to cunningly direct his growth by a deceptive presentation of the facts.
No, they did not make them his enemy. There is a HUGE difference between practice and intent. They do their best to serve their students as people of integrity with their own minds and hearts, openly showing their criticisms towards government and working actively for bettering and supporting their students school life.
I totally can make up the difference between evil intent and good intent. Which is in the case of my son and all his co-students a matter of great importance.
We had a teacher of which I found he was a person with little integrity and big ego and with whom I got into several arguments until he bettered himself and stopped using me and my son as a box of sorrows. More important was that my son was witnessing me standing up for him.
My son is a smart kid - whatever he might encounter in the future, he already learned up from elementary school that his parents cannot protect him from all what the world is presenting him. Children don't need to be presented those facts, they very well experience them on their own. But they do NOT need adults who put raw things onto them which they are not old enough for.
I must ask you at this point if it might have been the case that adults imposed on you their unvarnished truth and burdened you as a child with carrying and passing on their own anger and resignation. I need not an answer bu only want to pass this question to you.
Stay well.
What if there was a war, and no one showed up?
What if there was a compulsory indoctrination camp and no teachers showed up? You see the point. They are complicit. The institution exists because they accept those jobs. Same with police, same with military.
I was raised "protected" from harsh realities as much as possible. For this reason, it took years of immense effort and confusion to figure out what was going on. As you said, they experience it - you cannot protect them. So in trying to achieve the impossible, you withhold accurate explanation, and so they have the experience without being armed with the knowledge to process it accurately.
All those days of being miserable because I didn't understand why I had to wake up when I was tired; why I had to leave when I wanted to stay home; why I had to learn about things I didn't care about; and why I couldn't learn about things I did care about. The thousands of instances of unnecessary stress over exams, unfinished homework, reports and projects due, how my parents would react to my grades or slight disobedience at school. And no satisfying answer for why any of this was happening.
THIS IS ABUSE
And keep in mind, I had the best possible school experience: A or B+ student throughout; learning came easy. Very popular; had lots of fun with friends. Very respectful; teachers liked me and went easy on me.
Children are people - they can "handle" reality if it's presented to them appropriately. What they can't handle is living in a fantasy then having reality come crashing down upon them at the age of reason; or being presented with experiences without any means of understanding them. I believe our society bears this out sufficiently - a world of disenchanted, morose people, living lives of quiet desperation, subconsciously missing Santa Claus and the other rosey deceptions of childhood.
Just calling it like I see it. I get that these people are deceived, not malicious, but this does not make them moral actors. There's a difference between being a nice and being good person. They don't care to figure out what morality fundamentally IS, and have accepted the perspective of their culture without due investigation. This is a failing of their natural responsibility as a potentially intelligent being, and their negligence is causing harm to others. I don't see any way around this conclusion.
Well, that's what you mean! I started asking the "what if" questions about twenty years ago and as much as I tried to solve the problems of the world in my head, as much as I thought everyone had to boycott what is generally perceived as powerful, I always got into a mental misery because I came to a dead end. Doesn't that sound familiar to you?
You can trust that I am in a homeostatic exchange with my son that contains so much more than text lines could ever express.
The time of confusion and searching is a normal thing and so is the questioning of the status quo. Every young person goes through this. At some point it is appropriate to move into more moderate waters and consider other alternatives, including growing up.
You cannot look into the minds and hearts of other people and therefore cannot make them equally unworthy because of their professional or other affiliations. You are not walking in their shoes, you need not be their judge.
You are now an adult and no longer a child. Everything that was withheld from you or that was not made known to you has now become your own task. If you find that your parents and teachers have educated and raised you wrongly, it is now up to you to develop as you see fit.
I do not know if you are a father yourself. But if so, then you will know that in being with the child you as a parent are also in a dynamic relationship that involves a continuous learning process. Not only children develop with their parents but also parents develop with their children. On this way of maturing all people make mistakes and they do a lot right. They are morally fallible and they are good people. There is no real end to this, except when everyone in the family is dead. You too.
Otherwise, I really have no idea what you are talking about when you wish for the elimination of all the institutions and systems that have evolved over the millennia of human history up to here, and which contain a complexity that is beyond any simple view and solution. By pretending to be able to provide a simple solution to what you identify as a problem, you can only fail and feel powerless and angry. I don't know if you know anything about systemics, but I recommend that you dig into it.
Some of the notions people have have grown over centuries. They take just as long to disappear as they appeared. Everything is a process and not a sudden phenomenon. You wish for relief and satisfaction during your lifetime and a better world around you. In my view of the world it won't happen the way I want it to be in total. I can take influence on what is possible, there I can change things. Going into the dialogue with the present institutions, not turning my back on them and ridiculing the people I cannot pick as servants of deception.
I come from a refugee family, my parents have experienced imprisonment, hunger and war. They were born into a time that included great unrest and movements that could come back at any time. They have experienced forty years of unrest and then forty years of stability (at least my mother, who became 86).
I can now waste my life and live in fear and anger. But I can also try to appreciate the life given to me.
I must admit that you give me the creeps with insisting on morality and truth.
Well, is there such thing as Truth? Are there things that exist in this physical realm, events that have actually taken place, natural processes in play? What's wrong with speaking of them as such? This is the realm of science and philosophy.
Is there such thing as morality? Behaviors which will produce results more or less conducive to man's thriving? Does not every living thing have conditions that serve them better or worse? What's wrong with stating that this phenomenon exists? Why would these concepts generate discomfort?
It is wrong to tell a family that if their child does not conform to the arbitrary educational standards of a select group of strangers, their children will be stolen from them. This is not subject for rational debate - it is definitively so. It's a threat of terrible violence, and anyone who participates in keeping that system in place is complicit in that evil. What is untrue about these statements?
It seems you want to say that everything is up in the air; that we all need to compromise with each other because everyone's opinion is equally valid. No, a person who has the opinion that the sky is a black-and-white checkerboard is not on equal footing with a person who says it is blue. One person is correct and the other is wrong. To act as if the first person's opinion should be respected serves no one, not even them.
There is a very simple solution: Stop committing and/or advocating evil. Each of us can only do this for ourselves. As it regards others, all we can do is implore them to stop. This is what I do by sharing relevant knowledge that I have discovered, and I don't see why that's a problem. I'm not cutting anyone out of the loop, and I invite any and all to challenge my ideas with rational rebuttal. But I'm not going to pretend that there's no such thing as right or wrong relative to the truth of this reality, or to the subset of that truth called morality.
I understand that I will not likely see meaningful change in my lifetime, but I feel it a duty to speak Truth as I am able to demonstrate it, and to hold others to the same standard. This is the natural responsibility of every intelligent being. Just as you have responsibility to do no harm with your hands, you have that same responsibility to do no harm with you mind. People who think wrongly, act wrongly; so we must encourage everyone to bring their thoughts into alignment with reality, not just act from capricious, unfounded opinions.
You may take exception with my attitude, but if the ideas I present are true, then we have a responsibility to heed them.