Ice cream cone

....are they serious? Or perhaps they are interpreting my worst nightmare!

... 10,000,000 views?

What can I tell you Daniele: violence, God, money, etc. ... I don't know where we are going; as long as we work and the children stay at home getting bored ... I don't see much positivity.

nancy wrote:

....are they serious? Or perhaps they are interpreting my worst nightmare!

No, no Nancy... unfortunately they are serious, if one can speak of being serious in such an abominable case.

And unfortunately it is not a nightmare but a harsh reality, an enormous problem that, from my point of view, is underestimated - or partly unknown, I don't know! - by parents who do not realize who their children truly are.

I am very ...but very worried and moreover, I also feel very helpless regarding the drift we are heading towards!

Frank wrote:

... 10,000,000 views?

What can I tell you Daniele: violence, God money, etc. ... I don't know where we will go; as long as we work and children stay at home getting bored ... I don't see much positivity.

The necessity to work is indispensable and one cannot even think of asking a parent - who would usually be the mother - to give up their job.

Boredom is certainly a problem ... but there is something that goes deeper in this generation of adolescents, and it is the prospect of having no prospects.

Tudo que happens, has happened, and will happen, History teaches me, has its own motivation in what is the social, cultural, and political climate of the time in which it occurs.

And this too is a sign of the times, no ifs or buts! A sign of our time!"}

Our time. You're right. I am also terrified by the upheaval of values, or rather the total absence of values and the lack of lines of demarcation between what is lawful and unlawful... what I see emerging forcefully is nothing but pure selfishness. Respect for one's own dignity and that of others no longer exists... Middle Ages? Worse!

I beg to differ... The lack of values is only a consequence of a much deeper problem that, in my opinion, lies in the "stereotype," and I have already made this point several times in other threads.

As for the idea of history teaching us... I sincerely think that the history of back then in today's world is like putting sauce on an apple cake. The world has completely transformed technologically over the last 50 years, and one cannot speak of ancient history in a context where wars are fought by pressing buttons behind a desk.

I remember my adolescence very well, and it is not easy to be accepted in a pack of slackers if you are a boy who aspires to a different kind of life. The smartest ones adapt to everything while continuing to think about their own goals and finding ways to be accepted; the others either compensate or become like these 4 fools. I found myself in a transitional period between the professor who would give you a rap on the knuckles and the one where the professor was mocked by the students. Today, things have worsened exponentially. I would never want to be a teacher in a high school. Parents nowadays count for very little; everything depends on the intelligence of the children, who at a certain point should have a wake-up call and understand what they truly want from life. Young people are continuously bombarded with information and incorrect male stereotypes. On television, they only see asses and tits; at school, the thugs who beat someone up today and another tomorrow are treated like heroes, or those who don't study and spend entire days wandering around getting high or doing nothing. They take as examples the tough guys from movies, the American rappers who publish videos where the man is the object of desire for women willing to do anything just to have a relationship with them (that is the message being conveyed); and during adolescence, when a hormonal war comes alive in the body, if there is no brain, they identify so much with parts of these absurd stereotypes that they end up idolizing them and being willing to do anything to become like them.

At school, they study nothing, they answer teachers rudely, and often even threaten them, because that makes you cooler. As far as women are concerned, the only thing they want is just a quickie without any kind of feeling, because the tough man must not be a slave to a woman. It must be said that girls also play along, because if you are still a virgin at 16, you aren't normal, you have problems. That's the world we are in. We should kick them all in the balls like they used to do and put a stop to it.

The thing that scares me most is that in 10 years, these people will have to be part of the society that produces, or rather, should produce... The fate of humanity will have to be placed in the hands of these people.

You aren't exactly disagreeing...

I think like you. By values, I mean the logical and sense of justice that limits oneself out of respect for others. Once upon a time, those who did not respect others were considered to have no dignity. Transgression, even if it causes physical or emotional harm to others, is no longer considered negative. The typical boy no longer distinguishes well between good and evil (clearly in a secular sense), reality and virtual life. Life's goals are to have everything without any effort or merit, and those who instead preserve the old sense of logic and justice end up feeling like outsiders. An encyclopedia of sociology would need to be written, but to notice that our society is now completely overturned and sick, great expertise is not necessary!

It is not a matter of the history of then or the history of today, and technology, like any other human achievement, is nonetheless part of History!

When I assert that History teaches me (us), I mean that any social phenomenon, whether positive or negative, is always framed within a specific historical period and that the causes of progress or regression must be sought in motivations linked to what occurs in that historical period.

History, it is worth remembering, is not an abstract entity, and much less is it an event that falls from the sky; rather, it is the consequence of social, cultural, and political phenomena created by humans. Because it is always good to remember that History is made solely and exclusively by humans and, this, is always for better or for worse.

If we manage to clear the field of an indisputable fact—namely, that every historical period, every generation, has had, has, and will have its merits and its demerits, its good and its bad, and above all many who were neither too good nor too bad, without too much idolatry or demonization of the time that was—we will be able to begin trying to tackle the real problems of this new generation that is emerging into the world and which in a few years will be the protagonist of this world.

However, if in doing so we do not know how to, or do not want to, understand the mistakes of parents—which are many and serious—once again we will be unable to analyze a social phenomenon that, in its gravity, is either undervalued or, even worse, indulged with adjectives like "it's all just kids being kids," often because facing it would mean questioning how our parents were and how we are as parents.

Returning to the professor who hits [students] is not only unacceptable and deleterious but is a barbarity that a civilly evolved world absolutely cannot accept, and even worse is kicking someone in the balls.

Watch out Simone, because if you kick someone in the balls, it is not very different from someone singing "and you tell your father not to fuck with me because otherwise I'll kill him"; you are on the same level of violence, at least verbal. And in any case, the motto always holds—regarding values—that violence only creates violence.

If we are unable to understand and analyze the malaise of these new generations, then yes, it is probable that we will return to that Middle Ages of which Nancy speaks.

But to understand and analyze this malaise, a child of this time and thus of our current History, we must first, with humility, understand—if we are parents—where we have erred and are erring, and thus be able to strongly question ourselves. If we are not parents but might become them, the question we must ask ourselves is where our parents went wrong, how we are, and finally, how to try to remedy it so that things go differently and, above all, better.

As for professors, without wanting to paint everyone with the same brush and thus without wanting to generalize, often it is they who, because they themselves are very frustrated, fail to transmit positivity to their students regarding what they do and what their future will be. And this, too, is a fact.

Now, without claiming to answer an absolutely complex problem exhaustively with this, I maintain: these young people, even more so than the young people who preceded them, face the non-existence of perspectives. Perspectives of work, first and foremost; of having a life that is, at least, at a level equal to those—and I am referring, obviously, to those born after the Second World War—generations that preceded them. Perspectives of quality of life, both regarding pollution and the resources of our planet, and climate change. The very sad reality is that this generation finds itself unable to think about the future in positive terms, something that has never happened to any previous generation.

Let me be clear: I do not want to excuse or accuse anyone, but I would like to seriously open eyes to problems that concern all of us and especially our children and those to come. Because if we are unable to do so and we settle for or hide behind the usual empty catchphrases or self-absolving slogans, it will truly be a catastrophe for everyone.

I completely share Daniele's point of view. Ineffective parenting is producing generations of subjects with omnipotence syndrome. The inability to define limits and boundaries through the establishment of "good rules" fosters stereotypes where the only value is lawlessness and self-assertion through bullying and the imposition of one's own needs—both legitimate and illegitimate—on others. We have not yet succeeded in providing our children with authoritative parents who can serve as a point of reference so that the future adult can structure "a correct conscience." Today's youth often lack a conscience. We have moved from an inefficiently authoritarian parental model to one devoid of strength. Add all the elements of a society in deep crisis, and you get a young person adrift within their own family and outside....

No, no and no. I do not share even a single word because people are speaking with bias without ever having lived through certain situations, and this is obvious from the type of reasoning used, which is totally based on idealistic issues that deviate completely from reality. Your speech, Daniele, is far too moralistic, and if there is one thing I have understood, it is that moralism unfortunately pays little or even never pays at all, because in all things, even in moralism, there must be the right measure. We write history day after day, that much is certain, but reasoning in today's world based on the past can only lead to unsatisfactory results. You say that my "kicking" (obviously the meaning was to give a slap when necessary) children who behave in a certain way is to put myself on the same level of violence. I hope you wrote this without thinking, or do we want to believe that giving an instructive slap to a child is synonymous with violence on par with talking about the murder of a parent? I sincerely believe that the comparison does not even exist, no matter how much one tries to force it, and if you are truly convinced of this, it is an indication of a fake moralism that leads you to write things solely for the purpose of gaining consensus from those who read, because anyone with even a minimal vision of a reality lived firsthand cannot agree with such a statement.

My teacher (she was a nun) in elementary school often gave a spanking to a child when they behaved badly and made a big mistake. To me, this is not violence; it is a gesture that, for a child, identifies something that an adult considers serious and absolutely not to be repeated. Obviously, two slaps on the bottom did not hurt you, and I remember the crying was not due to physical pain, but rather due to the shame of having committed a malicious act toward a classmate and having caused harm to another human being, whether this harm was verbal or physical (a lesson, like the nun's, of the type: "now I will show you how it feels to do what you did to your classmate"). If by chance the nun had the opportunity to speak with my mother about my mischief, my mother would also give me the rest at home and would not report the nun, as happens today in this society of "evolved moralists"...

Violence is something else entirely, and if you are firmly convinced that giving a slap on the hands is violence, I am happy for you that you have never seen true violence. Despite the spankings, I cherish a beautiful memory of Sister Enrica, because she was the architect of a very important part of my education and she also contributed to the formation of my character and the character of all the other children who today are, no exceptions, all well-behaved young men with their heads on straight; and if I had her in front of me today and had to summarize my reservations about those slaps in one word with the benefit of hindsight, I would only say this: "Thank you!". The point is that thanks to her "instructive spankings," I began, like all children, to categorize and distinguish what is right from what is wrong.

The litmus test came in middle school when children who had grown up in much more "liberal" preschools than mine were practically already thugs immersed in street gangs, beating other children just because they had looked at them (according to them) badly, or because they felt a sort of antipathy instinctively. This is certainly the fault of both parents and the school. You talk big because you probably belong to another generation, and it is easy to fill your mouth with morality if you have not lived certain situations firsthand. For me, arriving at state middle schools after a private institute run by nuns was like a bolt from the blue, like waking up on Mars. I remember well, and my mother remembers very well too, the crying I did during the first days of middle school because I found myself in a totally different world and I did not accept it. I remember very well, in particular one episode among many that I could tell from first grade, where a boy wearing a turtleneck sweater had his head pulled up over his hair with his own sweater to be then beaten on the head with the tip of a compass just because he had allowed himself to look at another child with a completely shaved head who only had long bangs in front of his eyes (I wonder how that could have gone unnoticed).

Today everyone fills their mouth with moralism, exaggerating the concept to the point of passing off what is not violence as violence and filing criminal complaints against a teacher who gives a child a spanking. Violence is something else entirely, and I would like this to be clear to everyone. Violence is what you see in the videos of finance [sic - likely referring to social/news footage] that end up on television, where teachers grab children by the hair with force and beat them.

repeatedly. That is violence that even I do not accept, not the gesture of a spanking given solely for educational purposes to put the child in a position to experience the emotions that he himself, through his wrong behavior, made another child feel.

With all this moralism, what have we obtained? Nothing good; on the contrary, a world where teachers are no longer protected, to whom students can say and do anything and everything is granted and forgiven, while if the stance comes from the teacher, they risk being criminally reported or finding their car destroyed in the school parking lot. A world where a video that glorifies guns, violence, murder, easy money, prostitution, and drugs receives 10 million views in a few days. These are the results of this much-vaunted moralism!

The pure moralism you speak of is a concept that is not yet mature enough to be applied to this world; it should apply to a society of intelligent people where any problem can be resolved through dialogue, and this society is still light-years away from this developmental goal. Italy is a country where 80% of the people are functionally illiterate, and in the rest of the world, the statistics are no better!

If you found yourself speaking face-to-face with one of these kids, waving the flag of moralism and good manners in the air, what do you think you would achieve?

I can tell you, having seen plenty of these contexts during adolescence... You would get mockery or, in the worst case, threats and perhaps beatings.

These young people have rotten foundations because there has never been anyone who imposed themselves to correct their behavior. Now that they are like buildings, how do you think you can rework their foundations?

Character, way of being, and more generally "whoever you want to become when you grow up" are things that must be cultivated as children and must continue to be nurtured throughout the entire phase of puberty and adolescence.

If one then considers all the external factors that counteract this tendency, it becomes a war. Everything depends on ensuring that a child identifies a right kind of stereotype and strives to be that type of person, but this can only happen at a certain age, namely when someone who is no longer a child has the intellectual faculties to make a choice and decide what kind of man they want to be. As children, this is not possible because a child does not have these mental faculties, and the only weapon to clarify in a child's mind what is right from what is wrong is to make them empathize with the same situations that they themselves created toward others; and if a few slaps for instructional purposes were given, surely no one ever died, but on the contrary, those spankings could make the difference between "the ice cream cone kids" and "Carlo Rubbia." I believe there is much to reflect upon in what I have said.

dear friends... this discussion is anything but 'light music'!

i also, like Nancy, fully share Daniele's reading (I am referring especially to the post that I liked).

I am not adding anything, I am just making an emphasis: when you write - Daniele - that "The saddest reality is that this generation finds itself unable to think about the future in positive terms".

Unfortunately, I think this is the heart of the problem.

If you don't see positive prospects for the future, you lose the inner drive to commit yourself to very long-term things such as studying a musical instrument, social commitment in the area where you live, or the day-to-day construction of an emotional relationship with another person (just to give three examples where the road is paved with ups and downs).

I dare say that without prospects for the future, the inner drive also fails even for the individual who in their head is animated by the most sacred intentions.

(PS; due to time constraints, text length, and the desire to read it calmly, I will only read what Simone wrote above tomorrow evening)

I don't think that when Simone said "kicking people in the balls" he meant to propose a model of authority in the old-fashioned way... which borders on violence because it was based almost exclusively on the imposition of rules without any dialogue or mutual understanding... but I don't think Daniele proposed a "fake moralist" model either....

I believe that, in any case, you both perfectly agree on the fact that it is necessary to teach and educate respect for the rules....

The "how" can open up another significant discussion. ..

A slap (anyway, punishments also exist) given in the right way and at the right time can be effective without being considered violence. But it is above all the charisma that a parent has over a child that makes the difference... also because at 15 or 16 years old, slaps start to lose their effectiveness....

TheSimon wrote:

No, no and no. I do not agree with even a single word because this is being spoken with bias without ever having lived through certain situations, and this is obvious from the type of reasoning used, which is totally based on idealistic issues that deviate completely from reality.

Simone, I don't want to be paternalistic and I wouldn't want you to interpret me that way, but the 24 years that separate us force me to remind you that I have actually lived, in a school that came long before the one you experienced,

I wasn't at a convent school for elementary school. I was at a public school where my teacher, on the third day of school, having to choose two 6-year-old children - only 6 years old - to send away to another class, chose, by grabbing them and making them feel like crap: one who was the son of a woman with an unknown father who essentially worked as a prostitute to survive, and another who, coming from a family that didn't know what it meant to love their own children, was often beaten - the father in particular - and because of this, he was very wild and rebellious. As an adult, he became a drug addict, then entered a community center, and I haven't heard news of him for a long time.

The first day of middle school - or perhaps the third, probably - we had just been to Mass. I was in the middle of a group of my classmates; they were making a bit of a mess, but I wasn't actually doing anything. Suddenly and without warning, an enormous blow fell from the sky onto my head. I still remember it as if it were happening this very moment; it was terrible and I truly saw stars. What had happened? A technical applications professor, seeing the commotion, came running towards us and, with all his strength... bam, a hard, random slap on the group!

We were terrified because we had a principal who, if he caught you outside the door because a teacher had punished you, would give you a hard smack to the head. The first time - and also the only time - that I was put outside the door, I cried, not only because I had been betrayed by my best friend who had snitched, but because I was terrified of the possibility of the principal seeing me. I was always inside the bathroom, I remember.

All this did not prevent there being elements within my class like the ones you describe, and those elements were, as it happens, always children of family situations where slapping was often used, if not worse.

I have seen kids who are victims of bullying - and I too, albeit to a lesser extent, was a victim - but the difference between yesterday and today is that no one cared about those kids, starting with the teachers themselves. This is reality, Simone!

My speaking is not moralism but is dictated by my lived experience of yesterday; the child and adolescent at the turn of the 60s and 70s, and that of today: the parent of the 2010s with two sons, one 17 and one 15, who sees, undergoes, suffers, and makes mistakes, on their own skin and on theirs, all the problems of the modern world.

The 24 years that separate us are exactly what make the generational difference I am talking about, and you cannot base the argument on age difference because that argument doesn't hold water, also because I haven't been a child for a certain number of years now; rather than talking about age, one should analyze the intensity and speed with which one has lived their life up to today, something that stems from rhythms that have totally changed over the years. Those of my father's generation grew up in certain family and school contexts, your generation in other contexts, mine in others, and current ones in yet others. If you talk about family using the wording "family situations where a slap was often used, if not worse," then you are talking to me about violence. I did not make reference to any kind of violence by teachers because, as I said in my previous post, there is a huge difference between a one-time smack on a child's bottom for instructional purposes and slapping someone in the face with the intent to cause physical pain. The fundamental problem is that today this form of laxity has been created, where children have every kind of freedom, and if a teacher today did what my nun used to do to me, they would face lawsuits and counter-lawsuits, and this is not possible because everything must be documented with circumstances. I have a friend with whom I often get angry because she treats her son as if he were a guardian angel, and I often hear her blaming teachers without even knowing how things went... So, biasedly: if the teacher says something negative about her son, she doesn't even bother to find out how things happened; it's the teacher's fault, period. They are the classic parents people talk so much about, who, if they had a child starting to study music, would immediately say they have Mozart in the house, but instead, 99.9999999999% of the time, they are a terrible failure. This excess of zeal and protection is not only deleterious but, in my opinion, contrary to expectations, it weakens the character of a child who should learn to know through their own strength not only achievements but also defeats; they must learn to earn things and know how to defend themselves. This is how character is forged, not with overprotection. The parent, together with the school, must be an example of conduct; they must show the way but should never make choices for the child or substitute themselves in resolving problems of their age (with the obvious exception of problems beyond their reach); a child should be made responsible.

My mother often used her slipper as a child, always without hurting me but giving me lessons. My father, on the contrary, never touched me with a finger, but one look from him was enough to make my blood freeze.

Regarding the professors who today, especially, have become disinterested, it stems from the complete collapse of expectations. Honestly, I would do the same in their place. For 1200 euros a month, where does it say that I must try to frame a kid who is going down a bad path if the next day the parents come to school blaming me, suing me, or even worse, beating me up? Why would they bother?

Once, when the professor entered the classroom, all the children would stop talking, stand up, and greet the professor; during lesson hours, they were attentive, and heaven help you if a fly flew by. There were rules—this is what my father always tells me, and he used to sleep with his house keys attached to the door. Today, the professor enters and has to shout to get them to sit down and be silent, and if they overdo it, they risk...

The viewing is not recommended for the faint-hearted or minors. The videos contain offensive words that harm the dignity of others. The videos can be found freely on YouTube and I have done nothing more than link them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTs_z1GnirM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzsGgxREG1g

I could continue for hours. This is the reality, Daniele! A reality I lived firsthand, precisely spat out throughout middle school and the first years of high school. That's why I keep saying that things which seem serious to you, for someone who has lived experiences like mine—experiences like those in these videos that were repeated practically every day—a little slap seems like a caress, even with 24 years of difference...

I was one of the few outraged by these "antics" and I was seen as the black sheep of the class, but they didn't mess with me because I went to the gym every day, I did boxing, and if I got really angry, I became worse than them, so in their stupidity, they knew well it was better not to make me lose my temper, so I

they marginalized me and alienated me, and for me boxing was a lifesaver; otherwise, I really don't know what would have become of me if they had had a bite on me. In my fifth year of high school, because of these imbeciles, their exclusion, and the loneliness, I went through a bad period of depression. I skipped school for 3 months, huddling in the municipal library every single day until a professor whom I love dearly called me and brought me back to the right path.

You live out of context and speak about subjects you don't know because you haven't lived them. The things you experienced 30/40 years ago seem grave and exaggerated to you, but compared to what is happening today, it's like comparing fuses to a hydrogen bomb and, returning to the point of the story, if there is one thing that history teaches us is that if this excess of respectability has led to this result, perhaps it is time to take a few steps back.

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TheSimon wrote:

Viewing is not recommended for the faint of heart and minors. The videos contain offensive words that harm the dignity of others. The videos are freely available on YouTube and I have done nothing more than link to them.

Viewing would certainly be discouraged for minors, but I fear that minors do not listen to this advice. On the contrary. The web, YouTube in this case, amplifies imbecility in an uncontrollable way. What once could happen within a classroom remained essentially closed within the classroom. Now, incivility must be communicated to the entire world. The problem of emulation is real: if I see that in that class (perhaps from the other end of Italy) they have gone that far, what can I invent to surpass them in wickedness? Whatever it is, I will certainly make sure to have my classmates film a video of me, to leave testimony and so that the humiliation suffered by the teacher on duty does not remain confined within the classroom walls.

And even though I am in favor of using new technologies in class, I find all this very risky.