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My reaction to these kinds of things (see also: the abuse of the Battle School students in Ender's Game) is to think: (1) Perhaps it was the best way to teach c

My reaction to these kinds of things (see also: the abuse of the Battle School students in Ender's Game) is to think: (1) Perhaps it was the best way to teach certain things; but (2) I don't think the people who do such things usually rule out all the gentler methods first. It sounds like the "challenges" weren't necessarily intended to teach you what you learned, and you just happened to have a mind and mindset that responded well to the situation, so it isn't even an instance of "competently executed dangerous teaching methods". Nevertheless, do you think there's a safer approach that would have had a high chance of teaching you and the other kids those lessons?

watwut 5y ago
Enders game is a fiction. And while military boarding schools (and any closed seclude communities) in fact do have abuse systems amd are prone to bullying issue, there is zero evidence the abuses are best way to teach things. Being strip searched does not fixes mental health issues. Really.
- teekert 5y ago
  Indeed, children need love in order to be able to give it (and be able to receive it). It seems better to me to keep them in the “circle of love” than to send them off to the well known circle of abuse.
  - candiodari 5y ago
    Very often there's no choice. Either something under your control, or CPS comes and takes the kid away. Schools even do this to avoid dealing with abusive teachers and the like, or just to get rid of a specific child. And that would be this CPS: https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article238206754.html https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article23820... The idea that justifies the power of CPS, that these sorts of "measures" are taken in the interest of the child, are totally ridiculous upon inspection. Not because there aren't any problems, but because these "solutions" are so much worse.
- b0rsuk 5y ago
  I think people setting these up get their inspiration from the agoge, the boy rearing system in Sparta. The same methods are used to raise children soldiers in Africa. https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/ https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p... Also, you might be interesting in Cult of the Badass: https://acoup.blog/2021/02/19/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-iii-the-cult-of-the-badass/ https://acoup.blog/2021/02/19/collections-the-universal-warr...
  - andrei_says_ 5y ago
    Most child soldiers’ mental health is ruined for life. A model of obedience and desensitization achieved through abuse followed by committing unspeakable atrocities is not a great formula for making good citizens. What kind of twisted mental gymnastics convinces the creators of these programs that their programs are anything but harmful?
    - watwut 5y ago
      I was rewatching shows from 1990 and so on lately. One of surprising observations was that "tough love" came up multiple times, always as positive. There is something appealing about tough no nonsense solutions to people with authoritarian tendencies. And there is ignorance about how bad it can get in isolated communities where weaker individuals have no where to escape.
      - corin_ 5y ago
        I think it's not surprising that it had (and probably still has) positive connotations to many people, because "tough love" sounds like something most people employ sometimes - from a parent enforcing bedtimes to a friend telling another friend that they're being an asshole in some way. I think what clicked for the majority of people was the idea that loving someone doesn't mean saying yes to their every whim, rather than anything extreme.
      - TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
        When growing up as a teenage male, there was a turning point in my mental development. I was sitting in class cracking jokes when this jerk kid stood up and punched me in the back of the head. I didn't know how to respond, so I just sat there. I was an out of shape kid who would have definitely lost. That event changed me. In the weeks and months ahead, anger and shame in my response led to a focused and intentional mental and physical development. I started exercising, eating better, and learning how to fight. I developed social responses that helped me become better respected and less manipulated, and changed from a rotund pushover to a normal male. Our society has changed massively over the decades, and one of the biggest changes I've seen is that it's become significantly more feminized, but I think it's important to acknowledge that some things that work for feminine young women won't necessarily work for masculine young men. I think that tough love programs exist because many men who go there and run the place went through similar experiences as me. If the stress is handled adaptively and not maladaptively, it can be a motivator for positive change while dealing with our weaknesses.
- bnix 5y ago
  Exactly. A sci fi playwright shouldn't be a source for inductive reasoning, let alone any tv content.
torginus 5y ago
I think Ender's Game is the most compassionate protest against this kind of thinking - it is a thought experiment that demonstrates that with the right environment, even the most intelligent can be taught to use their skills in an utilitarian and amoral way - the book ends with Ender becoming the worst mass murderer in the history of the human race, despite representing the moral middle ground between his monstrous brother and his saintly sister. The later books are about him trying to undo the damage he did. I don' think the author intended the readership to see Battle School as an ideal form of education.
- loopz 5y ago
  I read it as Ender successfully solved the problems that he were educated and grown into to solve, despite no known solution existing and while having to be creative and improvise in a "no win scenario". The book is a critique, but more about wether it is good enough to be shaped by society, or how people shapes and make up society. When the latter is nearly non-existent, you end up with results such as in the first book.
- salawat 5y ago
  >the book ends with Ender becoming the worst mass murderer in the history of the human race. You may need to dwell some more, because there's some higher order practical and moral contention there. Guilt over things done in pursuit of survival is the victor's luxury. If you lose, and die anyway you don't have that problem. This is one of the sharp divergences that tends to exist between the soldier and the pacifist. One fights today to repent and atone tomorrow. The other risks destruction, robbing one of a future in which one may possibly avoid making the same mistakes or committing the same atrocities as one's forbearers. In this sense, the weight of being a mass murderer is shared equally by the warrior and the poet. One through action, the other through inaction. No matter the outcome, somebody's hands are covered in blood. Ender did what he was uniquely equipped to do in the moment where it was necessary for him, and those under his guidance to do it. We live not only under our own instrumentality, but under the auspices and obligations to which we are bequeathed by accident of our own existence. Ender's Game is an exquisite portrait of how the central theme of human existence is suffering. If you live to fight another day, you suffer those fights in the future, and the scars of the past you carry with you. If you acquiesce to destruction, your suffering stops, but the world moves on regardless. To be human is to struggle and suffer. The trick is coaxing some positivity out of the entire affair while we're around to do so. This applies at all levels of human endeavor. We all struggle against our own adversities perpetuated upon us by the "other". The biggest difference from one bit of suffering and struggle to the next, is how you define the "other". It's weird, but Ender's Game made a lot more sense after a reading of the Bhagavad Gita. I do not know if Card set out with that intent, but the two mesh with, and complement each other in ways few texts written at different time periods have. There's also good resonance with Martin Heidigger's thoughts on the nature of man being inextricably linked with the act of becoming or Being, the characteristic quality of Dasein. You cannot change your past, you can change the future, but only in as much as the road that has lead you to where you are allows. The Philosopher is left to wonder if it could have worked out any other way, the Faithful have their answer even if they didn't know it, and even a Free Agent, determined to sail their own way must navigate the waters pushed by the natural forces around them.
shkkmo 5y ago
How cam you reas that book and not think that the kida are abused and traumatized in horrific ways with minimal interest in the long term benefits to these kida? A core ethical question of this book is the degree to which the ends justify these means.
rawgabbit 5y ago
I didn’t like Ender’s Game and it’s portrayal of military boot camp. I had no idea what the training in Enders Game was about besides bullying and cruelty and very simplistic tactics. I went through US military training in the early 90s. A lot of it was bullshit but the intent was clear to weed out those who cannot handle an incredible amount of stress while you get little sleep or rest. There was no physical or verbal abuse. The intent of the training was to get people to keep performing and getting along with your team while everyone suffered the artificial stress created by the instructors.
- emptysongglass 5y ago
  I went through Marines boot camp and that was a ton of verbal and psychological abuse. There were very clear restrictions on physically assaulting recruits -- if a recruit entered within five feet? of a Drill Instructor, they could consider it an attack on their person and physically react -- so the DIs would spread their arms out and run at us to force us into their "engagement zone". I saw a guy piss himself from the verbal abuse in front of 100 other recruits in the squad bay. Another recruit vomited bile from being spurred to exhaustion by our "Kill Hat", again in public view of the rest of us and to the protests of the medic who pleaded with the Kill Hat to stop. He seemed a deeply sadistic man. There were so many of us for so few DIs it was possible to avoid their attention: my teenage self with a head full of fantasy called this the "eye of the malefactor". I've never seen so much evil in my life but I also never made it to a conflict zone.
  - rawgabbit 5y ago
    Sorry you went through that. I can only speak for myself and what I understand to be the norm. I know many countries’ boot camps still believe in the lie that abuse makes someone better. When/where was your boot camp?
    - emptysongglass 5y ago
      This was 14 years ago at the San Diego Recruit Depot right next to the airport. Those planes would keep us up all night. I remember breaking protocol to buy some earplugs so I could sleep. Much of that experience felt like a wild fever dream.
nextaccountic 5y ago
Of course some kids will get life lessons out of this experience, but they would get lessons from kinds of adversities anyway. I don't see the point. For me it's just cruelty for the sake of cruelty. Another comment here talked how Canadian indigenous children were subject to this treatment for over a century https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27559649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27559649 and this wasn't made in the best interest of the victims. And anyway, I don't believe in having institutionalized "tough love" could ever work. This kind of institution often attract sadistic people, that enjoy making the kids suffer.

watwut 5y ago

Enders game is a fiction. And while military boarding schools (and any closed seclude communities) in fact do have abuse systems amd are prone to bullying issue, there is zero evidence the abuses are best way to teach things. Being strip searched does not fixes mental health issues. Really.

teekert 5y ago
Indeed, children need love in order to be able to give it (and be able to receive it). It seems better to me to keep them in the “circle of love” than to send them off to the well known circle of abuse.
- candiodari 5y ago
  Very often there's no choice. Either something under your control, or CPS comes and takes the kid away. Schools even do this to avoid dealing with abusive teachers and the like, or just to get rid of a specific child. And that would be this CPS: https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article238206754.html https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article23820... The idea that justifies the power of CPS, that these sorts of "measures" are taken in the interest of the child, are totally ridiculous upon inspection. Not because there aren't any problems, but because these "solutions" are so much worse.
b0rsuk 5y ago
I think people setting these up get their inspiration from the agoge, the boy rearing system in Sparta. The same methods are used to raise children soldiers in Africa. https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/ https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p... Also, you might be interesting in Cult of the Badass: https://acoup.blog/2021/02/19/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-iii-the-cult-of-the-badass/ https://acoup.blog/2021/02/19/collections-the-universal-warr...
- andrei_says_ 5y ago
  Most child soldiers’ mental health is ruined for life. A model of obedience and desensitization achieved through abuse followed by committing unspeakable atrocities is not a great formula for making good citizens. What kind of twisted mental gymnastics convinces the creators of these programs that their programs are anything but harmful?
  - watwut 5y ago
    I was rewatching shows from 1990 and so on lately. One of surprising observations was that "tough love" came up multiple times, always as positive. There is something appealing about tough no nonsense solutions to people with authoritarian tendencies. And there is ignorance about how bad it can get in isolated communities where weaker individuals have no where to escape.
    - corin_ 5y ago
      I think it's not surprising that it had (and probably still has) positive connotations to many people, because "tough love" sounds like something most people employ sometimes - from a parent enforcing bedtimes to a friend telling another friend that they're being an asshole in some way. I think what clicked for the majority of people was the idea that loving someone doesn't mean saying yes to their every whim, rather than anything extreme.
    - TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
      When growing up as a teenage male, there was a turning point in my mental development. I was sitting in class cracking jokes when this jerk kid stood up and punched me in the back of the head. I didn't know how to respond, so I just sat there. I was an out of shape kid who would have definitely lost. That event changed me. In the weeks and months ahead, anger and shame in my response led to a focused and intentional mental and physical development. I started exercising, eating better, and learning how to fight. I developed social responses that helped me become better respected and less manipulated, and changed from a rotund pushover to a normal male. Our society has changed massively over the decades, and one of the biggest changes I've seen is that it's become significantly more feminized, but I think it's important to acknowledge that some things that work for feminine young women won't necessarily work for masculine young men. I think that tough love programs exist because many men who go there and run the place went through similar experiences as me. If the stress is handled adaptively and not maladaptively, it can be a motivator for positive change while dealing with our weaknesses.
bnix 5y ago
Exactly. A sci fi playwright shouldn't be a source for inductive reasoning, let alone any tv content.

torginus 5y ago

I think Ender's Game is the most compassionate protest against this kind of thinking - it is a thought experiment that demonstrates that with the right environment, even the most intelligent can be taught to use their skills in an utilitarian and amoral way - the book ends with Ender becoming the worst mass murderer in the history of the human race, despite representing the moral middle ground between his monstrous brother and his saintly sister. The later books are about him trying to undo the damage he did. I don' think the author intended the readership to see Battle School as an ideal form of education.

loopz 5y ago
I read it as Ender successfully solved the problems that he were educated and grown into to solve, despite no known solution existing and while having to be creative and improvise in a "no win scenario". The book is a critique, but more about wether it is good enough to be shaped by society, or how people shapes and make up society. When the latter is nearly non-existent, you end up with results such as in the first book.
salawat 5y ago
>the book ends with Ender becoming the worst mass murderer in the history of the human race. You may need to dwell some more, because there's some higher order practical and moral contention there. Guilt over things done in pursuit of survival is the victor's luxury. If you lose, and die anyway you don't have that problem. This is one of the sharp divergences that tends to exist between the soldier and the pacifist. One fights today to repent and atone tomorrow. The other risks destruction, robbing one of a future in which one may possibly avoid making the same mistakes or committing the same atrocities as one's forbearers. In this sense, the weight of being a mass murderer is shared equally by the warrior and the poet. One through action, the other through inaction. No matter the outcome, somebody's hands are covered in blood. Ender did what he was uniquely equipped to do in the moment where it was necessary for him, and those under his guidance to do it. We live not only under our own instrumentality, but under the auspices and obligations to which we are bequeathed by accident of our own existence. Ender's Game is an exquisite portrait of how the central theme of human existence is suffering. If you live to fight another day, you suffer those fights in the future, and the scars of the past you carry with you. If you acquiesce to destruction, your suffering stops, but the world moves on regardless. To be human is to struggle and suffer. The trick is coaxing some positivity out of the entire affair while we're around to do so. This applies at all levels of human endeavor. We all struggle against our own adversities perpetuated upon us by the "other". The biggest difference from one bit of suffering and struggle to the next, is how you define the "other". It's weird, but Ender's Game made a lot more sense after a reading of the Bhagavad Gita. I do not know if Card set out with that intent, but the two mesh with, and complement each other in ways few texts written at different time periods have. There's also good resonance with Martin Heidigger's thoughts on the nature of man being inextricably linked with the act of becoming or Being, the characteristic quality of Dasein. You cannot change your past, you can change the future, but only in as much as the road that has lead you to where you are allows. The Philosopher is left to wonder if it could have worked out any other way, the Faithful have their answer even if they didn't know it, and even a Free Agent, determined to sail their own way must navigate the waters pushed by the natural forces around them.

shkkmo 5y ago

How cam you reas that book and not think that the kida are abused and traumatized in horrific ways with minimal interest in the long term benefits to these kida? A core ethical question of this book is the degree to which the ends justify these means.

rawgabbit 5y ago

I didn’t like Ender’s Game and it’s portrayal of military boot camp. I had no idea what the training in Enders Game was about besides bullying and cruelty and very simplistic tactics. I went through US military training in the early 90s. A lot of it was bullshit but the intent was clear to weed out those who cannot handle an incredible amount of stress while you get little sleep or rest. There was no physical or verbal abuse. The intent of the training was to get people to keep performing and getting along with your team while everyone suffered the artificial stress created by the instructors.

emptysongglass 5y ago
I went through Marines boot camp and that was a ton of verbal and psychological abuse. There were very clear restrictions on physically assaulting recruits -- if a recruit entered within five feet? of a Drill Instructor, they could consider it an attack on their person and physically react -- so the DIs would spread their arms out and run at us to force us into their "engagement zone". I saw a guy piss himself from the verbal abuse in front of 100 other recruits in the squad bay. Another recruit vomited bile from being spurred to exhaustion by our "Kill Hat", again in public view of the rest of us and to the protests of the medic who pleaded with the Kill Hat to stop. He seemed a deeply sadistic man. There were so many of us for so few DIs it was possible to avoid their attention: my teenage self with a head full of fantasy called this the "eye of the malefactor". I've never seen so much evil in my life but I also never made it to a conflict zone.
- rawgabbit 5y ago
  Sorry you went through that. I can only speak for myself and what I understand to be the norm. I know many countries’ boot camps still believe in the lie that abuse makes someone better. When/where was your boot camp?
  - emptysongglass 5y ago
    This was 14 years ago at the San Diego Recruit Depot right next to the airport. Those planes would keep us up all night. I remember breaking protocol to buy some earplugs so I could sleep. Much of that experience felt like a wild fever dream.

nextaccountic 5y ago

Of course some kids will get life lessons out of this experience, but they would get lessons from kinds of adversities anyway. I don't see the point. For me it's just cruelty for the sake of cruelty. Another comment here talked how Canadian indigenous children were subject to this treatment for over a century https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27559649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27559649 and this wasn't made in the best interest of the victims. And anyway, I don't believe in having institutionalized "tough love" could ever work. This kind of institution often attract sadistic people, that enjoy making the kids suffer.