The Ultimate Authoritarian Parent is Capitalism
I have been writing a lot this week. Too much. Communication pieces and internal analysis and press releases and sponsorship requests. I don’t have a lot in me right now but I missed last week’s unschooling post and I didn’t want to fall behind another week. So here I am. Whew.
I was lying in bed trying to sleep last night (all that writing is tied directly to stressful tasks) and was thinking about how traditional parenting approaches believe that reward and punishment will reshape a child to be more inline with parental ideals. It’s bullshit, we know this, but it’s interesting to examine how we came to colonial parenting practices came to believe this as a good approach to raising a child.
Then I realized that it’s actually modelled very much after our culture: perform well under capitalism and you are rewarded. Slip up and you are punished. Rewards and punishment under capitalism are usually monetary (promotion versus loss of job) but there are a lot of other ways that our culture shames us when we don’t live up to it’s standards: loss of friends and family, our own mental health struggles, feelings of worthlessness if we don’t have a specific type of job.
I decided to write down some thoughts. I think this might be the beginning of my next zine.
When we punish our children for certain behaviours or reward other behaviours, we aren’t shaping them into better people. We're only teaching them to mask their own personalities and preferences in our presence.
Likewise, our culture tries to shift and mold us base on cultural beliefs and norms, but it doesnt change who we are at the core. We mask in the context of our culture to be accepted.
Yes, we try to succeed to earn rewards and avoid punishments. But those actions don’t change the shape of our core being, only how we act within a cultural context.
Rejecting cultural norms that don't make sense is like calling out a parent for instituting rules to be blindly followed.
Questioning the rules of the status quo helps us become ourselves more fully and honestly without fear of punishment or need for reward.
Anyone else see the parallels? If authoritiarian parenting is modelled after capitalism, I wonder what unschooling is modelled after? An ongoing question is to whether unschooling might be considered decolonizing or unsettling. This would point towards a yes, but I don’t think that’s a question for me to answer.