Oh. God. That last...I feel nauseous. These are the things that drive good people to thoughts of violence.
The only comfort I can possibly take in the reading of this story, is that it might save other families from being torn apart, and sweet, innocent children from terrible trauma, as I'm sure is the intention of Anna for telling it.
When my son went to Kindergarten, every single day for the few weeks he attended a public school (of his entire life actually) he came home with a sheet that had sad faces on them, which mirrored his own sad face at the start of every morning before going to the school. I made an appointment to speak to the teacher about this the third week when his sad face turned to tears and begging me not to send him. She told me he frequently got out of his seat and wandered the room, that half of his papers would be covered in doodles instead of him doing the assignment, and finally suggested that he be evaluated for ADHD. I remember staring at this woman and having this huge revelation, that she did not care about my son. That to her he was nothing more than a disruption because he didn't 'follow the rules', and all she wanted was to feed him, what we now know is extremely dangerous, habit forming, medication, just so she wouldn't have to deal with the bother of redirecting him to his seat or asking him if he was having trouble with an assignment, because of course the drugs have a zombifying effect on kids and with them he would be in his seat, possibly drooling. (For those who don't know this, both riddlin and adderall- and I'm sure whatever else they have out at this time- can have some very serious side effects and long term effects. Along with the drooling zombie effect, they tend to have no appetite and lose a lot of weight, and when the medication wears off they are ten times more prone to 'bouncing off the walls.' And kids who take these regularly growing up have a much higher rate of addiction to substances...considering the two drugs I named above are narcotics that adults would be arrested for using without a prescription...hopefully everyone can see something is wrong with that entire thing.
I also learned in that meeting that the children had ten minutes...let that sink in... ten minutes of recess per day. They were five and it was not half day kindergarten anymore, and they let the kids run around for ten minutes of a six and a half hour day. I remember very clearly thinking "Do the rest of the children sit quietly in their seats doing their work for all of those hours?? And if so, what the hell is wrong with them?"
It was the last day he attended. My daughter too, who was in third grade at the time and also not happy to be there.
I later learned that an outrageous number of kids, something like sixty plus percent, were classified as something, many of them on one form of medication or another in that district. And furthermore the schools got paid extra for kids who were classified because they had 'special needs'...and so did the parents. Every parent who consented to this was given a monthly check.
Obviously child services and their detestable kidnapping far outweighs in horror the story I just told, but I told it in order to point out that the abuse of children is not limited to the worst case scenarios. Also, while there certainly are some teachers who genuinely care for their students, they will rarely, if ever, love them the way their own parent does and in many cases such as the one I just outlined they don't care about them at all. And these are the people who are 'raising' our children for large portions of the day for over nine months of the year for eighteen years.
My son, by the way, has no such problem with attention or hyperactivity, never has, his only problem was the unnatural state of being confined to a desk for many hours a day. With only ten minutes to run around. (Yes, I realize that there are many districts that are more conducive to children, longer recesses, more breaks, but lately what I just described is becoming more and more of the norm, invading all areas- of this country at least)
I could go on, and actually I may, in a post.
Thanks again for sharing this with us Anna and Linda.
OMG!!! Kickbacks for classifying your child as having a problem???!!!
Yeah, it's disgusting right? According to a teacher friend of mine, in her school district they target the families on welfare...now you tell me how being of lesser means financially has anything to do with a child's ability to learn. Then I think, who is more sick, the system pushing this or the parents willing to get paid to label their child as something that could very well make them feel stupid or abnormal.
I remember that when my daughter was in school, she was 5 at the time, we got a form to fill out that would go to the ministry for education. One of the questions was what was the parents education and their jobs. I never filled that out as I didn't see the use of them knowing what I do for a living. I asked the teacher why this was in the form and she told me that if there were a lot of kids with parents from low educational back grounds they would receive more funding! She added: "Let's hope that there are a lot of lower educated parents..."
Wow. It's always a bit mind blowing when you run into people who are that self centered and appear to have absolutely no empathy. Though I don't feel angry with them like I used to because I don't know if they can help it, if they would even be able to see it. The reason I say that is because even as a child I wasn't like that, I always had empathy. If I was swimming in a pool and saw a bug struggling I would fish it out and put it back on dry land, it was just a part of me to care about other living things. But what if some are not born that way? I don't have a concrete set of beliefs, too much is shrouded in mystery in terms of what came before this life and what comes after, but I lean toward reincarnation until you evolve to a level spiritually where you can move on. So perhaps its simply that I have lived more lives, maybe once upon a time I was no different than the woman you mentioned or my son's kindergarten teacher.
It's very difficult not to judge people for shitty actions and behavior, especially to the level of those being talked about in this series. My initial feeling is always a surge of rage, mostly stemming from a desire to protect people, especially children, from horrible things. Sadly it seems to simply be the way of this world- suffering, pleasure, sorrow, joy, love, fear, hate, compassion. I don't know that it's possible to eradicate the things we consider evil or bad. It might just be the way this plane is meant to be, a balance. And the hope is that we will spiritually evolve enough to ascend to the next plane, or my hope at least.
The whole thing is so sick...it's one of those things that makes me think the earth deserves to be wiped out by a comet due to the sickness of our society.