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Library: recreation

Books

Author: Ran
Date:Aug 29 1997

This is about what typical aliens do for recreation, and what basic society is
like.

It is not totally different or completely different from, say, this society. 
But there are major differences.  At the heart, it is sadistic and
masochistic.  Most people look at the best say to have fun as causing pain in
others.  However, actual death is rare.
Torturing people to the point of death is considered unacceptable.

During early childhood (4 years or so) most children are sent to a "training
school" or "prelimary school".  It's called that, but in reality it isn't. 
It's more just like a day-care center where kids can be with other kids their
age and make friends / enemies and such.  Because it's considered unhealty for
kids to associate with adults, and up to that point most of what a kid does is
associate only with their parents and a few friends (maybe).  So, around four
or so they are thrust into a day-care type environment.

These schools have little or no supervision, and are often quite traumatic for
the kids.  While the schools try to teach the kids things like 'cooperation'
and 'working together' and such, the reality is that the lone teacher /
supervisor who is supposed to watch over kids and keep orders is seriously
overworked and outclassed the large number (20 - 40) kids.  The reality is
that, if, say a kid is picking on another kid or such, and that kid tattles,
the teacher tells him to deal with it and just not go near him.  So the
reality is that there is no real supervision.  Hence, kids tend to bond with
each other and for groups and close-knit circles, mostly for mutual survival. 
The rest of society sees this as "healty" and "good" behavior.  

Even at this young age, there is a great deal of fighting.  Typically the
fighting is territorial, like which group gets to play on the giant duck
statue, or who can use the indoor bathrooms when, or who gets to paint what
part of the ground.  There's a lot of fighting going on at this stage, and
naturally people get hurt.  But, it's hard to actually kill someone, and the
injuries are only temporary.  Medical science being where it currently is,
it's kind of hard to actually kill someone, and kids especially are guaranteed
good care.

That doesn't mean that there hasn't been deaths, relatively quite a few in
fact.  But in general, extremely violent kids that actually try to kill
someone are looked at as "insane" and "bad" and banned from these schools
before they can kill anyone.  You have to understand the difference in psyche
here.  The way to gain dominance in a social structure is through pain, fear,
and subsequent control of your opposition, not by killing off your opposition.

So by age six or so, kids are expected to know how to dominate others or at
least try to by inflicting pain and using fear.  Also, they are somewhat able
to fight.  These social skills are mastered, or at least have been explored by
the time they enter "young kids school".

Typically, the meanest and outright cruelest teachers are picked for "young
kids school".  These teachers might be nice people in general, once you "get
to know them".  But to kids, they're quite mean.  Their role is to try to
teach the kids to respect adults, because adults are stronger than them. 
Though this role is changing.  Today's kids are stronger, meaner, and more
obnoxious than their predecessors, to everyone, not just adults.  Several of
these teachers have been lynched and tortured and dismayed / made fun of by
kids, it became the kids (working together) rather than the teacher that was
in charge.  This kind of thing is well on the way to becoming the norm today. 
So recently, a lot of these teachers are lightening up and just trying to
teach the kids about basic fields (like how to cook, how to use technology,
how to use and maintain weapons) that they are curious about, or just trying
to give bad speeches and such.

Next is "older kids school".  This has many different classes which kids can
choose to take or not take.  There's no real requirements, the way
registration works is kids list the classes they'd like to take from a
catalog.  You're gauranteed those classes, the teachers get together and
decided how many classes there need to be and who will teach what.  But, for
instance, if everyone decides all they want to take cooking, then all the
teachers will have to teach cooking for that period.  A typical period lasts
equivelent to about 30 days or so.  

The end result here is this.  Some kids are pressured into taking things by
their parents, but few actually sign up for those type of things.  The most
popular classes actually signed up for and taught at this level are
exploration (piloting), fighting, cuisine and spices (cooking), live animals
(hunting), and design (shop), and art (painting and drawing).  At this point,
there's no real reward for doing good in a class, but, especially in fighting
classes, the kids want to be there and actually learn something, there's a lot
of dedication.

By now, parents being to realise they can't even control their own kids and
typically get more and more violent (spanking harder and harder, etc.).  But
in most cases, even this doesn't help, and kids without accepting parents
become delinquents at a young age.


Books