Car-centric city design is a terrible mistake done by many countries.
Fortunately there is a growing awareness of the negative externalites cars and car-centric urban design brings to our health, society and environment.
I found youtube's https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes an excellent eye-opener
Weapons of Mass Destruction, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Weapons of Mass Destruction. You have lost your moral ground to speak. Yes FBI and MI5 are included, your are part of the western intelligence alliance. Yes China is a baddy, but you have lost your credibility, I am not sure if you will ever get it back.
WFH should be the default for jobs that can be done from home. If employer claims that work-in-the-office is more productive, then make them put their "money where their mouth is": commute time is (paid) work time, commute cost is paid.
ELectronics is not the problem. Its a symptom of kids not being able to play outside (If streets were filled with kids like they used to in the old days, do you think your child would prefer the ipad?)
Kids cant play outside because the outside is filled with 2 tons killer machines i.e cars
r/fuckcars r/bancars
> Kids cant play outside because the outside is filled with 2 tons killer machines i.e cars r/fuckcars r/bancars
Kids can't play outside because parents don't allow them to. Single childs were traditionally more protected once they are naturally considered more "precious" and they are slowly becoming the norm. Large family's kids still play outside specially the ones from poor families.
I meant play outside unsupervised like in the old days.
Why don't parents allow them outside (unsupervised)? One big reason is due to cars(also due to over-hyped media stories about kidnapping). Think about it, would you let your kids play outside? If you dont have kids, trust me you wouldn't.
Not to mention its not even legal anymore, social services get called if they see a 10 year old outside alone (UK where I live)
We raised our kids in a large city in America. Perhaps we just bypassed this trend but we totally let our kids play outside unsupervised. We set boundaries and taught them the necessary skills to do so safely but then we let the go and play. And we lived on a pretty busy street. There are age considerations of course and we had a large family for the time (5 kids) so there was a wide range of ages with the elder kids watching the younger ones.
Maye we are just outliers but I don't think the reason is necessarily cars.
Some anecdata: where I live, gypsy and african descent kids play all afternoon (or all day during weekends and school holidays) outside with minor if any parents guidance. Other kids, rarely.
Childcare + car-centric urban planning robbed their safe space for play and socializing:
Childcare is unreliable, very expensive, patchy, and time-consuming to sort out.
School starts at 9am and finishes at 3pm. This is incompatible with working hours.
Also, tt would help parents who WFH if kids could play outside (like I used to when I was a kid). They can't because car-centric street designs took their space.
Children are an after-thought whose needs don't fit into modern society.
School from 9am to 3pm at a young age when childcare is most required is ridiculously long hours. This suggests to me that schools already take on much of the daycare role. That to me also seems very wrong.
School should first and foremost concern itself with effective education. If children can only study effectively for 2-3 hours a day, that is how long schoolday should last. Parents that need childcare should seek it elsewhere - that should be outside of the scope of schools' responsibilities.
Totally agree. Our current school schedule is based on a 1930's farm schedule and hasn't changed in the last 100 years.
Currently school is trying to do education, socialization and childcare in one big lump and doing all poorly.
I fear though, that if school was not responsible for childcare, there would be no support at all for childcare for working parents - and we've seen the disastrous childcare crisis already in effect for ages 0-5. So this problem needs attention too.
I have a data point that is perhaps relevant. I went to school in Eastern Europe in the 90s, and my education from secondary school onwards was naturally modular.
Normal day school was from 8:30-12:40 or 8:30-13:30 most days, with homework afterwards. But it was effectively optional - quality of education was tailored to the lowest common denominator, and it was universally understood that you are not getting into any decent university by just attending school. Universities set their own entrance exams, school marks did not matter to them, and they did not care how you got to reach the high entrance bar that they set. So teachers, principals, parents all understood and acknowledged that preparing for entrance exams comes first, that they are probably not qualified enough to prepare you, and so school comes second.
And there were many options for actually learning. Many parents paid for private tutors. But there were also (free) computer clubs, where somebody would volunteer to work with children on programming or 3d modelling projects - some structured, and some unstructured, where you would just turn up, try to create, ask questions and be helped out, progressing at your own pace through your own interest. There were very affordable maths and physics classes by post - where they would mail you textbooks and a timetable, and you would mail back completed homework, receiving feedback. There were evening schools, some of them free, where you would attend lectures and classes in person, mostly geared towards maths and physics, which would give you first class education - if you cared to learn.
If you skipped school or did not do your homework, or were even working on something of your own during classes, it was tolerated by the 'compulsory' schools. So effectively, you were free to pursue your own modular education in the spirit that you describe. And those that wanted to learn, people that I know, did very well out of it.
I agree with you that urban planning is contributing to the problem. Kids and adults are separated and there are very few family friendly spaces. People see kid energy as loud and annoying. I was raised as a single mom and she used to bring me literally everywhere. She just didn't care when people gave her looks. It worked well for us. I was pretty well-behaved just sitting in the corner reading a book while she lectured or attended meditation class. Only exception was restaurants where I used to throw HUGE tantrums.
With regards to the 9-3 schedule, this is one of the great things about homeschooling/unschooling/modular learning. Just like you can design your child's education, you can design their social experiences and their childcare experiences to optimize them for your child and family. School needs to evolve with an evolving work force and 9-3 doesn't make sense.
If you don't live in an urban area, it's totally possible to set up an outdoor work space while your kids play outside.
Kids may be an afterthought for society, but they are definitely NOT for most parents. And we need to be more assertive about making sure that needs as a family are met. For example, it's unacceptable for a huge corporation to design a multi million dollar space with no daycare - and certainly not conducive to hiring talented women to work there who could bring a ton to the company.
Also, parents need to be more aggressive about asking their jobs to let them carve out time for the kids. With remote work it's hard, because when your kid gets sick, it's not like you are out of the office at home with them, you're supposed to be on and tuned in remotely while they are at home with you working.
