incogneato,
No, it was not "condescending." Merely calling it "condescending" does not make it so!
I think if you check back, you will find that I merely have responded specifically to posts that gratuitously insulted me -- as you just gratuitously did. I certainly have not simply aimed a string of posts at someone who was not directing posts to me. It is kind of sensible to respond to a post directed explicitly to me! To call that beating a dead horse is simply insulting
Personally, these gratuitous insults do not seem to bother me as much as they do some people, but, yes, I do actually feel entitled to respond to gratuitous and false personal insults, such as yours.
You are rude.
And, more significantly, there is a real and interesting question of substance here: does the hothouse environment of traditional schooling, in which kids spend over a thousand hours a year with kids almost exactly their own age, not exactly the environment in which most humans have traditionally lived, cause people to grow up with an over-sensitivity to social peer-group pressures?
That was the original question I was raising as a general point, not directed at anyone here personally and one or two people happened to get personally upset about the matter!
One does not have to be a psychotherapist to suspect that this rather peculiar over-reaction does reveal something about the general question, and that, I think, is quite interesting.
Incidentally, I am not, of course, by any means the first person to have realized this effect that the schooling experience has on so many people's emotional and psychological development. For example, Grace Palladino alludes to it in her study "Teenagers": she is making no connection to "homeschooling" but just noting the social-psychological dynamics that are created in the schools.
Social psychology (e.g., Milgram's famed "Obedience to Authority" study, Zimbardo's well-known "Stanford prison experiment," etc.) is rather interesting, although it does tend to produce negative emotional reactions in some people!
Dave
