Overconsumption Over The Ages

People do over consume. This is nothing new. My God, look at the pyramids, The Louvre, Buckingham, the Great Wall, the Hanging Gardens, Colossus of Rhodes.

Still, it looks as if we are getting better and better at it. ;-))

About ballet & music classes.... I dunno what it's like over there, but here it is torture plain and simple. It has nothing to do with culture - and everything to do with fake pretend aspiring middle-class bullshit. Keeping up with the Joneses in a new dimension. My kids can do better than yours and I can afford more and more expensive classes than you can. It really disgusts me. And the kids hate it. Not when they are very little, of course, because daddy and mommy are beaming and they are just performing in order to garner the praise of the adults. Later on it's a different picture though. Those guys go to school all day long and then they go to special classes until 10:00 pm. And THEN they go home to do their homework. They all go to bed past midnight. They are so tired in the evening classes that they literally fall asleep on their chairs. Most of them do it six days a week, some go to special classes seven days a week.

They never have time to really play - not in this city they don't - and if they have a few minutes on the weekend, all they can do is watch TV and play computer games. It might be different in the country-side, I can't vouch for that. In that respect this city is about the worst for kids I can possibly imagine.

And home schooling? I guess there's simply good as well as bad. Some misguided people don't think of the overall picture and those kids then have the equivalent of a Koran school education. Bad news that. But others are apparently doing an excellent job. We intend to try and we will certainly try to do an excellent job.

UNESCO recently criticized Germany for "the absence of organized pre-school learning". And here I thought that kids were supposed to spend their time playing and figuring things out for themselves before they are put in the brain-washing straight-jacket which is called school. And apparently, the only good solution is to send kids to school all day long as opposed to only in the morning as they have done in KrautLand for generations. No wonder we are all so uncultured and under-educated!

I do have to admit that there is a problem though. The lower social strata and especially the many immigrants are having a really tough time right now. I just don't think the way to fix this is to fuck it up completely for everybody.