Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

I can understand people who don't personally want to have children. I can't understand people who have contempt for children, and (typically) contempt for the human legacy they make salient. It's a scary thing when a person's self-loathing is too big to fit their own skin alone

I was going to say I'd never met anyone who had contempt for children. But when I thought about it, some of the teachers in the schools I went to may have. So maybe adults who feel this way hide it from other adults...

I think it may be a generational thing. It was already a pretty common sentiment when I was in college — and I went to a midwestern state school. Pairs well with the belief that human beings are toxic to the planet, or that human civilization is a fundamentally rapacious endeavor

Teachers too, I'm sure, although I think that's an even darker thing: if you find yourself wrapped up in constraints that force you to control, mistreat, and neglect other people, it becomes very useful to think of them as bad, even disgusting

I think a lot of the clearly terrible stuff that happens in classrooms — blatant favoritism, adults all but calling little kids "stupid," perfectly normal boys being made to internalize a sense of irredeemable criminality — can be attributed to prison guard coping mechanisms