Great thread!
2 posts that stand out to me.
Mal's regarding transforming the public education system into more of a business-like model and Cym's last post concerning the reason why things have gone "down-hill" in the education system, and in society in some ways... due to people not caring.
The former, Mal's post, I completely agree with. I don't think it's the *direct* solution to kids being fat, but I think it's the solution to improving the western education model/system. I know many individuals who schooled abroad, both grade school and college and they are far superior in terms of intellect, rationality, reasoning, and even knowledge than most of what I see being produced from the western public education system.
My wife is a teacher in the public education system. She's amazingly great. She cares about her students and wants to make the world better one kid at a time. She teaches out of pashion. NOT b/c you get your summers off and a decent pay check. Unfortunately, she is the minority. And she teaches in fantastic district in a wealthy area of the country. Travel to the "dark corners" of the country and check out their schools and their teachers. You'd be lucky to find one *good* teacher.
In any profession there are going to be people that are good at what they do and people that are bad at what they do. This is product of how our society operates. We ship kids, many of whom have no desire, off to college at the ripe age of 18. We make them decide what the heck they want to do for the REST OF THEIR lives. You think they actually know? F*%$ no! But they have to decide if they want to graduate.
This translates to a lot of people working at jobs they either aren't good at or don't care about. But that's another topic
Sadly, the public education system is set up so that once a poor excuse for a teacher winds up in the system, teaches a few years and obtains tenure, they can barely be touched. Bingo, we've got a piss poor teacher building the minds of our youth for the next 50 years. And this happens more often than not.
Tenure! LOL, I can't imagine that being in place where I work. You don't produce, you're fired. End of story.
A business-like model for the education system would be good, I agree.
In Cym's post, I totally relate to her thoughts. Our value systems have changed drastically over the last few decades. What was important 30 years ago is no longer. People behave based on what they prioritize as important. Unfortunately, most of the people I correspond with on a daily basis in our society lack the ability to THINK and/or REASON. It's like they're on auto-pilot. They've allowed society to establish/structure their personal value system.
This translates to people caring about things they probably shouldn't be caring about. Things such as instant gratification. Movies instead of books. A paycheck instead of working hard. A television instead of a 2 mile hike to the swimming hole. Sex instead of love. The list goes on and on. It's created quite the mess IMO. It's no wonder the U.S. is the laughing stock of the globe, again, IMO.
I'm proud of who I am and I'm proud to call myself an American. But what I base that pride on has absolutely NOTHING to do with what we are becoming as a society holistically.
A by-product of all this garbage I've posted above is obesity. It's just ONE of the many negatives that have so joyfully come to fruition. Is it the most important? To some maybe. To others probably not. It all depends on your own personal beliefs and set of circumstances.
I happen to work with a lot of obese individuals and I can say, the epidemic has really screwed up some people. Sure, a group of obese people exists that actually claim their happiness with their size and they promote fat acceptance. While I believe fat people should be accepted just as any other physical-type of person out there, I DO NOT feel that anyone should accept their obesity as it is.
To me, that's like getting stabbed with a knife and not going to obtain medical attention. Eventually it will become infected and potentially kill you. Same with obesity, chances are good based on medical history and scientific evidence that obesity will probably kill those who possess it.
With this screwed up society, we've got things like pure discrimination against fat people, which tends to really do a number on them mentally, worsening the entire issue. This is one of the major initiators of emotional eating, I've found. Society's also brought us (going along with this instant gratification non-sense) these oh-so-caring-and-great businessmen who've realized that the majority of our world is fat. And instead of coming up with *real* solutions for the problem, they've decided to quickly and easily thicken their wallets through baiting the desperately hopeful fat population with promises and quick fixes.
We're left with a very large population (no pun intended) of individuals who are emotionally a wreck and have no idea where to turn.
Because nobody really seems to care about this population, or more importantly about finding a solution to the problem, there seems to be no end in sight. Sure, great communities such as WLF exist.... but what percentage of people really are helped through communities like this? And of the people that find their way here, how many actually succeed? Are we even operating most effectively with how we run this board? I don't know. But I know we do more here than society as a whole does in terms of *helping*.
People say parents are the problem. They aren't teaching their kids proper nutrition. They're letting the televisions be the babysitter.
I don't necessarily agree.
Again, the value system has changed as a whole in this country.
When today's parents were young, we didn't have XBOX 360. Things that were more appealing to the youth's eye were waiting outside. We didn't have child molesters on every street corner. I forget the address of the website, but you can actually type in your address and see how many registered sex offenders live near you. I have 5. We didn't have kids killing kids. Need I say more?
Parents don't know any better. The world's changed and with the lack of thought, parents today don't know how to *behave* in this new light (or should I say darkness). They certainly don't know any more than their kids how to eat properly. Certainly common sense tells us that chicken and broccoli is better for you than a big mac and fries.
But eating the wrong foods isn't necessarily the problem. Certainly food is more abundant now. But activity is lost. Ride down a country road. How many kids do you see out playing football? Climbing a tree? Heck, how many kids do you see sitting outside reading a book? Rewind even 15 years and do the same thing. I believe you will see drastically different results.
I think there's more to it than parents not caring.
From what I can see, we (society in general) is acting out of these value systems that have gone down the drain right along side society. Chicken or the egg? Who knows and who cares. The goal now is to slap more people across the face and send more wake up calls out to the masses. Things have got to change as a whole before the acute circumstances such as obesity start to change.
The world has changed these last few decades. It's not that parents stopped caring. It's just that they went with the flow, and the flow changed. The flow went down the toilet, and before we knew it, things were ugly.
Ugliness yielded obesity, as well as many other bad things.
