[My Women's Studies Class]

Time to suck it up and use it as a learning experience on how to deal with people we don't agree with, because those people will be there all of our lives.

I agree with this, and having done so myself in college, using the experience was very fruitful. I treated professors like the one you describe as clients and did my best to provide them with a product to their liking, for which they paid me high grades. Many of them kept my work for display and future classes to appreciate, and I was fine with that.

I did my work in such a way as to not cheapen it or abdicate my values, too, so it was a great learning experience overall; in fact, I may have learned more from those classes than the ones with sensible professors because I had to work so much harder and with more maturity in the ones with ninny-heads for instructors.

Take it or leave the advice, but I really enjoyed the challenge of doing things the way I did. I learned from my earlier educational experience that trying to interject sense into discussion generally made things harder for me, and not in a way that brought about growth, but that meant fighting for deserved grades and being mostly miserable during the time I was required to spend in those classes if I was to graduate.

It was fun to mine professors for information and use it to my advantage. What I produced made them happy too, so I received the payment I sought. I was at the top of my class in an elite program and this was in no small part because I effectively dealt with situations like the one you described. Several other students ended up flunking out or quitting because they didn't figure this out and chose to fight instead. I retained my voice and my values, and gained the respect of my professors and fellow classmates while producing top quality work.

I highly recommend taking up the challenge of doing this yourself, rather than trying to overhaul the erroneous thinking of your obviously unwilling professor.

[Psychological and Physiological Effects of Color]

I've grown up in Canada, and previous to visiting Cuba, I had little appreciation for the then seemingly over-the-top-bright, intensely saturated colour palettes seen commonly in art produced by artists who live/work near the equator. While I was in Cuba, the second day there, I walked down to the water on the beach at the resort I was staying at, and was astonished to see a sun-blazing, over-the-top-bright, intensely saturated landscape of natural and manmade objects, and in that moment, I thought immediately of all of the paintings that I just didn't 'get' until I had personally experienced the light of the environment from/within which they were created.

After that, I revisited myriad paintings and began sourcing photographs of the regions they were meant to depict and/or where they were created. My whole visual scope of appreciation was blown wide open, and I wondered how in all the time I'd studied art, there had not been one mention of this, that every professor, teacher and artist I'd encountered had not mentioned or even given full attention to something so important as this.

Being from Canada, the necessity for traveling to really 'see' might be overlooked because the country is so large and most people probably do see much of it, without seeing much of a light change from coast to coast, and if most people don't leave altogether, they might not even know. I used to live in the southern-most part and now live in the far north, not quite as north as possible, but close.

I don't associate cool colours with negative emotion at all; the light here is usually cool. I do associate cool colours with a peaceful or serene feeling though, like the strangely audible silence during the long winter; it's peaceful and rejuvenating, not sad or depressing, or negative at all. We do have bright warm colours too, but they are always in contrast with the coolness of everything else. This is the distinct beauty of the north, I think.

I rely heavily on the content of a painting to convey the intended emotions. Perhaps I have a glitch in my brain that I don't seem to have automatic emotional responses to colours. I do find some colours physiologically irritating on their own and/or in combination, but this doesn't seem to me to be emotional. I can usually enjoy those colours in small doses in the right context.

This is a complex topic.

[Why do people have children?]

That said, there is another, critically important consideration at this point in history, and that is the degenerate state of the public schools. Actually, that includes most private schools.

The schools are not just politically active where they shouldn't be, they actively undercut the individual student's intellectual confidence. They more or less decerebrate the students by giving lessons that defy understanding and integration. Many lessons contain errors and inaccuracies, which the teachers fail to notice. Kids automatically think that it is their fault that they don't "get it."

As far as school experience, they are prevented from discovering the efficacy and reliability of their own minds. Memorization is the only option, and that is a turn-off to any intelligent kid, of course, besides which, it fails to create hierarchical understanding, it fails to build a body of knowledge. Also, of course, the social milieu of the classroom ranges from awful to abusive.

How, subject daily to this environment, can a child learn that his mind is his most important tool? How can he take pride in his growing intellectual powers? Learn to think for himself? Build the ego-strength to stand up for his opinions?

The adolescent drive for self-esteem is especially consuming. Having their proper self-concept as a thinking being stunted, or even refuted, what pseudo-self-esteem icons will they adopt? What relief from the constant, inevitable sense of inadequacy will they seek?

(FYI: My daughter attended two Montessori schools and two public schools, and I investigated many other private schools.)

Before having children (and my first was a surprise, followed by another when I should have been clinically infertile, followed by the others that I anticipated regardless of the supposed unlikelihood of their conception), I had exactly zero seconds spent considering whether I would like to have children, followed by the same amount of consideration for why I might. That said, I had a lot of catching up to do, and my child's education was among the first things that raced through my mind in the minutes that passed following the shocking call from the doctor explaining the reason for my worsening fatigue for the previous three months.

I did already have many years of experience and thoughtful consideration about mass schooling, and with the new information- that I was responsible for the education of another person- I applied in principle what I had already reasoned. So saying, my partner and I educate our children rather than employ the government and its agents to do so.

Our children are yet very young, and their needs will change, so to that end, we plan to involve/employ purposefully selected, skilled people to work directly with them individually when their interests and pursuits exceed our scope. I am intensely interested in learning, so educating our children is a great adventure for me as well, and I am looking forward to the opportunity to work with and learn from the people who will assist us in our journey of childhood education. Presently, our children are learning alongside my partner and I in our lay-apprenticeships with two sustenance and small business farmers.

My partner and I take care of the academics and visual arts/crafts, music, and physical and life skills guidance and teaching of our children. If they want to learn aeronautics or acrobatics, we will employ skilled professionals to teach them.

I will not be 'taking advantage of' government funded/regulated mass schooling, or any mass schooling at all. Had I thought about the future of my family before I knew I was going to have one, I would agree that considering the level of responsibility and my personal qualifications for my facilitation of my children's education would be essential to the decision about whether or not to have children.

My process was a little backwards, but that has just meant that I have had a very intense experience as I have worked to stay several steps ahead of the emerging needs of my children (granting that their immediate needs have been met since they were conceived, by me, deliberately- once I knew anyway).

This is another way in which the wide-spread assumption of 'auto-raising' of children really irks me. Thank you for raising the issue, Mindy. I also highly encourage others to consider this aspect of child-rearing very carefully, before having any children if possible, and if not, then now would be the best time to start doing so, if you already have children.

For interest, the Canadian school board curricula or at least ministry 'objectives' are all online and I have many times had to take breaks from reading them because they are utterly disgusting. Even worse than when I was in public schooling.

[Why do people have children?]

If you mean more abstract values like virtue or reason, then that would be a good way to look at what sort of goal you could accomplish by having a kid.

This is the way that I understood ZSorenson's point, and the only way it really makes sense. Assuming I'll make five in toto doppelgangers is highly irrational. I do expect that my children will embrace reason and virtue because I do, and I actively and deliberately guide and challenge them, in addition to their passive observation of my manner of living.

[Why do people have children?]

ZSorenson, I'm surprised that anyone takes issue with you not having children and addressing this topic. It seems to me that your observations, grasp of the issues, and reasoned arguments are light-years ahead of most people who do have children and assume that their children can be 'raised' automatically.

I do not know *anyone* personally who has children and also has even a cursory grasp of what parenting is. *I* do, but I mother deliberately, and sadly, this seems to be a rarity.

[Can you love your baby after it's born?]

I think that my children live under my assumption of their being virtuous until they have the ability to express and thereby demonstrate that as they grow. They came from me, and given that I am raising them with compassion and reason, they have every opportunity to embrace virtue and conviction and with an example of that in their mother. I assume they value their lives foremost and will desire virtue.

They are also pure potential when they are born and live under every manner of assumption to do with human capacity and ability since this is the only way that human beings come about (as newborn babies), so it is our only option and we must assume the best of its future and outcome. I don't think that is why I love them though.

I am honesty not sure what the mechanism for loving them is other than that they came from me and in the beginning, we make a transition from being as intimately related as any two human beings can be, to being two people distinct from one another as they grow, and we develop a new dynamic that allows for their growth, and mine too. From that place of intimacy, that I have only with each of them distinctly from any other relationship in my life, my love for them is like a 'mini' tandem or parallel version of the love I have for myself.

That, and a content baby can make a person feel like the most important person in the whole universe, which is better than flattering. Their unmitigated welcome and utter dependence illuminate my heroic nature. I keep my babies alive, and better, I guide them and they trust me implicitly. I also genuinely delight in discovering who they are as individuals; it really is fascinating and for lack of a better term, adorable.

Why that evokes love from me, I'm not sure, except maybe that this sort of love is as natural to man as industry or faculty of reason, which we accept as given. For me, having become aware of their presence in my body was in all ways synonymous with loving them. I don't think I can really tease this all apart in any reasonable way unless it is true that this love is an expression of my nature in relation to their existence or that my nature includes love for people I grow in my body.

I'm pretty entrenched though, having five children and the youngest being 6 weeks old. Perhaps I will have a clearer explanation when they are grown. For now it is what it is.

I think that not loving one's baby is the departure from reality, actually, but again, I think that my emotional involvement in the subject likely occludes at least part of my ability to reason this fully- even if I turn out to be correct in my assessment, I admit to taking a pretty circuitous route.

[If there were such things as cradle-Objectivists...]

Thank you all very much for the warm welcome.

I admit that I left out a middle section wherein I would have described my period of struggling with trying to figure out what normal is and whether or not I wanted to live it myself. I did strive to live with conviction and rationality, but I made some glaring and personally damaging mistakes against my better judgment (that I have since rectified). The good news is that I did come through it and I won't need to go through that again.

[Spanking, Smacking etc. of Children]

In my experience (with my own 5 children), children are always doing their best, putting everything they have into each pursuit and expression. They don't hold anything back for later or on reserve for something else. They are driven. Unless they have been squashed, but mine are free-thinkers, and I don't have most of the communication problems others have expressed to me when they wonder why I don't have to punish my children- ever.

They are also very rational, apparently unlike some of the descriptions of others here, which admittedly surprised me. I question whether or not the descriptor 'irrational' is misplaced, because one of the most difficult aspects of mothering my children has been their strict adherence to rationality. It is difficult because their grasp of cause and effect is near perfect. I bet that seems absurd, but in order to be rational, one need and indeed can only act according to the given or observed information or facts. Children do so with gusto: the challenges, for me at least, have been centred in providing them with adequate facts to make more wholistically rational choices.

What I mean is that (in my experience), my children act rationally according to what they know, what they have themselves observed and understood according to the context within which they made their observations. This leaves them with enormous deficits of knowledge due to their as yet very short lives, and therein I find myself clambouring to catch them up on whatever they are missing in order to act rationally, not in trying to get them to act in a way that for me, who is in more full possession of the facts would, because if they act as I would but without the whole set of facts, for them, their behaviour would be irrational.

An (admittedly incomplete) example: My six year old son came running in to ask me to give to him my 7 yr old's bow and arrow. I said that I would prefer that he not use it at that time because daddy was at work, and I would feel safer having another adult around while he uses it. He told me then that it wasn't for him, but that his brother had asked him to bring it to him for target practice. I reiterated my concern and my decision that he would have to wait until the next day, when daddy was home. He proceeded to essentially freak out- crying, wailing, stomping, etc.... I asked him why he was so upset that his brother wouldn't be using the bow and arrow, and then he told me that he was upset because his brother had asked him to get the bow and arrow for him, and he was waiting and expecting it, and now he wasn't bringing it. So, I confirmed with him that he felt responsible to the task of bringing the objects to his brother and I was preventing him from accomplishing his mission, with which he emphatically agreed and calmed down completely. Then he sat at the table with me and we discussed risk and risk analysis within the context of physical activities and he agreed without my insistence that it would be better to wait until daddy was home since I was the only adult for several kilometers in every direction and *if* something happened with the bow and arrow, it could be serious and piling all of us into the van to meet the medics half-way would be more difficult than to do so when daddy was home.

He just turned six and his brother just turned seven.

When he freaked out, some people would assume it was irrational (and give him a smack for freaking out and I said "no" right?), but he was not in full possession of the facts and neither was I when his behaviour turned into an outburst of emotions.

Children can be very, VERY emotional (as can adults) and mine are not in any way properly understood to be 'compliant'; they are self-assured and not irrational. If anything, it's their insistence on rationality that wears on me because I must spend so much time teasing out what they know from what they need to know in order *for me* to have rational discourse with them, which I do. The discussion I described above is in kind with the discussions I have with my two year old as well (he's very articulate). I act according to the evidence they give me from birth that they are reasoning and aware and that they need only be guided, shown, let into the real workings of life and not some pretend child-alternate-universe that is so common for children today (check out any mass schooling curriculum for young children, any daycare, any preschool or nursery with a few exceptions; they are scary- completely disconnected from reality).

As for 'spanking' them, I agree that in order that the hitting could be thought to be effective, we'd be relying on the same capacity for rational thought that I do when I talk to my children. Besides that, I have so many more relational and beneficial ways of communicating with my children than hitting, that even if it were the last item on my list of acceptable responses to my children, I'd never even get there: I'd have long, long earlier resolved the issue, as I have and do so presently.

Also, the idea that hitting is okay when they are old enough to 'know better' but young enough to be overpowered is an impossibility for me for even more than philosophical reasons. My just-turned seven-year-old is 4'3", 64lbs, and his just-turned six yr old brother is two inches and two pounds smaller. I honestly cannot overpower them except in controlled settings like arm-wrestling. I am not weak either, but one is long limbed too, and the other is built like a tank. I feed them very well, and they have benefitted! By the time they would fit the common (not crazy baby-training a la Ezzo) criteria for 'spanking', I'd have to garner their agreement to do it to them, but all of us would rather discuss than hit or be hit. And I've raised them to esteem themselves higher than to submit to being hit...

So, we reason together- and I am a walking encyclopaedia, facilitator, adoring mother, and human resource in the most practical sense. And it's exhausting.

[If there were such things as cradle-Objectivists...]

I've been reading here for a short while, having only recently discovered that the way I think has been formally expressed and named. I came across an index of articles that answer FAQs about Objectivism and felt so much relief from reading thoughts that align with my own, with thoughts and convictions I have held, and for which I have been severely and unjustly punished, since I was a child.

Strange, really: my parents are addicts and text-book as far as that goes, and my personality was just the opposite of what might have allowed them to remain comfortably evasive and thereby behaving badly (I fit the INTj profile very well, but have developed much more emotional maturity than is typical for this type- and I'm a creative artist, which is also atypical, but otherwise, with even more caveats, I'm pretty much as described ). Can you imagine an eight year old child explaining to her parents why being on welfare is abominable, how being high and drunk every day is a sacrifice of the highest order and utterly immoral, how working for one's own life is ultimately the nature of the human, and on and on? My parents endured this... My school teachers endured my arguing against the validity of so-called 'children's and animals' rights', 'the greater good,' and 'busy work,' amongst other common ideas that I took issue with, and still do.

I was an insufferable child because I could never escape the realities before me, the easily deduced conclusions from observable evidence. My parents were incessant evaders and I was and am an incessant 'reasoner.' Not that I am always correct, of course, but I do my best to achieve excellence in my thinking and whatever I pursue. The idea of being on welfare, for instance, is so absurd as to be comical, not that the choice to remain in that condition is in any way humourous. I have been estranged from my birth family for six years and this by deliberation and decision. It may not be forever, but it has been one of the most liberating and personally beneficial choices I have made.

Please forgive my misappropriation of vocabulary terms as they pertain to Objectivist philosophy. I have used different words to describe some things and this will be a habit to break since it may cause confusion. Much of how I think now was solidified when I was 8-10 yrs old, which may seem to my discredit, but I don't mean by this that I have not matured- only that my modus operandi, or my manner of critical thought, was nearly and mostly formed at that time, so as I read Objectivist literature, I am making adjustments to those terms that are better understood by alignment with the terms used formally within Objectivism.

Sorry for the trip into childhood; I don't often think of that time in my life, but reading Objectivist writings has brought back many memories from that time when I was far more inclined to speak openly about my thoughts than I am now- at least publicly. I speak openly in my home, of course.

My partner and I have just purchased all of Ayn Rand's novels, ItOE, and The Virtue of Selfishness. The rest will come in time. I read Anthem in highschool and loved it, and my partner just read it and loved it too. I will be reading it again, along with the rest of AR's works. I am looking forward to it, but being in the land of the midnight sun, reading is mostly a cold-season activity, given that we will also have 24 hours of darkness too. During the warm months, and especially by the end of them, as in now, there is a big rush to finish outdoor things, and less time for reading. During the cold months, I regularly work on 5-6 books at a time in addition to whatever series I am reading to my children (my partner reads a separate series to them and we alternate, so they have two going at once, and they love it).

Anyway, I am 33 years old, married, and my present occupation is the education and up-bringing of five children- four boys ranging from ages 7 to 2, and one girl who is today, six weeks old. Mothering is my primary occupation, and providing the raw elemental materials and ideas toward raising children who love their life, think critically and live according to their nature and reasoned hierarchy of values is of utmost importance to me. To this end, I study subjects that pertain to meeting the needs of my children and family, exhaustively. We live on a farm in the rural far north, next to Alaska, where we are presently acclimating and learning the principles and skills involved in food production/preparation/preservation, land management, and animal husbandry, home building, business and finance, and everything else that presents its necessity as we learn.

I will be resuming making decorative craft-work in the next month, and after the winter celebrations are over, I will be resuming work on my fine art series begun this year and put on pause when I couldn't reasonably hold a pen or brush past my giant belly. Now the belly resident is in a baby-wrap and still, thereby, on the front of my body until she can either switch to my back, or play on the floor.

I also play ukulele (not well yet; I'm just learning), read voraciously (mostly academic and/or non-fiction informational texts), write, illustrate, renovate/rebuild my home (I looove working with tools), and a very long list of activities and ideas that stimulate my brain, thereby allowing me to occasionally rest (I have to be actively learning or I feel like I'm losing my bearings- though I do enjoy periods of relaxation; I'm not a 'work-a-holic' of any sort). I have been enjoying collecting wild edibles and navigating the omnivore's dilemma- outside the grocery store, that is.

That's probably enough for now. I look forward to jumping into discussions here and there.

Imogen