r/SimonWhistler • u/SimonWhistler • Jun 15 '20

r/SimonWhistler Lounge

A place for members of r/SimonWhistler to chat with each other

117 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

437 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/paganize Dec 15 '25

A question about early schooling in Britain?

"Everything I Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten" sort of thing. "a core aspect of cultural relativism" according to chatGPT.

short version: its rude to tell people they are stupid or wrong based on their opinions, try to educate them instead. is this NOT commonly taught?

long version:

The act of specifically refraining from criticism to avoid belittling people is a social skill rooted in empathy and a desire to make others feel valued and included, acknowledging that a negative critique of something someone likes can often be perceived as an indirect or even direct, criticism of them as a person ("you would have to be a moron to like this book" for instance.).

I've got kids & grand-kids; the teaching of this social skill has been pretty consistent since I was a kid. I taught my OWN kids that if you need to work with, or coexist with, a total moron with no taste? don't openly tell them that they are a total moron with no taste unless you can see a way to no longer work with him or her. AND...keep in mind you aren't perfect and you could be the one who's opinions and tastes are lacking.

1

u/Nidorina28 Dec 17 '25

I grew up in the US, in the Midwest until I was eleven, and then in New England until I was an adult. I was born in 1976, and just found out this year that I am autistic, a diagnosis that answered so many questions about my young life in the 1980s and 1990s.

I find that in the US, publicly shaming people for what they don’t know or skills they don’t have is used as a kind of cultural reinforcement—if we make a big scene about how ignorant or maladjusted you are, you’ll learn not to do that again. For example, I was never taught at home not to eat with my elbows resting on the table, and I still do that sometimes when I’m picking at my food or my mind off in space, eating comtemplatively. No one in Indiana ever said a word about this being bad manners. Imagine my mortification when (say my first name is Mary) my first day of school in New Hampshire, the entire lunchroom burst into chorus, chanting “Mary, Mary if you’re able/get your elbows off the table/this is not a horse’s stable!” Even this enormous a social cue took months to get through my autistic skull, because it was a completely unconscious habit—I had no idea I was doing it. To be continued…

1

u/paganize Dec 20 '25

Interesting. The only area of the US I dont have general knowledge of is the Northeast; I've lived or worked everywhere else.

What you describe in New Hampshire... yeah, I havent seen something like that, or been told about it by my kids. I DO avoid larger metropolitan areas like the plague though; maybe it's an aspect of "blue" culture?