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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20958 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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Could America have changed Afghan culture in 20 years anyway? Sure, but that would probably have required heavy-handedness to the point of genocide, which i doubt Pakistan would have agreed to act as a staging ground for.

At the very least, it would have required taking over the education system by both controlling the curriculum and forcing children to attend it, to which your point still applies.

As a 'rule', you can force significant culture change in as little as a generation, but that also doesn't mean that you make the changes you intended to / wanted.

(A campaign of forced schooling under western tutelage would have likely both significantly negatively impacted the rural farmers who depended on their children for labor, causing major economic issues, and would have led to the Taliban/insurgents deliberately targetting schools for mass casualty attacks, with all the cultural impacts that normalized / endured school bombings might have.)

(A campaign of forced schooling under western tutelage would have likely both significantly negatively impacted the rural farmers who depended on their children for labor, causing major economic issues, and would have led to the Taliban/insurgents deliberately targetting schools for mass casualty attacks, with all the cultural impacts that normalized / endured school bombings might have.)

There's ways to do that on the cheap and ensure safety. Literally pay families to send young boys to military boarding schools as the first step.

Might work but that’s how you get the residential schools everyone complains about. Especially once you factor in the discipline problems from children who don’t want to be there and adults who think they need to kill the Afghan and save the man.

Keep in mind I'm not talking about reshaping the entire Afghan society this way, I'm talking about teaching enough young boys to fight for their country when they become men. You don't need to enroll all children there, and you don't need to make it mandatory. Just pay the parents enough that they line up to send the children there themselves, and just expel any kids too undisciplined to work with. The rest will come under pressure from their families to be on their best behavior.

This is child slavery with extra steps.

Not any more than any other boarding school. I'm not sure if it's even different from mandatory public schooling in general.

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