There is supposedly a connection, though. American actors adopted the Bellamy salute for plays about ancient Rome because it was similar to the supposed Roman salute, and the convention spread to Europe.
Beginning with Jacques-Louis David’s painting The Oath of the Horatii (1784), an association of the gesture with Roman republican and imperial culture emerged. The gesture and its identification with Roman culture were further developed in other neoclassic artworks. In the United States, a similar salute for the Pledge of Allegiance known as the Bellamy salute was created by Francis Bellamy in 1892. The gesture was further elaborated upon in popular culture during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in plays and films that portrayed the salute as an ancient Roman custom. These included the 1914 Italian filmCabiria whose intertitles were written by the nationalist poet Gabriele d’Annunzio. In 1919, d’Annunzio adopted the cinematographically depicted salute as a neo-imperial ritual when he led the occupation ofFiume.
Through d’Annunzio’s influence, the gesture soon became part of the rising Italian Fascist movement’s symbolic repertoire. In 1923, the salute was gradually adopted by the Italian Fascist regime. It was then adopted and made compulsory within the Nazi Party in 1926, and gained national prominence in the German state when the Nazis took power in 1933. It was also adopted by other fascist, far right and ultranationalist movements.
I have a deep distrust for “mental health professionals” whose advice is ultimately “be more like me” when I can ask a random narcissist how to deal with my personal circumstances for free.
I used to work in a public library. In the south. The kids who would come in from the Christian schools were, on average, way less intelligent than the public school kids (with exception of the Catholic school kids, the Marist fathers run that school). I don’t know about test scores, I know about, being able to figure out how to use the checkout screen without giving it the deer in headlights look, choosing a book they’d like to read for fun, literally do anything without an adult telling them exactly what to do. You know, any sort of independent thinking. Worse than the homeschoolers.
I don’t think that shows that they were “less intelligent” bur rather that they were more sheltered and dominated by the adults in their lives… possibly bordering on abused… We should probably feel sorry for them and hope that they got better support later in their lives.
It’s crazy how they were able to rebrand and bounce back so quickly and robustly after GenX took the image of “Motivational Speaker” to the cleaners and exposed them as charlatans and narcissistic nut jobs doing far more harm than good. We really do never learn, history rhymes, etc…
Perhaps had less availability of quality education and technology resources- but inherent intelligence is unlikely.
Catholic school was in my experience better for the early grades - learning basic skills etc - but worse afterwards. Deficits in science and the social sciences as the coursework progressed. Comparing myself to my older siblings. Some stayed through HS - I left in 4th grade due to a severe physical attack by the teacher.
Erm yes and no on the homeschooler thing and this is coming from someone who was homeschooled. My folks had very few options at the time (which I can easily imagine being even worse in the south where you are). It wasn’t so much the problem being poor grades but my utterly shit emotional intelligence that lead to my bad grades and getting kicked from school for blowing up food to impress a girl.
One of the largest issues with homeschooling (and in turn the majority of homeschooling parents) I feel is that they enforce an much more intense “kind learning environment” that universities and public schools would. Kind learning environments have clearly defined rules, have minimal randomness with easily observed results (games like chess, golf, tennis etc) while wicked learning environments have often times poorly explained rules with delayed results let alone results being able to be observed at all (aka ‘real life’). For example of how different those environments are, look at chess maestro Bobby Fischer. Brilliant at the game but so incredibly shit at real life that the choices he made in life eventually ate away at everything including his chess career.
This is a problem also seen with non homeschooling parents too. Pushing their kids to get great grades and signing them up for a ton of activities that ends up consuming a significant amount of said parent(s) time also. By the time many of those kids reach halfway through college they completely burnout or by the second or third year of being in the workplace they develop all sorts of emotional or mental problems they never really learned how to deal with when they were younger. The unempathetic old timers joke a lot about ‘adulting’ these days but in reality it’s no joking matter. Parents trying to turn their kids into clones of themselves or a severely highly and completely unrealistic idealized person is a larger problem than just ‘hahah the fundies are trying to turn their kids into robots’. Mix in religious views that mistake ‘not being of this world’ as being ‘living away from this world’ and you get some very serious problems… for everybody in a community. Idiots always end up causing trouble for everybody.
Yeah, in the south you defintely have the homeschoolers that do it because they really want to teach a religious education and are trying to indoctrinate their kids and make sure they don’t get any outside views, but man, some of them were really amazing parents who were raising smart, and dare I say, well adjusted, kids. And I had a few when I ran teen programming who never intended to homeschool, but their kids dealt with bullying so bad that it was their best option.
And lets be real, I had a moment between my first post and this one where I almost decided to homeschool, when I drove past my youngest kids school on the way to the store and saw 5 cop cars (3 school district police and 2 city police) outside. There was a panic. Her classroom is the closest one to the front door. The older one starts middle school next year and I may very well opt to homeschool if the violence gets worse in our district. A lot of teachers are quitting over it.
For real. But a good school should be teaching problem solving skills, independent thinking, etc. And I also had trouble with the public school kids picking out a book to read for fun, but that was because of Accelerated Reader. When they stopped doing that shit, it improved.
I usually tried to show them how to use the self checkout. Or the online catalog, or just finding books on the shelf, or any other library things. The moms of those kids were pretty controlling over what they were allowed to read. They’d have lists of acceptable books (like, the kids reading level would be in the teen section but the parents wouldn’t let them read anything with dating or kissing, so they’d be stuck reading books in the kid section). So helping them choose books was difficult.
Actually not sure which school the 11th grader was from who needed a book about WWII and did not know what the holocaust was. That was at a different branch out in the country.
Yeah, the catholic school is not perfect by any means, but they take academics seriously. I’m not sure if they had a high school at that time or if it just went up to middle school. I think the high school was still under construction or had not been open long when I left the library. I went to a catholic college, run by an order of nuns but we had teachers who were Marist fathers and I enjoyed their classes. I don’t think I’d send my kids there, but I’d choose it over any of the other Christian schools in the area for sure.
Not to dox myself too much but I worked in Gwinnett, so we got plenty of that even back then. There’s a pretty firmly set book removal process at the library (and, some form of “Did you read the book?” is on the form). The only downside is you can’t get factually inaccurate books removed either (see, half the books about autism) because they’ll also treat it as book banning. But books that claim I have been poisoned by vaccines or toxic metals or gluten should really not have made it past the purchasers.
