An American Experiment

Hey, Arne, here's an experiment for you--let's get some real data!

Let's take a few American babies, even wealthy white ones with full-time nannies, and pump them full of cortisol.

Every few minutes, shoot another bolus of cortisol into their veins, their brains.

Watch their hippocampuses (critical for memory) shrink as their bellies bulge, their memories fall as their blood pressures rise.

Watch their amygdalas, the seat of fear and aggression grow, as their health declines,

Then give them some more.

Wait a few years, then toss them into a classroom and subject them to a "level playing field," where years of toxic doses of cortisol have shaped their minds and their bodies, and keep pumping that cortisol in hour after hour after hour after hour.

Then test them, and label them as the failures that they are, the dregs of our culture, and toss them back into the abyss of cultural condemnation.

Toxic stress is real.
Teachers cannot fix it, though bad ones can certainly add to the cortisol carousel.

There's a reason lower standardized test scores correlate with lower "status."

If you care about children, stop focusing on whether standardized tests should (or should not) be mandatory. It's like asking whether the Titanic's color scheme worked.

Our culture is poisoning children, especially children of color, with cortisol.
We're too busy to even pretend to notice.

I have really had it with the smug bullshit dished out by Emperor Arne....