The common word for “grooming” is education. You find plenty of material on LW about education and thought about human learning.
If you look at the UK quite a lot of political figures do get groomed in Eton and go on to get a degree in Oxford or Cambridge.
In the US you have the ivy league universities. In Yale the Skull and Bones grooms further politicians to the extend that in 2004 the bonesman John Kerry lost to the bonesman George W. Bush.
In France you have Sciences Po.
Those institutions all have power but they the information about how their power works isn’t as public as the information about the voting system.
I tend to see education as acquiring book-knowledge i.e. the categorization and description of things, and most often in a parroty way. Well, I guess it says something about my schools. (I still get worked up in a not good way when I remember my music education was about learning category trees like aerophones consist brass, woodphones etc. instead of learning to enjoy or play music.) But this is why I tend to consider parenting about equally important in grooming as education is, as parents tend to show kids how to do things, not just how to describe or categorize things.
Yes, I know the truly good schools of the world are far more doing focused, they have more projects than verbal exams, all sorts of debating societies and clubs, and so on, but still, if you want to be a leader, which is not really a skill that could be summed in a few books, it must be really invaluable to have a parent who is.
Story: my dad used to be an entrepreneur, not big, but still when I accompanied him on days off from school we met all kinds of fairly powerful people, like a town mayor’s top ranking aides or sometimes bigger entrepreneurs and CEOs and generally these kinds of “suit” types. So I really early learned these people are just people too and was not afraid of them. And I was surprised to learn later that most of my friends were afraid of people who wear suits and radiate authority. I kept telling them this is just some fat guy with a difficult job and he is probably far more interested in his hemorrhoids than playing god with littler people but they were still scared, because they never knew them in person, they never had the chance of e.g. their parents taking them as kids on a skiing tour with a CEO type and his kids. So this lack of fear of high ranking people later on proved to be an immense help on job interviews.
So this is really the non-educational kind of grooming.
I think there’s an important distinction here this doesn’t address though.
Both selection and grooming feature education, but in cases of grooming, a person is being educated for a specific role which they’re intended to fill. In cases of selection, the person is acquiring qualifications which will promote them as a candidate for a variety of different positions. Within a system of selection, some people may receive significantly better or more prestigious educations, and this gives them preferential candidacy for higher level positions, but it’s not the same as grooming, where a person is selected for the position they’re meant to fill before they’re educated for it.
The common word for “grooming” is education. You find plenty of material on LW about education and thought about human learning.
If you look at the UK quite a lot of political figures do get groomed in Eton and go on to get a degree in Oxford or Cambridge.
In the US you have the ivy league universities. In Yale the Skull and Bones grooms further politicians to the extend that in 2004 the bonesman John Kerry lost to the bonesman George W. Bush.
In France you have Sciences Po.
Those institutions all have power but they the information about how their power works isn’t as public as the information about the voting system.
I tend to see education as acquiring book-knowledge i.e. the categorization and description of things, and most often in a parroty way. Well, I guess it says something about my schools. (I still get worked up in a not good way when I remember my music education was about learning category trees like aerophones consist brass, woodphones etc. instead of learning to enjoy or play music.) But this is why I tend to consider parenting about equally important in grooming as education is, as parents tend to show kids how to do things, not just how to describe or categorize things.
Yes, I know the truly good schools of the world are far more doing focused, they have more projects than verbal exams, all sorts of debating societies and clubs, and so on, but still, if you want to be a leader, which is not really a skill that could be summed in a few books, it must be really invaluable to have a parent who is.
Story: my dad used to be an entrepreneur, not big, but still when I accompanied him on days off from school we met all kinds of fairly powerful people, like a town mayor’s top ranking aides or sometimes bigger entrepreneurs and CEOs and generally these kinds of “suit” types. So I really early learned these people are just people too and was not afraid of them. And I was surprised to learn later that most of my friends were afraid of people who wear suits and radiate authority. I kept telling them this is just some fat guy with a difficult job and he is probably far more interested in his hemorrhoids than playing god with littler people but they were still scared, because they never knew them in person, they never had the chance of e.g. their parents taking them as kids on a skiing tour with a CEO type and his kids. So this lack of fear of high ranking people later on proved to be an immense help on job interviews.
So this is really the non-educational kind of grooming.
It might be true that a lot of schools fail to do more than transfering book knowledge but that’s not inherent to the word education.
Ivy league universities do many to teach the lesson that high status people are just people.
I think there’s an important distinction here this doesn’t address though.
Both selection and grooming feature education, but in cases of grooming, a person is being educated for a specific role which they’re intended to fill. In cases of selection, the person is acquiring qualifications which will promote them as a candidate for a variety of different positions. Within a system of selection, some people may receive significantly better or more prestigious educations, and this gives them preferential candidacy for higher level positions, but it’s not the same as grooming, where a person is selected for the position they’re meant to fill before they’re educated for it.