My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (Live Reactions & Discussion)

I feel like the beginning of the First day of Class song was all about implying that, yes, the Mane 6 are better teachers when they get to teach in their own way. Things only went downhill when the EEA rule book started to heavily come in. Twi wasn't making an assumption about maybe the cast would be better without regulation. She saw it first hoof.

I still feel like you're overselling the scope of Twilight's school. It's not that big. It mostly caters to teenagers or young adults. There are some foals there but it's not a lie is it that the vast majority of students in this one institution are a lot older.

What the heck?! It sounds as though the writers have crafted a self-sabotaging narrative, where the protagonists are constantly proven to be wrong and the antagonist is proven to be right and none of the writers seem to notice!

Edited by fredhot16 on Feb 11th 2019 at 6:20:29 AM

It doesn't matter. If there are any foals there, then they need to be teaching core subjects so that those foals don't grow up uneducated.

A successful future career should not be a price of entry to Twilight's friendship school.

And we know for a fact that there are foals there. One of them is in prison now.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 11th 2019 at 7:23:09 AM

Or be light enough that one could feasibly go to two schools and not be buried under the homework and exams of two different schools.

As someone who got excellent grades in primary and secondary school, but is currently unemployed, nothing I learned in primary school has helped me find a career.

T The jury is still out on whether secondary education is even a major thing in Equestria, but regardless, you're drawn to and do what you're born good at in Equestria. An education doesn't affect this, unless we get cases of kids never discovering their cutie marks because they're in Twi's school. So if these people are passionate about, say, magic, they'll go to a magic school, not Twi's school.

Edited by GNinja on Feb 11th 2019 at 2:30:59 PM

...Alright, I want to put this before the forum: should we stop conversing about this?

It seems that if it goes on, it might not be for the best for anybody.

So your argument is that it's okay for kids in Twilight's school to not have a core educational curriculum because core subjects are useless and kids shouldn't bother learning them anyway?

Because that's what it sounds like you're saying. In which case, why even bother attending Cheerilee's school in the first place?

Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 11th 2019 at 7:35:35 AM

I'm just tired of fans applying malicious thought processes to the characters.

...O.K, I'm going to say this: can we please go to another subject? I can not see this one going to end amicably.

Nobody's trying to say that "Sparkles thinks that standard education has no value" but if the writing comes off as a bit positive of a thing that is not positive at all, that is the problem.

Edited by fredhot16 on Feb 11th 2019 at 6:41:36 AM

There are things more deserving of your passion than somebody impugning Twilight Sparkle's honor.

While they may not directly help you get a job, they're still an essential base for A) learning the skills that will help you get a job and B) being a functional human being.

History and social studies provide context for the world you live in, LA, math and science all teach critical thinking skills, and all of them help to provide a general set of knowledge that most citizens share, and shared knowledge can be essential for cooperation and collaboration.

(Especially LA. Seriously, I know that 'durr hurr teacher invents meaning the author didn't put there" has been a joke for decades, but the critical thinking, reading compehension and defense-of-viewpoint taught by those courses are super important. Like, you don't get... anywhere, if you can't understand and think things through)

The benefit of academic pursuits, even for people who don't ultimate pursue academic paths in life, is that they exercise the mind and teach important mental skills that will be applicable for everyone.

Now granted all of that isn't to say it's impossible to impart those skills without the standardized curriculum—but the curriculum is what it is for a reason. And while a cynic might say that the current curriculum in many developed nations exists primarily to train obedient workers, from what we see of Equestria that's clearly not the case.

I mean, I still don't think that one necesarily gets rid of the other. I don't know how long you spend at Twi's school. If it's one or two years then you'll be graduating still too young to get a job, so I see no reason why you can't go there, then go to an EEA school.

There's so much we don't know about the education and government systems in Equestria. There's this empty chunk of a pony's life after CMC age but before they're an adult that we don't know much about. That from what I can see could be potentially filled with anything. You could go to Twi's school. You could go to magic school. You could go get a Rocktorate. You could potentially go get a standard EEA education like in Cheerilee's school. Maybe not in a classroom like that, but still learning all the same things.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 11th 2019 at 7:42:17 AM

Actually, come to think of it, couldn't you apply this same issue to Twilight's education? She entered into Celestia's school for Gifted Unicorns at the same time she got her cutie mark. If you get your mark around the age of the CMC, then Twi wouldn't have finished her standard education either. She jumped right into a specialty field. That of learning magic.

Sorry, I get this feeling I'm coming off like an asshole. I hate not being able to argue anything of worth.

Edited by GNinja on Feb 11th 2019 at 2:50:17 PM

Here's a tip from me: take a breath and let it go for now. Come back, if you still have the desire, in a day or two. Give yourself time to be calm before you say anything more.

I get your passion and your passion is not obnoxious but there comes a moment when you need to take a breather and approach it from a cooler view.

It's a thin line between being passionate and being persistent.

So, as to go to another thing altogether, allow me to ask:

What the bugger is this?◊

The whole Friendship school plotline never made any sense once you think about it, and it seems like the writers don't really know where they're going with it either. It almost feels like the kind of thing mandated to sell toys, except that I don't think it was the case here. Most likely they just ran out of plot ideas and decided to shake things up.

Also, the rants about charter schools sit oddly with me because I went to a charter high school which was basically just an ordinary public high school with a gifted program tacked on. But I do understand that most charter schools aren't like that, or at least, that's not the kind of charter school politicians talk about.

I liked Pinkie's callback to that form in The Mean 6.

I always somewhat liked the floofiness of their manes like that.

I've definitely heard it was a mandate from Hasbro. Jim said they wanted a school, so they tried to make it work.

Edited by GNinja on Feb 11th 2019 at 3:11:17 PM

The context we have from expanded universe stuff and background details of various characters is that students go through Cheerlilee-style education (earning or not their cutie marks in the process - most do by then), and the unicorns apply to Celestia's school immediately after that.

Admission is limited, so many don't even get to attend. Those that do then need to keep up.

Those that we know couldn't keep up: Sunburst, Glitter Drops, Spring Rain, Trixie.

Those that we don't know how they fared: Lemon Drops, Twinkleshine, Minuette, Lyra, Moondancer (she most likely finished).

Sunset and Twilight are both special cases in that not only they finished, they were taking lessons straight from Celestia.

Most deffinitely a mandate from Hasbro. There was a big fancy play set that Hasbro needed to sell.

Edited by MrSeyker on Feb 11th 2019 at 7:24:20 AM

Where did the part about Shimmer come from? It's not from the comic because she hadn't actually graduated at the time though I only vaguely recollect it.

Edited by fredhot16 on Feb 11th 2019 at 7:28:31 AM

We don't have enough context, tbh.

I kinda made an assumption, because Sunset and Twilight's education is unique among unicorns, because they took magic lessons directly from Celestia that seem to be separate from her school.

In Sunset's comic she was still undergoing her studies when she has her fallout with Celestia and leaves Equestria, so you can easily argue she's flunked like Sunburst and co.

The comic is kinda compressed tho, in that it shows her getting accepted, and then a vague passage of time occurrs where she insists Celestia teach her more advanced magic, and then she leaves for the human world.

Later comics, however, show her attending the school as a filly (like Twilight when she got accepted in show canon) rather than as an early-teen like in her Annual.

When her Annual was written, there was much less info to go about what Celestia's school actually was (we only had the Twilight flashback for context).

Later canon (Sunburst and Starlight's backstory, and that of Tempest and her friends) showed that unicorns join the school young, so comics written after this now show filly Sunset in the background.

EDIT:

Yeah, I know, comic canon. MLP canon really. There's as little consistency to be found here as there can be found in the show if you take episodes far enough apart.

If you want to fill in details for the sake of world building, you kinda have to do it in broad strokes.

Edited by MrSeyker on Feb 11th 2019 at 8:04:38 AM

Wait, was she getting accepted into the school at the beginning of the comic or was it supposed to be a final exam? Because if it was her getting accepted into Celestia's school, it means that she was Celestia's student before she even got into Celestia's school!

If so, I now have to wonder what inspires Celestia to take a student? Because Sparkles doing magnificent magic is understandable but what the bugger could Shimmer do before she even got into Celestia's school?

Edited by fredhot16 on Feb 11th 2019 at 8:43:39 AM

She wrote a compelling essay.

Uff, I REALLY need to go over a whole bunch of stuff, it's been ages.

Yeah, you're remembering correctly.

It wasn't an entrance exam, it was just a school test and she had been attending for a while. The test is framed to be a visual callback to Twilgith's entrance test in the show as means to showcase the strength of Sunset's magic, which along with me not remembering the actual dialog made me think it was the exact same scenario.

After the vague passage of time, they argue about the mirror for the umpteenth time and Celestia revokes her position as pupil, after which Sunset flees to the human world.

So yeah, she could be said to be a drop out, which fits with the whole inferiorty/superiority complex towards Twilight that feeds a bunch of Sunny's actions.

Though I still personally see attending the school and being Celestia's pupil as not quite the same thing.

Edited by MrSeyker on Feb 11th 2019 at 9:19:45 AM

One thing that I think hasn't been answered is why Twilight feels she needs such a big set of lessons to teach Friendship. The show seems to suggest that students attend her school daily (do they even get weekends? we never see them OUT of school), with lessons throughout the day, living on campus in a dorm. But what we see from lessons is that the Mane Six largely teach things from their personal fields of interest, along with recent pony history. These are things that arguably could fit in a regular EEA curriculum as well. In that regard, it would have been far more logical to create one or several courses revolving around friendship lessons, instead of creating an entire separate school.

That would also create a much better environment for learning about friendship outside of a classroom setting (and field trips are effectively a classroom setting, too). That has been one of the problems with how Friendship has been depicted on the show lately: as something that you can study and teach in a classroom setting, as a piece of knowledge that you either do or don't have. This as opposed to friendship being a social construct that tends to happen naturally and organically when social beings interact with each other. Humans generally don't need a Friendship School, and if they do, then we send them to a psychologist, not a school.

The Mane Six shouldn't be teachers, but counselors. Starlight basically has the job best suited to teach friendship: as a school councelor. It is rather telling that more often than not, students go to Starlight with any serious friendship problems, not their teachers.