The Rules, and the Real Rules

I doubt that it is actually better in other societies, neither historical nor primitive; not Eastern or African or Native. When I point out that there is a grave discrepancy in American society between the rules that we teach children will be what they need as adults and what the rules turn out to be, I am not going to spring on you some nonsense how that wasn't what happened in the old days, or in China, or in the golden age of Greece, nor among the Arapaho. We teach children what we want to believe are the real rules, or wish were the real rules.

We do this at schools a lot, insisting that the behaviors which bring awards and honors there will also work in the adult world. They do somewhat, but there is another entire set of work rules, concerned with skill at selling things or making things that gets left out of the mix.  I have mentioned before that the Second Wave feminist fury derives in part from succeeding at school, just as told, then finding that this is not a fully reliable predictor of success as an adult. I followed the directions.  You lied. They didn't much mean to lie, especially as schools are and were run by women for girls. Those are the skills that work for school jobs and are not unrelated to other fields. Their horizons were limited.

Churches insist that certain moral behaviors will "work" in solving your problems, not fully understanding that they are not necessarily intended to work in that way. They are meant to work in terms of building a particular type of person, fitted for heaven. That is supposed to be our goal, and the Church's, yet it often isn't, not quite.

It's one of the lessons that sports actually does teach, because what the rules are in the book is not always what the officials will call. The baseball strike zone gradually got completely out of whack for a while. What is a foul in basketball, what the rulebook says or what the refs will call? And yet it also pays to know the book rules cold, because sometimes, sometimes you can steal a march on everyone else for a whole season until they change the rules in the offseason. 

Who gets promoted?  In some systems the formal rules are followed strictly, in others you can spend your career trying to figure out what the real rules are. What are the real rules of marriage?