A New (or Old?) Kind of Education Needed
Friday, April 11th, 2008
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Third-graders hatching murder plots? Teenage girls beating a fellow student and then posting video of the attack on the internet? Students jump school teachers with no recourse from the district? Since when did this become commonplace? Since when did kids have the gall to plan the stuff out and broadcast it? Since when did we become so weak as to let them without so much as a slap on the wrist? Kids need to learn lessons, and the most important lessons aren’t about math, history, or science.
Schools don’t teach respect, self-control, and discipline. That’s not their job. Parents are responsible for those subjects. The home is the first classroom. If the end product is any indication, many parents are doing a lousy job. There aren’t enough rules for kids, and, if there are rules, they aren’t enforced enough. Respect for any kind of authority is no longer demanded by parents. Therefore, they treat it like a foreign concept when they get out into the world.
Here’s a newsflash, parents: you aren’t doing your kids any favors by going easy on them, rewarding disobedience, or giving yourself a break from parental duties because you’re working, too tired, or just plain frustrated. If you won’t teach your kids, the cold, cruel world will, and it may just be behind bars that they learn the lessons you should have taught.
A schoolteacher friend of mine is fond of saying, “We teach kids in spite of their parents.”
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The No Child Left Behind Act will not fix this. The next president will not fix this. Sending your kid to a different school, a different teacher, will not work. The job belongs to parents. Others can support them, but they cannot supplant them.
Save yourself a lot of trouble down the road: teach your kids now. Teach them to respect others. Teach them to control their anger, fear, and frustration. Teach them that there are lines that are never crossed. And then enforce those teachings in your home. They won’t learn it any other way. They certainly won’t learn it at school. There is no new kind of educational model that will cure this problem, only the oldest educational model known to man: parenthood.
