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BS ‘n’ About…
Education
Education is always the answer. From the dawn of time through ‘not very long ago’ we nurtured, raised, and educated our kids in a certain way, a communal way. We married not much after the onset of puberty, lived under or near our parents’ roof through our childbearing years, and popped out babies as fast as we could. As with everything else, modern society has drastically changed all this. And not necessarily for the better.
It used to be that, when a baby entered this world, it was surrounded by the stimulus and input of a stay-at-home Mom, siblings up the ying-yang, a multi-generational extended family, a community full of similar family units, and lots of other babies. As soon as it could walk, that baby began its education by following in the family footsteps.
Little girls learned to run a household at he elbows of their Mamas and Grandmas. Little boys were put to work in the family business or on the family farm. Kids were sent to the schoolhouse of the church school to learn the ‘3-R’s’, but most education was geared toward the family vocation and handled by family members. Once puberty was reached, girls were married off, boys were apprenticed out, and the process began anew.
For most of human history, the education of our children has been a personalized thing, tailored to meet the needs of the individual child, built upon the strengths of the given family. Since children were expected to follow in the footsteps of their parents, their parents were qualified to give them most of the education they’d need. That is no longer the case.
Nowadays we treat education as just another impersonal, same-size-fits-all, assembly line of modern babysitting. We lock our kids away from the rest of society for twelve years, chain them to desks, and forbid them to speak unless spoken to. We teach them all the same white bread curriculum, then pass out rewards on how well they parrot it back to us. We discourage individuality, reward conformity, and medicate restlessness. We teach all but a select few athletes and scholars that they are found wanting in one way or another.
The dogmatic rigidity and glacial inertia of our educational system is doing a poor job of preparing our youth for the rapidly changing complexities of the Real World. Like everything else Washington has sunk its teeth into, education has turned into just another hot potato of political selfishness. Every President anoints himself “The Education President” yet educational standards and opportunities have been on the decline for decades. Decades!
This must change if America is to remain competitive, much less preeminent. Already our kids’ lives are not better than our own. Nor are their schools. Unless we’re willing to coast through a 21st century that sees the death of the American Dream, We, the People need to take back control o our kids’ education from a Washington that oversees it with campaign platitudes and budgetary disdain. Our kids will never be a priority in Washington: They don’t vote or write campaign checks. Politicians talk a good game when it comes to our kids, but it has been a long, long time since they actually did anything to actually help them. Healthcare cost reform? Declaring Peace for a change? Pell grants for college? Winning the war on drugs? Trillion dollar deficits, anyone?
So where do we start? How about the beginning? Since virtually every scientific study shows that most of who we are is formed in the first year or two of life, why not start there? (Europe does, damned socialists that they are!)
As things stand, we trust the most crucial years of human development to young parents who are all-too-often still kids themselves, and a daycare system that is little more than unregulated warehousing. By the time society gets involved in their formal education, the seeds of anti-social behavior, mental illness, and even serial killing have already been sown. This may sound harsh but it is fully in line with the findings of modern science.
Formal education needs to be instituted, not only in the formative years of life, but also for the first years of parenting. No other human endeavor do we dive into so completely unprepared for. To entrust a human life to whichever two human beings happened to boink it into existence is not only cruel and unusual punishment, it is downright criminal. No child should be left to the mercies of any two individuals, especially not in today’s complex, ever-changing world. No child should be spending half of its waking hours in the hands of some daycare stranger, and half of the rest plugged into Sesame Street.
When a child is brought into this world, both it and its parents need to be spending significant amounts of time in a structured, educational environment. If the parents aren’t in the position, or don’t have the desire, to make that child the center of their existence until it gets off on the right foot, they shouldn’t be having it in the first place. Friends must be put on hold. Careers must be put on hold. Dreams must be put on hold. The days of having babies just to have babies need to come to an end.
The effects of this level of commitment on society would be profound. The effect on the economy could be offset by fully engaging the community, and especially its ‘Elders’ in the process. …just like it was done throughout history, coincidentally enough. The rewards for both seniors and students would be immeasurable. Let your imagination run wild and see where it takes you.
By the time most kids reach grade school age these days, they’ve Sesame Streeted their way to a basic understanding of reading and ‘rithmetic. Rather than chain them to desks and pedantically pound dogma into them, we ought to be taking advantage of their youthful curiosity to give them a thirst for knowledge by exposing them to their world.
We ought to be putting them on buses and taking them to the hospitals and army bases, the factories and stock exchanges, the police stations and retailers. Give each of them a dream and then tell them the answers to their questions are in the library.
Within parameters, we need to let each student design his own curriculum, at his own pace. Does it matter which ten books they read, as long as they read ten books? Does it matter whether they hone their math skills by building a doghouse, following a recipe, or completing a sudoku puzzle? As long as they hone their math skills, right?
Let them find their thirst for knowledge in ways that are passionate for them. Let them learn success by bettering their own yesterdays, rather than comparing themselves with their neighbors. Let them learn success rather than failure.
Once a thirst for knowledge is instilled, it will never go away. Later on society can go back and fill in the blanks. Later on society can focus that thirst in a career-specific direction. All of us need to know how to balance a checkbook. Few of us need to know the roles Dante and Chaucer may have played in making us who we are today.
Instill in us a thirst for knowledge, make education fun and relevant, and we will want to continue learning up until the day we die. It’s in our nature. It’s at the core of who and what we are.
Good thing. From now on education is going to be a lifelong process. Our grandparents were born into a world without plastic. Our kids were born into a world virtually devoid of computers. Who can say what kind of a world their kids will be graduating into a mere twenty or so years from now.
Unless we want them graduating into an America that is second rate, envious of the world plundered by their parents, fearful of the future they will leave to their kids, we must quit giving lip service to the concept of making education a priority in America.
Education isn’t something you read in a book, vote for on Election Day, or pay for by the mil. Education is a mindset, a dream. Our education was our parents’ dream as they dragged themselves home from the factories, mills, and mines. Their dream was that we would get an education so that we wouldn’t have to work as hard as they did. All we’ve dreamt about is getting rich, even if it meant gambling away the kids’ college fund in the attempt. We’ve sold our kids out for a trillion dollar deficit and a shameful day of reckoning that’s going to hurt like hell.
We need to pull out the photo albums, go back a generation or two, and look into the weary but proud eyes of those who were known as the ‘Greatest Generation’. We need to explain to them how we could have frittered away the wealth they had amassed for us so quickly that their great grandkids face times even bleaker than the ones they endured. Our parents were proud of how hard they worked. We were proud of how much stuff we had, paid for or not. Will our kids have anything left to be proud of? Education is always the answer.
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