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| education (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee) |
This post will continue the debate about guns as the cause of violence. Mass shootings inevitably lead to an outcry against the accessibility of automatic weapons. My argument is that guns are not the problem--people are. In my post Should We Ban (Insert Topic Here), I suggested that before the nation takes an overly reactionary response in attacking the Second Amendment rights laid out by the founding fathers of the United States, we might want to consider some other things that could be contributing factors to the violent incidents that have been seen in the United States. Should we blame guns or something like the topic of this post?
Are Schools Doing a Lousy Job of Raising Our Children?
I would imagine more than a few eyebrows were raised by the ridiculous question that is the title of this post. Schools raising our kids? Shouldn't parents be raising kids? And what kind of job are they doing?
The best they can would be my answer to the last question where it comes to a good many parents. Parenting can be a real challenge and there is no clear cut one size fits all manual handed to new mothers and fathers when they receive their child. Raising kids is often a trial and error work of blind faith.
Part of that blind faith comes into play when we send our children off to school. Often we assume that the educational system has the best interests of our children in mind. The question is whose mind and what mind? Is this collective interest in sync with the minds of the parents?
Don't get me wrong--I am not scapegoating the teachers. For the most part they are just pawns caught up in the system. My biggest concern is administration--there is way too much power in the controlling aspect of the educational system and too little left for the ones actually dealing with the kids. Teachers and students are the ones victimized by screwy state programs and one-size-fits-all standards. Performance measured by testing is detracting from the actual job that teachers should be doing. Schools are becoming more like factories mass producing cookie-cutter uninspired graduates.
Now I know this is not true across the board, but I hear more complaints about stressed out teachers who are burdened with more nonsensical work to appease the system as they have to deal with students who often don't care about education. And frequently the parents are oblivious to the actual problem. They'd just as soon blame the teachers before looking at themselves as parental figures or the ersatz childcare of television and video games.
Many kids are left to sort things out for themselves with the dubious help of equally misguided peers and bad cultural icons. When youth goes wild it seems easy to blame the ones who have had the biggest hand in raising them--the schools. And when we think of schools we think of teachers. They must be doing something wrong.
Let's not forget that administration is a hefty part of the typical school system budget. Pundits of educational theory come up with silly ideas that sound good in their brains and in the boardrooms. Administrators fall for the nonsense and the politicians dish out the big bucks. The teachers and students are the unfortunate beneficiaries of the great governmental hoax.
After all, what do any of us know? Government is here to take care of us all. They will tell teachers how to teach and what to teach. They will tell us what to eat and what to do. Then the administrators will make sure it all gets done according to the governmental rule book.
There is still something missing here that is the common denominator of all the issues I've been bringing up. I'll eventually address what that is sometime in May. We shouldn't be blaming the educators for the way our kids our turning out and some of the anger that can eventually lead to violence. But we might want to take a closer look at the ones who are tying the hands of those educators.
To what extent do we need government telling us what we can do? How much influence over nationwide education should the federal government have? To what extent should state government dictate what needs to be done at a local level? Do you think many kids become frustrated with school life?
