Educators are Coming for Our Children … But Do We Care?

  Educators are Coming for Our Children … But Do We Care?

        Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal July 30, 2017

                        

            Nat King Cole’s “lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer” are upon us, a time during which Americans like to escape their routine if and when they can.  And school has already started?

            For those who can manage to get away for a break, here’s a message that awaits them when they return: your kids’ school started while you were gone.

             Families had better enjoy the open road while they can because the American summer is being chipped away.   School boards seem set on the idea of starting school while the weather is still sweltering.  The trend is to start school early and give students a couple or more breaks between starting time and Christmas.  (The Winter Solstice, that is.  I keep forgetting that Christmas is a bad word at school, though the Celtic pagan religion expression, “winter holidays,” is not.)

            Formal schooling is important, but it’s only a part of our total lives and our learning.  Formal schooling isn’t the only kind there is.  Children and youth can learn outside the classroom.  They learn from trips, from Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa, Uncle Joe, neighbors, summer jobs, recreation, and chores.  They learn to live life with their families and away from their peers. 

There are two reasons why these early start dates are not good.  One is educational, the other, cultural.

            MDJ letter writer and teacher, Melissa Anderson, recently hit the nail on the head, arguing that when the break times come, at least two instructional days are lost, the day before the break when students are too excited, and the day of return when they are comatose. I know from experience, also, that such breaks don’t serve students well.  Teachers lose ground.  Students lose tempo and interest.  Surely we adults remember what it was like returning to school after Chris … , I mean winter holidays.

             Shortened summers are bad culturally. Extended summers, while good for the economy, also curb the impact of teen culture.  Teens need to be around adults more.  They are spending too much time with each other. Too many parents don’t realize that school is now a subculture, one that can suck teenagers in and woo them away from the habits and values they have been taught at home.

            This reality is no fault of principals or teachers.  It’s the nature of the beast.  Although I realize big schools are what we’re stuck with, a thousand or more or even several hundred teens in one place is a bad idea.  Teens quickly become each other’s confidants, teachers, comforters, counselors, and chief influencers.  Only the strongest of homes, as havens of love and dispensers of discipline, can keep their offspring from being enveloped by the negative aspects of teen culture.  Yes, including its music, its dress, trends, moral values, language, and most seriously, its obsession with conformity.  Teen culture’s beachhead is the school, but it exists apart from and in spite of the school.  Sheer numbers feed it and give it life.

            Schools deserve some of the blame for youth culture’s direction - in music and dress, particularly.   If rock is their music at home and out and about – with its primitive rhythms and coarsening lyrics - why not a different kind of music at ball games and in the cafeteria?  Classical music would appeal to far more teens than anyone realizes. Why give teens what they already have?

 Schools to teens: “At home do what your parents allow.  That’s really none of our business.  But at school, we will not give you what you already have.” 

And dress?  God help us.  School boards should fight parents on this one:  “At home, dress like a vagabond, listen to loud music, use terrible English, but school is a place where standards are aspired to, expectations are held up, excellence is taught, one’s best is demanded.” 

Oh, how we have fallen. Not just schools.  All of us.  The culture has gone from “Shall the pot command the potter?”  to “We must identify with youth.”  It’s quite unfair to blame educators totally.  Yes, doctrinaire educators want our children, but many parents are apparently willing to let schools have their children.

Another thing.  To me there are few things more heartbreaking or more foreboding for a nation than the expression “Pre-K.”  PRE-kindergarten?  Where are parents?  Is the delivery room the next destination for the nanny state educationists?

Yes, educators are coming for our children.  Busy, hardworking parents need to take notice.

Roger Hines

7/26/17