People worry about “kids today”.
I don’t, so much.
I’m concerned more about the parents.
Kids have it good. When I was a kid, we’d be handed lawn darts and told “go play”. In hindsight, that does not seem wise.
Bike helmets hadn’t been invented yet that we were made aware of. Seatbelts were tucked away under the cushions (kids rode lying in the back window, looking up at the stars… unconcerned about their potential as projectiles). Airbags?… Are you kidding me? Drunk driving, tragically, was an every-summer-weekend experience.
Technology-wise, I carried around a slide rule. Hard to reach the internet, or your “five faves”, on a slide rule. (Log tables were even less helpful.)
Nawww… kids got it good today. And, for the most part, they’ll turn out good… if their upbringing doesn’t get in the way.
Those parents worry me. And the other adults that are placed in positions of “in loco parentis” over other people’s kids.
I worry about the ones coaching my kids in hockey or baseball, or modelling behaviour from the other bench. I worry about their driving (with my kids in their car… or in their way). I worry about the examples they are setting, that my kids or other kids might stumble upon. I wonder what they’re thinking. I conclude that often they’re not, overmuch.
And I look at government school budgets, that share only about one penny of every 10,000 pennies (a penny out of every $100.00… what financial folk refer to as “a single basis point”, or, in other words, the very smallest iota of measurement in finance… slice things any smaller and you’re moving into the realm of atomic-level physics…) toward helping parents improve themselves as educators, as role models and as teachers of their children… and that worries me most. K-12 schooling is a 13-year marathon relay between home and school… and home gets little of the coaching, little of the training, little of the “constant improvement” and lifelong learning.
If “kids’ schooling” was looked at as a 24/7 enterprise, instead of an “8 to 3 government job”, how might those resources be divvied up? What impact might that have on the parents’ side of the relay? And what might be the impact, just accidentally, on the kids?
GLO
gordotto@parentsnschools.com
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