Cleanliness and order are not matters of instinct; they are matters of education, and like most great things, you must cultivate a taste for them.
- Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister (1804-81)
We humans are naturally inclined to gather into clusters of individual living spaces, whether hamlets or cities, when doing so means we can produce more food than we need to survive. But we aren't naturally inclined toward any particular form of order (government) or forms of cleanliness, other than we don't usually foul our own nests.
Order and cleanliness must be taught if they are to be followed. If they are to be followed by everyone, they must be taught to everyone. That means to every child.
That's where modern societies fall down, badly, tragically. So long as most people get the main parts of the society's messages as they grow up, everyone assumes that every child gets the messages.
And they assume that every child gets the same messages in the same manner and with the same effectiveness.
These assumptions are all wrong. Every one.
When members of our communities mess up, such as by breaking laws, having unwanted children they can't or won't support or breaking down emotionally due to excessive stress our only solutions are to punish them or fill them with drugs.
This lesson is not hard, but we aren't learning it. We're screwing up and paying more each year to make up for the messes we're making. Anything we want everyone to know and to follow must be taught to every child or adolescent.
That's it! We can't depend on every set of parents to teach their children the same lessons because they don't know the lessons themselves. If you doubt that, check out how many adolescents are in prison, are homeless or are in gangs because they can't make it on their own.
I am not aware of any government that does not pass laws. I am as well not aware of any government that has a systematic method for ensuring that laws that it passes are taught to the members of the public to which they apply. That doesn't make sense.
I am aware that in many jurisdictions of the world, ignorance of the law is not accepted as an excuse for breaking it.
In the western world, cleanliness is taught. Some would say to a fanatic extent, given the obsession we have for buying cleaning products that are far more powerful than necessary and that harm the environment when they leave our homes. But disease born from unclean and unhealthy environments is in decline. No so in all parts of the world, as we know from the spread of bird flu.
Since we leave the teaching of cleanliness mostly to corporations these days, of course they teach us to use their products. Only later do we learn (the hard way) that their products have done considerable harm to the environment (air, water, land). By then they have moved on to entice us with products that are "cleaner" and "greener."
Our governments and our education systems take no responsibility for teaching either laws or cleanliness beyond what is minimally necessary to get them through the day. They leave that to our media, which means to our corporations.
We have only one way to ensure that every child learns the same lessons that we expect them to follow as adults. That way is to put what we want them to learn on school curriculum.
In the United States today, over ten percent of adults are either in prison or have criminal records. That's the highest in the world, per capita. But even other countries such as Canada, the UK and Germany aren't far behind.
We also need to teach our children one other kind of lesson. We need to teach them how to cope when their lives get messed up and they might turn to breaking the law, to drugs, to suicide, to abuse or to obsessions such as overwork. They need to know what to do when they realize they have a problem that causes them to get involved with some form of anti-social behaviour.
Let's begin with you. Have you taught your children all the laws they need to follow? Have you taught them how their lives (and probably yours) will be destroyed if they turn to counterproductive measures such as drugs, alcohol or overwork?
Have you taught them what to do with packaging when they have consumed its contents on the street? Judging by the streets of most cities, not every parent has taught that lesson.
The only way to ensure that family-friendly and community-friendly practices are followed is to teach them to every child. Every child.
Will schools have time, given how busy their teaching schedules are already? Yes. They will get the time they gain when they don't have to deal with misbehaviour and lack of attention because their kids want to be taught what they really need but aren't getting.
Oh, yes, kids know that they need to know lots of things to function properly and in a healthy manner as adults. They aren't sure what those things are. They know naturally that they need to be able to cope in the society they will enter as independent adults soon. They don't know how to do that.
Most know that they aren't getting all of what they need. It upsets them terribly, though they tend to demonstrate their frustration in different ways than adults do. Kids misbehave when they aren't getting what they need in life. When they misbehave, we call them brats. They don't know what else to do to get our attention. We punish them.
Don't wonder what's the matter with kids these days. Wonder instead how so many manage to join the mainstream as adults when finding out what they need to know is so hard for them as children and adolescents.
Do you know what laws your national government passed in the last year, laws you will have to obey or find yourself in court? Kids won't either. And they have no way to find out if we don't provide ways for them to learn.
Do you know where to turn when life gets too much for you? Suicide? Drugs? Abuse? That may not be you, but it's what a shocking percentage of people do.
Being the clever and resourceful person you are, you likely can answer these questions positively. Not many can.
Talk about it.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teaches who want to equip their children with what they need to know to survive and thrive as adults, instead of struggling along on what they learn in school now.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Showing posts with label curriculum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label curriculum. Show all posts
Monday, June 09, 2008
Sunday, April 27, 2008
What We Miss Most
When you are eight years old, nothing is any of your business.
- Lenny Bruce, comedian (1925-1966)
It's a good laugh line for a comedian. Just about everyone remembers that when they were eight years old nobody wanted to include them in adult affairs or conversations. And the adults in Lenny's audience likely did the same with their own kids.
I remember a man I overheard speaking to another man, when I was about 15 years old, saying "I don't bother trying to have conversations with anyone younger than 25 because they don't know enough to hold a decent conversation." It impressed me so much I decided to learn enough to be able to hold a good conversation by the age of 25.
I certainly didn't consider including my own children in conversations I had with my wife when they were that age. They weren't interested anyway.
I was wrong.
My kids were wrong, but maybe because of our practice of excluding our kids from adult conversations they just got used to how things were.
It's the sole purpose in life of a child to learn what it's like in the adult world they are enter within a few years. The young of every species has that same purpose.
If we, as parents and grandparents, don't include kids in our conversations, they miss out on opportunities to learn from us.
What we don't teach with intention, kids learn by our example. If our parents didn't talk about sex or even indicate that they had sex with each other, they likely didn't say much to us about the subject. We learn the hard way, probably the way our parents did. There's a pretty good chance that we and our parents both missed out on much of what we could have had and done if we and they had known more.
In turn, our kids miss out if we don't know what to teach them and how.
Kids most often follow the examples of their parents when they reach the age of majority and have to choose a political party to vote for. They have overheard discussions among their parents that led them to the conclusion that one party is better than the other(s). Most parents don't even indicate to their kids that voters have more than one choice. The young adults vote the way their parents would.
We're forced to learn too much the hard way. We make too many mistakes on stuff where there was no reason we shouldn't have known better, stuff that someone should have taught us.
Why should a child learn a foreign language and trigonometry in school if that child will never use it as an adult, but that child never receives proper instruction about how to make and keep friends, how to be a good spouse in a marriage or how to be a good parent?
We fail at friendships, marriages and parenting. We never get a chance to fail at speaking the foreign language or using trig in most cases, but that's just as well because we likely forgot most of it since we had no use for it.
Do the arithmetic. Which is more important, knowing how to make and keep friends, how to have a compatible marriage and how to be a good parent or how to speak a foreign language and do trigonometry?
That's not to put down learning languages or trig, only to state that we have other more important needs that our parents, our grandparents and our teachers seldom or never address.
We accept this because "That's the way it has always been done." It's clearly wrong, so does that mean that many generations of our ancestors were wrong? It's a sharp edged pill to swallow, but, yup, they were wrong.
When we chose to exclude ourselves from the natural courses of nature in our modern world, we didn't compensate for the important lessons that nature teaches to every other species on the planet. We miss some of the most important lessons in life. Parents don't know them so they can't teach what they don't know. Or they are reticent about teaching what they learned themselves by doing and making mistakes.
No matter, we have sports, drugs, other addictions, abuse, volunteering, exercising and lots of other ways to compensate for our lack of knowledge about important human subjects.
That won't change until some of us decide to change it. The longer we wait to change the system by teaching kids what they need to know as adults, the bigger the job will be.
It could all change in a flash if school curriculums were changed. That's not hard because curriculums change almost every year to some extent.
Doing nothing is easier. Except the problems keep getting worse.
Maybe we should talk about this subject more.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers that provides material that all kids should know but that most never get at home or in school.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Lenny Bruce, comedian (1925-1966)
It's a good laugh line for a comedian. Just about everyone remembers that when they were eight years old nobody wanted to include them in adult affairs or conversations. And the adults in Lenny's audience likely did the same with their own kids.
I remember a man I overheard speaking to another man, when I was about 15 years old, saying "I don't bother trying to have conversations with anyone younger than 25 because they don't know enough to hold a decent conversation." It impressed me so much I decided to learn enough to be able to hold a good conversation by the age of 25.
I certainly didn't consider including my own children in conversations I had with my wife when they were that age. They weren't interested anyway.
I was wrong.
My kids were wrong, but maybe because of our practice of excluding our kids from adult conversations they just got used to how things were.
It's the sole purpose in life of a child to learn what it's like in the adult world they are enter within a few years. The young of every species has that same purpose.
If we, as parents and grandparents, don't include kids in our conversations, they miss out on opportunities to learn from us.
What we don't teach with intention, kids learn by our example. If our parents didn't talk about sex or even indicate that they had sex with each other, they likely didn't say much to us about the subject. We learn the hard way, probably the way our parents did. There's a pretty good chance that we and our parents both missed out on much of what we could have had and done if we and they had known more.
In turn, our kids miss out if we don't know what to teach them and how.
Kids most often follow the examples of their parents when they reach the age of majority and have to choose a political party to vote for. They have overheard discussions among their parents that led them to the conclusion that one party is better than the other(s). Most parents don't even indicate to their kids that voters have more than one choice. The young adults vote the way their parents would.
We're forced to learn too much the hard way. We make too many mistakes on stuff where there was no reason we shouldn't have known better, stuff that someone should have taught us.
Why should a child learn a foreign language and trigonometry in school if that child will never use it as an adult, but that child never receives proper instruction about how to make and keep friends, how to be a good spouse in a marriage or how to be a good parent?
We fail at friendships, marriages and parenting. We never get a chance to fail at speaking the foreign language or using trig in most cases, but that's just as well because we likely forgot most of it since we had no use for it.
Do the arithmetic. Which is more important, knowing how to make and keep friends, how to have a compatible marriage and how to be a good parent or how to speak a foreign language and do trigonometry?
That's not to put down learning languages or trig, only to state that we have other more important needs that our parents, our grandparents and our teachers seldom or never address.
We accept this because "That's the way it has always been done." It's clearly wrong, so does that mean that many generations of our ancestors were wrong? It's a sharp edged pill to swallow, but, yup, they were wrong.
When we chose to exclude ourselves from the natural courses of nature in our modern world, we didn't compensate for the important lessons that nature teaches to every other species on the planet. We miss some of the most important lessons in life. Parents don't know them so they can't teach what they don't know. Or they are reticent about teaching what they learned themselves by doing and making mistakes.
No matter, we have sports, drugs, other addictions, abuse, volunteering, exercising and lots of other ways to compensate for our lack of knowledge about important human subjects.
That won't change until some of us decide to change it. The longer we wait to change the system by teaching kids what they need to know as adults, the bigger the job will be.
It could all change in a flash if school curriculums were changed. That's not hard because curriculums change almost every year to some extent.
Doing nothing is easier. Except the problems keep getting worse.
Maybe we should talk about this subject more.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers that provides material that all kids should know but that most never get at home or in school.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Monday, February 26, 2007
The Road To Success Leads Through Failure
Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
One of the toughest lessons to learn, especially for those who live in the western world, is that our bodies were designed to work hard, to struggle, to overcome. This does not set well with people who were raised on the belief that the easy life was ahead, that leisure was the way of the future. We were designed to overcome, but it isn't necessary that we overcome difficulties that we could easily have avoided.
Ease and leisure were never the way of the future, except in the minds of those whose intention was to profit from designing and producing products to sell to us using the hook that our lives will be easier. Did dishwashers, computers or televisions make our lives better, considering all of the consequences that resulted from their use?
Technology gives us the opportunity to learn more, to grow, to expand who we are. But it comes at a cost. In some cases, the cost has been obesity, broken marriages, families with two working parents who still can't make ends meet and kids who play video games at home because their parents feel it's too dangerous for them to be alone on the streets. True, those are not immediate consequences, but downstream results of life changes that resulted from using these "essential" technologies.
Emerson's point is that it's all right to make mistakes, to experiment and fail, because life is about experimenting. That means that more learning comes from failure than from success. We can accept one change without buying into a series of life changes that sometimes result from it.
Success brings an end to growth for many people, whereas each failure gives an opportunity to rebuild ourselves better than ever before. Setbacks are opportunities for those who know how to rebuild themselves. These are not skills that are widely taught in schools.
What we must be cautious about is experimenting with things that could have tragic consequences. Usually that requires us to investigate the consequences that have resulted from other people doing something we anticipate doing ourselves. If they have caused too much grief, the risk must be assessed before launching into the new venture.
An example would be people who experiment with taking drugs. In most cases, people who begin taking illegal drugs have been encouraged to do so by others who want company (or sales). Often the first experiments are free offerings. Tobacco companies have done this outside of schoolyards--mostly recently in some African countries--giving free cigarettes to children as young as six years. Kids only a couple of years older than that have been offered free street drugs. Kids don't know the downside of taking street drugs.
These children and even adolescents and adults who try street drugs have usually not been advised about how using them has destroyed the lives and the futures of many people who used the same drugs before them. Very few people will experiment with a drug if they have met someone whose life and family have been destroyed by drug use.
Many people would say that "Common sense should prevail." It should. However, common sense is not innate to us at birth. All common sense (if there be any such thing) is taught commonly, to all people, usually in childhood. People don't use common sense if they have not been taught how to apply themselves to a decision about experimenting with something new.
At the rate we can see from newspapers and lists such as the Darwin Awards that people have not used common sense, we must conclude that it has not been taught to every child. Walk through supermarket aisles and you might believe that almost none of the people you see have been taught the common sense rules of sharing space with others.
Common sense is a series of life skills that should be included in the curriculum of every school district. Every one of those skills is more important and more useful than any given bit of learning in chemistry, mathematics or language. Every one is usable by every person who knows it.
Experiment with life, yes, but do so with some degree of caution and research so that tragedy is not a certainty for the future.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to make human needs a necessary part of learning for every child.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
One of the toughest lessons to learn, especially for those who live in the western world, is that our bodies were designed to work hard, to struggle, to overcome. This does not set well with people who were raised on the belief that the easy life was ahead, that leisure was the way of the future. We were designed to overcome, but it isn't necessary that we overcome difficulties that we could easily have avoided.
Ease and leisure were never the way of the future, except in the minds of those whose intention was to profit from designing and producing products to sell to us using the hook that our lives will be easier. Did dishwashers, computers or televisions make our lives better, considering all of the consequences that resulted from their use?
Technology gives us the opportunity to learn more, to grow, to expand who we are. But it comes at a cost. In some cases, the cost has been obesity, broken marriages, families with two working parents who still can't make ends meet and kids who play video games at home because their parents feel it's too dangerous for them to be alone on the streets. True, those are not immediate consequences, but downstream results of life changes that resulted from using these "essential" technologies.
Emerson's point is that it's all right to make mistakes, to experiment and fail, because life is about experimenting. That means that more learning comes from failure than from success. We can accept one change without buying into a series of life changes that sometimes result from it.
Success brings an end to growth for many people, whereas each failure gives an opportunity to rebuild ourselves better than ever before. Setbacks are opportunities for those who know how to rebuild themselves. These are not skills that are widely taught in schools.
What we must be cautious about is experimenting with things that could have tragic consequences. Usually that requires us to investigate the consequences that have resulted from other people doing something we anticipate doing ourselves. If they have caused too much grief, the risk must be assessed before launching into the new venture.
An example would be people who experiment with taking drugs. In most cases, people who begin taking illegal drugs have been encouraged to do so by others who want company (or sales). Often the first experiments are free offerings. Tobacco companies have done this outside of schoolyards--mostly recently in some African countries--giving free cigarettes to children as young as six years. Kids only a couple of years older than that have been offered free street drugs. Kids don't know the downside of taking street drugs.
These children and even adolescents and adults who try street drugs have usually not been advised about how using them has destroyed the lives and the futures of many people who used the same drugs before them. Very few people will experiment with a drug if they have met someone whose life and family have been destroyed by drug use.
Many people would say that "Common sense should prevail." It should. However, common sense is not innate to us at birth. All common sense (if there be any such thing) is taught commonly, to all people, usually in childhood. People don't use common sense if they have not been taught how to apply themselves to a decision about experimenting with something new.
At the rate we can see from newspapers and lists such as the Darwin Awards that people have not used common sense, we must conclude that it has not been taught to every child. Walk through supermarket aisles and you might believe that almost none of the people you see have been taught the common sense rules of sharing space with others.
Common sense is a series of life skills that should be included in the curriculum of every school district. Every one of those skills is more important and more useful than any given bit of learning in chemistry, mathematics or language. Every one is usable by every person who knows it.
Experiment with life, yes, but do so with some degree of caution and research so that tragedy is not a certainty for the future.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to make human needs a necessary part of learning for every child.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Saturday, February 03, 2007
We Need To Teach
"Everybody has talent, it's just a matter of moving around until you've discovered what it is."
- George Lucas, movie producer and animation innovator
Doesn't that make sense? Lucas, an inventor and producer of dreams in reality, learned that as an adult. In general, that is not a lesson that children are taught.
Innovation--just being different--is a risky business. Society mediates against those who are different. They don't have ladders to climb. They must create their own mountains, then scale the precipices themselves. When they reach the top, they need to market themselves so that others will know what they have accomplished.
Our society is designed to produce followers. Which suits business fine because they treasure employees who will follow the role model they have described. In a society whose work habits, clothing styles, cosmetic usage, hair styles and even morals and ethics are dictated by business, the economy revolves around followers.
Young people who move around to discover their strengths receive little support or encouragement in a broad sense. Business does not like movers, unless they are winners from another company that choose to move to their own business. Moving out is not encouraged, nor is moving up (again in a general sense).
Our education systems prescribe a set curriculum and schools test to ensure that students have attained comptence in the skills and memory of the knowledge to be tested. The objective, we are told, is to ensure that each child receives the same minimum level of skills and knowledge within the public school system.
This objective is worthy to an extent. Yet we still have many young people leaving school without knowing how to read or write at a functionally acceptable level. And we have persistant discipline problems and troublemakers in school who become owners of business empires or great artists by middle age.
In a time when moving around to find your strengths is difficult in most communities and the base of general knowledge grows much faster than it can possibly be taught in schools, we need different ways of doing things.
First we need to teach life skills so that students know how to cope with rapidly changing work and even personal environments. We need to teach children where and how to find the knowledge they require, rather than simply acquiring a little of it for particular classroom projects.
We need to teach social skills to every child so that the "equality of opportunity" to which we pay homage can become a reality where each adult knows how the systems of life work. Opportunities in life mean more than laws and competence with curriculum.
We need to teach emotional (psychological) skills so that each person understands the needs that we all have and knows how to manage their own. They will also know how to recognize problems in others and take steps to intervene to help where advisable.
We need to learn how to help each other and that asking for help is perfectly acceptable. We need to learn that it's in our community's best interests for everyone to be socially and emotionally stable so that we have no hesitation about helping others because we know that the whole community will benefit. And that helping others in need is socially correct.
We need to put into place values where everyone understands that they do not have to be self-sustaining islands of independence, but instead should be part of the community in which they live. A community improves where everyone contributes to it and this will not happen so long as everyone believes that they must look out for their own best interests because no one else will.
We need to learn trust and honesty before we buy our way into chaos and perpetual war. Trust and honesty will be learned if and when they are taught as values and norms of society.
If most people cannot move around freely to discover their strengths, as George Lucas did, then we must provide similar opportunities within school and home environments. This can happen, but only if we teach the necessary skills and knowledge to everyone.
Right now we have the skills and knowledge, but it's wrapped up in psychologists, psychiatrists and therapists who make their living by trying to patch up people who are emotionally and socially broken. The skills and knowledge are in the wrong hands. They need to be in the hands of teachers who can convey them to every child.
Let's stop forever trying to fix broken people. Let's give them what they need to prevent them from breaking in the first place.
The place to begin is within the education systems. Then it will move into homes.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to shine a light forward in an increasingly dark tunnel that is our future.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- George Lucas, movie producer and animation innovator
Doesn't that make sense? Lucas, an inventor and producer of dreams in reality, learned that as an adult. In general, that is not a lesson that children are taught.
Innovation--just being different--is a risky business. Society mediates against those who are different. They don't have ladders to climb. They must create their own mountains, then scale the precipices themselves. When they reach the top, they need to market themselves so that others will know what they have accomplished.
Our society is designed to produce followers. Which suits business fine because they treasure employees who will follow the role model they have described. In a society whose work habits, clothing styles, cosmetic usage, hair styles and even morals and ethics are dictated by business, the economy revolves around followers.
Young people who move around to discover their strengths receive little support or encouragement in a broad sense. Business does not like movers, unless they are winners from another company that choose to move to their own business. Moving out is not encouraged, nor is moving up (again in a general sense).
Our education systems prescribe a set curriculum and schools test to ensure that students have attained comptence in the skills and memory of the knowledge to be tested. The objective, we are told, is to ensure that each child receives the same minimum level of skills and knowledge within the public school system.
This objective is worthy to an extent. Yet we still have many young people leaving school without knowing how to read or write at a functionally acceptable level. And we have persistant discipline problems and troublemakers in school who become owners of business empires or great artists by middle age.
In a time when moving around to find your strengths is difficult in most communities and the base of general knowledge grows much faster than it can possibly be taught in schools, we need different ways of doing things.
First we need to teach life skills so that students know how to cope with rapidly changing work and even personal environments. We need to teach children where and how to find the knowledge they require, rather than simply acquiring a little of it for particular classroom projects.
We need to teach social skills to every child so that the "equality of opportunity" to which we pay homage can become a reality where each adult knows how the systems of life work. Opportunities in life mean more than laws and competence with curriculum.
We need to teach emotional (psychological) skills so that each person understands the needs that we all have and knows how to manage their own. They will also know how to recognize problems in others and take steps to intervene to help where advisable.
We need to learn how to help each other and that asking for help is perfectly acceptable. We need to learn that it's in our community's best interests for everyone to be socially and emotionally stable so that we have no hesitation about helping others because we know that the whole community will benefit. And that helping others in need is socially correct.
We need to put into place values where everyone understands that they do not have to be self-sustaining islands of independence, but instead should be part of the community in which they live. A community improves where everyone contributes to it and this will not happen so long as everyone believes that they must look out for their own best interests because no one else will.
We need to learn trust and honesty before we buy our way into chaos and perpetual war. Trust and honesty will be learned if and when they are taught as values and norms of society.
If most people cannot move around freely to discover their strengths, as George Lucas did, then we must provide similar opportunities within school and home environments. This can happen, but only if we teach the necessary skills and knowledge to everyone.
Right now we have the skills and knowledge, but it's wrapped up in psychologists, psychiatrists and therapists who make their living by trying to patch up people who are emotionally and socially broken. The skills and knowledge are in the wrong hands. They need to be in the hands of teachers who can convey them to every child.
Let's stop forever trying to fix broken people. Let's give them what they need to prevent them from breaking in the first place.
The place to begin is within the education systems. Then it will move into homes.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to shine a light forward in an increasingly dark tunnel that is our future.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
