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Part 49: Child Welfare:
Distractions:
May 5, 2003:
It is time to start laying out the specifics of my philosophy
and plan for K-12 education. One of the first things I must look
honestly at are the current distractions to education. Right now
k–12 education is tightly integrated with all kinds of influences
which distract from rather than contribute to education. Some
of these are real sacred cows and the vested interests will go
ballistic at the very notion of removing them.
Nevertheless, we must get all non-educational things out of the schools. Now, this does not mean removing all social activities. Most of these, unless they are elitist in nature, have educational value which outweighs their distracting influence if any. Among these are after hours dances, concerts, and plays which offer a safe environment for social adaptations.
The idea is not to ruin healthy activities, but to get the distractions to education out of the educational environment. For example, athletics and gymnastics have a place in education as does dance. Organized sports do not. Organized sports are the exclusive domain of people with unusual physical attributes and are elitist by nature. These activities create an elitist social cast system in the schools. It may be good for a few kids, but it is emotionally destructive for most of the kids. Most kids will not be "in". Elitism and social casts have no place in education.
This "in" mentality is not limited to organized athletics. Cliques are a part of culture. We will always have them, but we must guard against them in the educational environment. There is a strong tendency in humans to like some people and exclude others. Too often we find teachers doing this. Call their selected ones, proteges, teacher's pets, or suck ups, it does not matter. A teacher supported clique, to the extent that it excludes some students, is a distracting and destructive influence in education. It cannot be allowed.
Another distracting and destructive influence is the presence of commercial interests in the schools. A big part of my plan is to get commerce out of the schools. These intrusion are totally dishonest and sell out our kids. I am talking about things like the readily available sugar and fat dispensing machines. I have found these things in every school I have entered lately. I think everyone knows that the purpose of these is not to sell a few products in the schools. Their real purpose is the brand-bonding of children. The administrators of these schools are selling out our kids to commercial interests for pitifully small sums of money. It is unethical and unconscionable.
Brand-bonding of children ranks with child labor as an despicable practice of America's corporate community. It is purely evil. One of the biggest targets of this activity are the young talented athletes of some schools. Here is where the athletic equipment manufacturers come to buy off coaches. There are two things potentially wrong here. First professional coaching has no place in our schools in any case. Professional coaches belong in professional sports. An athletic degree is in no way a qualification for a K-12 educator. It usually indicates a primitive mentality.
Second, even where the coaches are not professional, the kids are still being marketed like products. Coaches who take payoffs and sell their kids out to commercial interests are criminals and should be so treated. They should never be allowed near kids. They are not ethically different from pedophiles. They gain a kid's confidence then trade on that to the kid's eventual detriment. It is child abuse in the extreme.
I don't think I have been strong enough about this brand-bonding of our kids. It is a sickness which is beginning to permeate our entire culture. We must stop this, be it the beer companies targeting teenage children or athletic supply companies buying off grade school coaches. We must also stop the sugar and fat peddlers from buying their way into our schools.
I will repeat a theme. If we cannot rescue our kids, nothing else we do will matter. We must rescue them from all abuse, regardless of the source, regardless of the immediate cost. Organized sports in schools, from the standpoint of the non-elite, is abuse. Commercial intrusions for profit into the educational environment is child abuse on a grand scale. It must be stopped. The perpetrators must be barred and punished if they persist.
Now let's fix our focus on what is wrong and what is not wrong in education. The obese kid who is suing McDonald's is not part of my argument here. That stupidity just clouds the issue. We cannot reasonably make the schools responsible for obese kids. What about the parents? What about the responsibility of the home? For sure, Madison Avenue must bear a huge part of the responsibility for turning us away from discipline and toward hedonism.
Obesity is just one of the problems which has resulted from that. We have the grossly obese children of the indulgent obese parents. It has become a national health problem. That problem is all about discipline and discipline starts in the home not the schools. The schools cannot be made responsible for instilling a sense of personal discipline in the kids. They can help foster the sense, but they cannot create it. The parents must do that.
The fast food industry is not culpable for the bad behavior of a fat kid. His parents are. Fat and sugar laden fast foods in the school cafeteria are part of my argument. In this case, the fast food peddlers and the school administration are equally culpable. They are responsible for their own bad behavior. In both cases the home shares a great part of the responsibility, but the focus of this is about the effect on education. Anything which affects a kids health is a distraction from his education. Where we can control that we should.
Finally I want to look at the ongoing attempts by primitive
religious groups to thrust their version of religion into the
educational process. We should have no doubt that the children
need to learn and adhere to a moral code of behavior. However,
I insist that behavior cannot be tied to primitive religious philosophies.
It must be based in facts and reason. It must be about our relationships
and our responsibilities to other beings, not about some mythical
thunder and lightning God. Teaching standards of sound social
behavior is a legitimate function of education. The selective
teaching of mythology as a form of truth is not. It is a distraction
from education.
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