Education is an all day event. August 17, 2007

I have wanted to write about something in depth as apposed to the usual crap I put out so here is my first post on education which is an area I find very interesting and screwed up.   What qualities and attributes would we as a nation, employer, parent, & student like to see in our young men and women entering adulthood?  Here are some things I would like to see.  As an employer I would like to see employees have a strong work ethic, a practiced ability to learn new information and skills especially how to use computers and unfamiliar software and an ingrained set of ethics and the ability to work well with others.  I think the focus is often too focused on SAT scores etc. when what we should be thinking about is the whole person.   In order to be a happy healthy productive member of society a person must be of sound mind body and spirit.  So when you talk about education you can’t just think in terms of what goes on at the elementary school down the block.  The school district, the parents and society at large should each do what they can to achieve that mind body and spirit we desire.  It is common to think that there should be no overlap on what these stake holders’ focus on and their area of responsibility.  That is probably where my thinking diverges most because I think if the school and the parent reinforce each other; their combined effort has much greater results.  Here is an example of what I mean.  If a six year old is caught in an obvious lie a parent may inform the child that lying is wrong and they get in more trouble if they lie.  Hearing that same advice from a teacher reinforces what the child hears at home.  Hearing it once from two different sources has much greater effect than hearing it twice from one source.  Children are often influenced more by teachers and piers than they are by their parents.  I know some people would say that is not the responsibility of teachers to teach morals and character like they would do a hundred years ago.  Don’t think in terms of responsibility, think in terms of opportunity.   A lot of business schools have discovered they needed to teach ethics and social responsibility because it turns out too many people in high places didn’t posses those traits.  Let’s move that thinking all the down to pre-K where it can be absorbed more readily.     Let’s take another example and think about nutrition.   Do our schools have an opportunity when it comes to our children’s nutrition?  Not only do they have an opportunity but they have often been part of the problem of our dramatically declining health.  When a kid has pepperoni pizza and a coke for lunch or Frito pie or a bag of chips and a candy bar most days, is it any surprise we have childhood diabetes for the first time in history?  The truth is that many school districts are in bed with the food industry conglomerates who pay the districts to have their vending machines in the schools or a mini Pizza Hut right on campus.  Saying that the kids won’t eat the healthy stuff is a cop out.  The food industry is coming after our kids to get the considerable dollars they spend on food.  Not only do they want that money your kid has in his pocket today, but they want to train the tastes of young people so they continue to eat they way in the future.  They go right around mom and market right to kids like McDonalds does and all they care about is the money.  Only a concerted effort by the government, the schools and parents will have any hope of turning things around.  Again, this is not just a school, parent, or society issue but something that can best be addressed from all angles.   You can’t just look at an obese child and say the parents are at fault when it is much more complex than that.     The one point I want to make in this post is that we should not draw circles around the home or the school yard when in reality the best time to teach and mold our kids is when they are awake.  We start with a general set of qualities and abilities we would like our kids to have and look for every opportunity to steer them in that direction.  That would mean parents and teachers working together as a team on a level never attempted. Up next, teach a man to fish and you get a fisherman, teach a man how to learn and you get the universe.