A friend of ours told his daughter who was about to enter college that he would pay her tuition regardless of any major she chooses except psychology and education which he did not believe to be serious disciplines. This friend is a college professor, by the way. Naturally, he is a foreigner - British, to be exact. For an American to not consider education to be a reasonable field of study would have been blasphemous, no doubt.Well, today, as I was sitting at a doctor's waiting room with my son, we were watching CNN Headline News where they reported an amazing latest discovery by the very education experts our friend denies the right to exist: that spanking is good for toddlers. Wow, wow, wow! What will American educational science discover next? That literacy is a useful skill to have for the majority of the population? That allowing bad students to fail a grade is actually good for them? What is this world coming to??!! We must be living in an age of the American educational science Renaissance!
Few people probably did more harm to this nation than education "experts" who instilled into generations of parents a notion that one has to foster a child's self esteem above everything else. Self esteem not based on any achievements, totally undeserved and unconditional. That rather than spanking a misbehaving child and teaching him that a certain behavior will not be tolerated (while quickly letting your own steam out), you need to engage in endless discussions with a 2-year-old about why you are asking him to stop, then sending him to his room, or taking away his favorite toy, only to discover years later that you have created a monster who is intolerant of any criticism, demands respect for anything he does, and does not respect anybody else in return.
Movies like "Avatar" and "discoveries" that spanking a toddler can do him good fill me with hope that maybe the nation is starting to heal from all the self-inflicted wounds of self-aggrandisement, ignorance and arrogance.
One last question: how much money did the "experts" get paid to conduct this breakthrough study?
And the cycle returns to how difficult it is to teach a student if you cannot punish them, if their parents cannot or do not care to punish them. So the teachers quit at a rapid rate. The students are abandoned to believing they are better than their teachers because they cannot be told they are wrong and they grow into an ignorant American society that breeds itself.
ReplyDeleteWe can only hope that the next fad will be that making choices out of fear rather than deliberation may be injurious in the long run.