Presenting:

"Daddy, why does my head disappear so easily into the television set? Daddy?"

So, my recent thoughts have been spent on the importance of a stable, supportive home-front on educational outcome, but also on the question of how do those few schools with poor students and unmotivated parents do it?

To begin answering those questions, I think it’s important to understand a student’s world according to the greatest influences. I think of students as existing in two spheres, each having the ability to shape their development for better or for worse. Education can make people at any age flower into well adjusted, fully functioning individuals, but if a students shows up at the school door unprepared to take advantage of this opportunity, there is a limit to what the establishment can do to reach them. How receptive they are depends on the other, second sphere of everything else: family, peers, television, computers and other media, much of which today I believe we should consider a cultural wasteland.

My experience has convinced me that society would be a different and better place on the whole if parents showed more philanthropy to the development their children’s character rather than spoil them materially, set few limits, and consider them their “friends”. Most of the behavioral problems in the classroom –in my opinion the largest factor obstructing academic progress- would largely disappear if students were taught how to exibit self-control and respect for authority, starting in the home.

But the $20,ooo question is and shall remain: How do you effect change within communities where the generational ethos is selfishness and irresponsibility?

I think the first answer to that tough question is: by sheer necessity. People should be protected from harming themselves and others, namely their children, but they should also be found accountable for their behavior. Decisions are meaningless if there aren’t consequences, and if you shelter an individual from this truth, they will not learn it and ardently resist learning it later in life. I know this from personal experience –studying my own personal behavior- as well as from watching that of others very closely.

In a related way, too, a reevaluation of what is commonly considered acceptable and unacceptable behavior and norms (witness the ongoing culture wars) is necessary. But that isn’t a conversation this country (Europe is gone) is easily willing to assume since so much of what is considered virtuous or wicked is regulated to the authority of opinion and therefore is usually off the table for public debate.

So, I ask again with a slight modification, and with the understanding that I do so as a lonely voice in the wilderness: How do you effect change within communities where the generational ethos is selfishness and irresponsibility, knowing it is politically incorrect to attribute causation to cultural factors that largely lay outside public education?