How would you propose the government should have tackled this problem?
I do think that a reasonable sense of responsability and duty should be instilled into children, and that they should learn that not everything in life will be an easy, colorful, happy game designed to entertain them. But I see this as a much wider and deeper problem. It's in the media, who want people to be consumers from the cradle to the grave; it's at home, where parents sometime cannot and sometimes will not bother; it's everywhere.
School can only do so much. The core values have to be not only taught but lived, at home. If the parents and the closer circle of the child provide no valid model of self-reliance, self-respect, respect for others, work etc., it will be hard for schools or the government to do anything about.
Quite. But if there is one thing I have learned in life, it is that you do not solve a problem by taking in all the various things that are wrong with it and obsessing about how impossible they all are to solve at once. One problem I had to deal with recently was to have to clean a whole house that has been allowed to go to rot. The amount of different jobs that needed doing was scary, and each depended on the others. But if you start by being scared of the whole, and just looking around you helplessly, you will never get anything done. You have to start from one point - say, the kitchen. And what is more, you will find that as you are cleaning, for a while the mess will grow worse, not better. As you go behind the furniture to get rid of the caked filth and spray for mice and cockroaches, the dirt will go back on the areas you have already worked in. But in the long run, you are cleaning the whole area
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I agree that the government should focus on this issues and radically change its policies in education and schools (I'm talking about Spain now, but I don't think the situation is all that different), and above all, stop catering to the media and "general opinion". Schools should stop being afraid of parents and lawyers and be given the proper tools to implement good learning atmosphere for kids
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We have been there before. Or rather, our fathers have. When, one after the other, Prussia, France, Britain, Italy and the USA imposed universal elementary education on their population, they started from human material at least as unpromising as today's. One Frenchman from the period described his own country as "a nation of barbarians civilized by conscription" - and conscription, which was the end of the educational cycle for most male citizens, was no bed of roses. The State, having a clear idea in mind of the citizen it wanted and needed to produce, used all its powers to produce it. The problem today begins with the State having no confidence in its own values, not enough to face down refractary and anti-social citizens. Of course, this does not apply only to schools.
Above all, you have to remember what I was writing. My point was not that the work to be done is difficult or impossible; the point is that the Tory Blur has wasted an incredible amount of effort - mostly other people's effort - essentially in an escapistic direction, positively refusing to notice, let alone deal with, the one gigantically serious issue that underlay all others. When I think of all the extra work that has been placed on the shoulders of teachers, let alone the way they have been made to feel at fault, my blood boils. And when I think that the final result of this process, which I had seen at work years ago (and I have the essays to prove it), is children of fifteen stabbing each other to death because the only social reality they know is their street gang, and that these things were not happening even five years ago, that they are the end result of ten years of wasted effort, I could strangle the man.
I do think that a reasonable sense of responsability and duty should be instilled into children, and that they should learn that not everything in life will be an easy, colorful, happy game designed to entertain them. But I see this as a much wider and deeper problem. It's in the media, who want people to be consumers from the cradle to the grave; it's at home, where parents sometime cannot and sometimes will not bother; it's everywhere.
School can only do so much. The core values have to be not only taught but lived, at home. If the parents and the closer circle of the child provide no valid model of self-reliance, self-respect, respect for others, work etc., it will be hard for schools or the government to do anything about.
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