My friends have asked me to keep things simple in my posts so I will be making a concerted effort to do just that. This should be fairly easy because the causes of our national ills are really very simple indeed. However, the emotional reactions that will accompany the acknowledgment of these very simple causes will be profound and so readers will have to take a few moments to absorb them. I refer you now to the title of this blog–The Longest Journey Begins… The remainder of this old saying is… with but a single step. I will try to limit the ideas presented in each post to just one or at most, two, single connected steps.
Step one–the social and political dysfunction in America is being caused by our “educational” system which can be very accurately summed up under the more appropriate title of “bad parenting.” Or perhaps “no parenting” will be more accurate still. That may look like quite a stretch to some of you, but think about it a minute. There really isn’t any such animal as “Society.” There are only individual people, you and I, and if we are not raising emotionally healthy individuals the country (society) is not healthy. Our current educational practices are not producing healthy individuals. (I develop this theme more fully in an earlier post–Great Expectations! http://wp.me/p1BaiG-N ) The cause for this is simple.
Human children need to spend the largest bulk of their time at home, under the direct supervision of their parents, especially during infancy and early adolescence. They will absorb the necessary basic functions of society in this setting only. Only here will they feel safe from social pressures they are not mature enough to deal with, only from mother or father will they absorb the feeling that they are being nurtured because they are loved as individuals and that their individual needs are being focused on. Only from their parents will adolescent children receive the sense of familial supervision and personal restraint they will need to develop an ethic of sexual responsibility in their approaching adulthood. The time constraints imposed by our public school system do not allow for this.
It is not possible to overstate the importance of direct parental supervision in the process of child rearing. It is equally not possible to miss seeing the results of ignoring this premise in today’s society. Calculate the amount of time an american child spends at school every day and add in an average 8 hours for sleeping. How much time is left? How much of this time is spent with mom or dad or both?
It is a very sad truth obvious in the entire Western world that most parents are using the howling kant about “EDUCATION” being so important as an excuse for not raising their own children. Children need to be educated they rant. We not only have kindergarten for five-year old infants but now we are having more and more “pre-k programs” to “give our children a more competitive edge in the educational system.” How many of you have heard this particular obscenity? Children do not need to feel competitive, that is an attribute of only certain areas of adult endeavor. In fact, most adults do not need to feel competitive. Children need to be nurtured by their parents. They need to feel loved and protected.They need to have their physical requirements met. Education is NOT a primary need of infancy. It will not give children a “good start” in life.
Archeologists have uncovered what appears to be evidence of whole societies that sacrificed their infant children to the god Moloch by burning them to death at his altars. Evidently it was thought that the society as a whole would be preserved in a prosperous state by this practice. Education has become the new “Moloch” of our world.
At this point, I am happy to state that there is an increasing trend among parents today to home school their own children. An excellent idea and a step in the right direction.
To sum up this post, of course our children will want an education, no one will deny that, it is the system we have created that needs to be revamped. In the first place, we need to stop braying about “THE IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION” as if it were in itself a be all—end all, it is not. Secondly, small, privately run schools within walking distance, and more of them, should replace the large public school systems currently ruining our future citizens and our pocketbooks. There would be no lack of teachers to run them. School hours should be limited to 3 hours a day. The attention span of most children runs about 10 to 12 minutes, anything over that is a waste of time so 3 hours a day is more than enough time to cover all the basic subjects, plus a break time. Lunch could wait till they got home so no kitchen facilities, personnel, or food budgets would be necessary. Now, take a moment to realize what an educational budget would amount to for a small school building (about the size of the average home)that did not require money for buses, their maintenance, gas, driver salaries, and insurance. Compare what it cost to replace your own roof with that of replacing the roof on your local grammar or high school. Are you getting the picture now? Smaller is in every way better here.
Next, delete the multimillion dollar budgets for school sports programs, equipment, busing to and from games, insurance, maintenance, coaches salaries. building and upkeep for gymnasiums and playing fields.
I know, I know, but education is about reading, writing, and arithmetic, science and literature and cultural studies of other countries. Football, basketball, soccer, swimming, etc., etc., are not education, they are games, and as such have no place in education or the budgeting necessary for it. We can and should be deleting this expense from our educational realities. Left to themselves, children make up their own games, always have, always will. Our towns and cities can no longer afford to be financing the farm teams of the NBA, the NFL, etc., etc.. Let these huge sports franchises donate to the locals out of their multibillion dollar budgets if they want players. If they can afford to pay multiple millions per season to just one of their “stars” they can afford to.
In my next post I will develop this theme in another few simple steps–The basic functions of society.
The Longest Journey Begins... 