Don't kids have to rebel in order to separate from their parents?
No. They eventually have to separate, but they don't have to rebel. In other words, separation is normal, yes. Individuation is a normal human developmental stage. You have to become a separate, individual person. But it doesn't mean you must reject and be hostile to the values of adults. As a matter of fact, in traditional societies, children become adults by being initiated into the adult group by elders, like the Jewish Bar Mitzvah ceremony, or the initiation rituals of tribal cultures around the world. But American kids are initiated by other kids. And so it is that you have the gang phenomenon, which is actually a misplaced initiation and orientation ritual, where kids rebel against adult values. It happens not because they're bad kids, but because they've become disconnected from adults.
Education in the United States -- how does it fit in?
We first have to ask, how do children learn? Learning is an attachment dynamic, among other things. You learn when you want to be like somebody. So you copy them, so you learn from them. You learn also when you're curious. And you learn when you're willing to try something, and if it doesn't work, you try something else.
However, in caring about something and in being curious about something and in recognizing that something doesn't work, you have to have a certain degree of emotional security. You have to be able to be open and vulnerable. The problem is, children who become completely peer-oriented -- because the peer world is so dangerous and so fraught with bullying and ostracization and dissing and exclusion and negative talk -- have a hard time protecting themselves from all that negativity in the peer world. The harsh reality is that children are not, and cannot be, committed to each others' unconditional loving acceptance. Far from it. Even adults have a hard time providing that. Children simply can't do it. Ever. So those children who rely totally on their peers, and not their parents, become very insecure. And emotionally, to protect themselves, they shut down. They then become hardened, so that they can become "cool.' Nothing matters. Cool is the ethic. You see that demonstrated amply in rock videos. It's all about being cool. It's all about aggression and cool and no real emotion. Detached. Now, when that happens, curiosity largely disappears. Why? Because curiosity is inherently vulnerable, because when you care about something and you're admitting that you don't know, you are vulnerable. When you're "cool,' you won't try anything, because if you fail, your vulnerability is exposed. And that violates the ethic of "cool.' So, you're not willing to allow the trial and error that is essential to real learning and real education.
As long as kids were attaching to adults, they were looking to the adults to model themselves on, to learn from, and to get their cues from. Now, in America, kids are still learning from the people they're attached to, but now it's other kids they're primarily attached to, not their parents. So now you have whole generations of kids that are looking to other kids to be their main cue-givers. Therefore teachers have an almost impossible problem on their hands. And unfortunately, in North America, education is seen almost exclusively as a question of academic pedagogy; hence these terrible standardized tests. And the teachers who work with the most difficult kids are the ones who are most often penalized. For if they don't have good student test scores to show school administrators, they're seen as bad teachers, and then they could be fired. So, to avoid being seen as "bad teachers," they are inclined to kick out any difficult kids, so as to avoid that label and the firing that might then follow.
The difficult kids get kicked out, and teachers are afraid to teach in neighborhoods where, because of troubled family relationships, the kids are having difficulties. The kids are peer-oriented, and are not looking to the teachers. And this is seen as a reflection on the teachers, which it definitely is not. So, actually, teachers are regularly being slandered and scapegoated these days, for something that is not their fault. And the reason that teachers are being slandered and scapegoated is because of the failure of American society to produce the right environment for proper childhood development!
What this problem reflects is the loss of the community and the neighborhood. So, we have to somehow recreate those communities and those neighborhoods. The schools have to become not just places of pedagogy, but places of emotional connection. Teachers must be in the emotional connection game before they attempt to be in the pedagogy game.
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