It's half past ten on a Sunday night. Just turned the boiler temp down to 15 before heading to bed, and I am looking forward to not having to wake up early to work tomorrow morning. Having said that, I would look forward to waking up early tomorrow morning to go to work if I had to. Either way is good for me.
'The Secret Millionaire' tonight featured Hull and the problem with truancy and kids dropping out of school early - unmotivated, bored and uninspired. My respect for teachers everywhere who try their best to lead and show the way to kids at school. It's a tough job, made worse in recent years, it seems, with one hand tied behind their backs half the time. And I feel for those kids as well. Back when I was in school, we didn't have half the amount of distractions kids have now. And not just from video games, mobile phones, Nintendos, computers and video games. These days kids face the kind of peer pressure and 'social expectations' we never had to contend with. I was never in a very materialistic environment. These days if you don't have a computer at home or don't attend at least piano or ballet classes after school, you're practically a social pariah at school.
Again... it seems like we're frogs slowly boiling in hot water without even realising it... how the values that sociaty hold as 'important' are sliding quietly, surreptitiously into a whole different - and not necessarily positive - plateau. And before we know it, we find ourselves in a society where the social norm is for parents to schedule all 14 of their children's waking hours with one activity or another that they believe will assist in 'elevating' their children's lives, give them brighter futures. Makes me wonder how they decide what classes they ought to put their kids in to. Is it based on what the children seem to be interested in? Or what they say other kids are taking up outside school hours? Or worse, on what the parents think would be good for the kids regardless of whether or not the kids themselves show much enthusiasm in them, so long as their kids keep up with the Joneses' kids?
But do they really learn things that would give them what they really need? Do they pick up good values from those 14 wakeful hours of their lives? Do they learn respect for the elderly? Do they see the importance of a measure of compromise and tolerance? How not to envy what other kids have? How to be grateful for what they have themselves, no matter how meager it may seem?
We have no manuals on how to teach kids these things. And unfortunately, these are not things that one can learn from logic and cereberal genius alone. These they learn from their parents, first and foremost, and then from their peers, their teachers and other people around them. Children are the best at mimicking what they observe. Most of them are ever so good at picking up the subtlest behaviours in adults. So it pays to take care what you say and how you behave in front of kids.
'The Secret Millionaire' tonight featured Hull and the problem with truancy and kids dropping out of school early - unmotivated, bored and uninspired. My respect for teachers everywhere who try their best to lead and show the way to kids at school. It's a tough job, made worse in recent years, it seems, with one hand tied behind their backs half the time. And I feel for those kids as well. Back when I was in school, we didn't have half the amount of distractions kids have now. And not just from video games, mobile phones, Nintendos, computers and video games. These days kids face the kind of peer pressure and 'social expectations' we never had to contend with. I was never in a very materialistic environment. These days if you don't have a computer at home or don't attend at least piano or ballet classes after school, you're practically a social pariah at school.
Again... it seems like we're frogs slowly boiling in hot water without even realising it... how the values that sociaty hold as 'important' are sliding quietly, surreptitiously into a whole different - and not necessarily positive - plateau. And before we know it, we find ourselves in a society where the social norm is for parents to schedule all 14 of their children's waking hours with one activity or another that they believe will assist in 'elevating' their children's lives, give them brighter futures. Makes me wonder how they decide what classes they ought to put their kids in to. Is it based on what the children seem to be interested in? Or what they say other kids are taking up outside school hours? Or worse, on what the parents think would be good for the kids regardless of whether or not the kids themselves show much enthusiasm in them, so long as their kids keep up with the Joneses' kids?
But do they really learn things that would give them what they really need? Do they pick up good values from those 14 wakeful hours of their lives? Do they learn respect for the elderly? Do they see the importance of a measure of compromise and tolerance? How not to envy what other kids have? How to be grateful for what they have themselves, no matter how meager it may seem?
We have no manuals on how to teach kids these things. And unfortunately, these are not things that one can learn from logic and cereberal genius alone. These they learn from their parents, first and foremost, and then from their peers, their teachers and other people around them. Children are the best at mimicking what they observe. Most of them are ever so good at picking up the subtlest behaviours in adults. So it pays to take care what you say and how you behave in front of kids.
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