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Are We Failing To Prepare Children For Leadership In the US?
Vulcan195 writes "Would you let your three-year-old play with a real saw? You would if you were a parent in Switzerland. Suzanne Lucas (a U.S. mom residing in Switzerland) writes about the contrasts between the U.S. and Swiss ways of instilling wisdom. She writes: 'Every Friday, whether rain, shine, snow, or heat, my three-year-old goes into the forest for four hours with 10 other school children. In addition to playing with saws and files, they roast their own hot dogs over an open fire. If a child drops a hot dog, the teacher picks it up, brushes the dirt off, and hands it back.' She suggests that such kids grow up and lead the ones who were coddled (e.g. U.S. kids) during their early years."
Step 1: Have a Rich Family
Not sure what the other steps are...
Most people say there are two certainties in life. Death and taxes.
I'd like to add a third to the list: Mothers thinking their way of raising their kids is better than x, bragging about it and if allowed to will continue to write about it in a blog, on Facebook or in a magazine in excruciating (to the rest of us) detail.
Nothing new here, just a new fad 'that's better because...' and the reasoning is usually just thinly disguised as because "I'm doing it"
We don't want our young cattle to grow into leadership roles, are you nuts!? Here, we make a point to keep kids docile with a mix of fluoride and Prozac.
I'm sorry, this is just too much. Every week there's at least a couple of these what's-wrong-with-American-education stories. It's always that Americans are doing it wrong, somewhere else is doing it better.
It's entirely reasonable to survey the different approaches to teaching and try to select the best for your own kids/schools/country. But the underlying nationalistic streak in all these articles, and the bogus tone of imminent disaster, is just baiting. And you're going to provide a big fat forum for the libertarians and plutorepublicans to grind away at "why don't we totally defund public education, it's clearly not working". Someone will misquote ol' Thom Jefferson.
God, I would like to be able to differentiate this week from the one that came before. Why is this what Slashdot has become? How is this "news for nerds"? This looks much more like "bait for hot-headed middle-aged guys".
Well, what you Americans do looks very much like organized child abuse to the rest of the world. Not letting children make essential experiences results in stunted development, and there are not many worse things you can do to a child. Even if you think you are protecting them, what you really do is setting them up to fail more drastically later, when they are less resilient and learning is harder for them.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
No, they would just run and cry to their obese parents, who would in turn tattle to the principal, who would have the teacher brought up on sexual harassment charges for the suggestive way she brushed the dirt off that phallic foodstuff.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
As far as the "pussification of the American Male" that George Carlin warned about it is a resounding yes. I don't have kids, but I have friends and relatives that do. And boyo, can I tell you how different it is.
Go ahead and hang out on my lawn while I rant...
Yes, in junior high I WALKED to school, which was over a mile away.
Yes, we had fireworks "wars" with bottle rockets, firecrackers and roman candles every summer.
Yes, PE in junior and senior high school was brutal, competitive and compulsory. The coaches and upper classmen were pricks, thats just how it was.
Yes, my parents usually had no idea where we were after school, or especially in the summer. Back then, parents weren't fixated/paranoid on children like they are now.
Yes, we played dodgeball in school and it was fierce.
Yes, there was hazing, bullies, fights, etc; same shit as now, only there wasn't a "national debate" about it.
Leadership however is a different animal.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Is that the Boy Scouts you are referring to?
Are you kidding? They are a pale shallow immitation of what they were 30 years ago. If anything they are a great example of what the original article was talking about.
The Scouts have similar failings as the public schools you're whining about.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I don't think its really an administrative decision to protect children and provide only safe choices that prevent an education like this. Its the need to protect the schools, the businesses and any other organizations involved from lawsuits. Here in the U.S., the insurance premiums necessary for any group that would allow a 3 yr old to even approach - let alone use - a functional cutting blade bigger than "safety scissors" would be astronomical.
Its like the need for all that squishy rubber surface on playgrounds these days. It isn't there to keep kids from breaking limbs falling off equipment because breaking limbs is a bad thing. Its to minimize exposure to litigation if they do.
What?
I remember playing with some twist drill bits as a very young child. I was poking them into holes my father had already drilled; all good fun. When he offered me the cordless drill, complete with keyless chuck, all my birthdays came at once.
Even my own daughter has proper toys to play with. The medical certificated stethoscope we bought her was actually cheaper on Ebay than the toy version in Toys-R-Us. The magnifying glass she treasures will be awesome when she discovers the sun and it's fire-starting magic. muhahaha.
Children: They'll only cut their fingers off once.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
End of discussion.
why?
Leadership is a 20th century concept. Raise your kids to be engaged, informed, and independent so they can participate effectively in decentralized groups.
I was thinking about "depicted as" and now I wish I had phrased that differently. Yes, Boy Scouts is officially opposed to participation by GLBT people. I had not meant to imply otherwise.
I cannot think of a large scale secular organization that parallels the function of Boy Scouts that is more inclusive in this respect.
No, they would just run and cry to their obese parents,
Running means exercise, which is healthy. US wins another round. Your move, Switzerland.
'Run' in the figurative sense.
From what I've seen of kids these days, any actual running is out, as they would have to put down their electronic devices for more than 2 seconds.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
No, they would just run and cry to their obese parents, who would in turn tattle to the principal, who would have the teacher brought up on sexual harassment charges for the suggestive way she brushed the dirt off that phallic foodstuff.
And yet, it is truly disgusting that so many turn a blind (or ignorant) eye as to the real cause of this exact situation. If we wouldn't allow such nonsense into a courtroom in the first place, then we wouldn't have the joke of a litigation system we have today.
I think it's more the idea that they can perform tasks and solve problems on their own. Teach him to cook a hot dog on his own, and when later in life he encounters uncooked pork chops, he'll think "I bet I can cook this" as opposed to crying because the food did not come pre-cooked and sealed up in a wrapper with a clown on it.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Except that the point wasn't about serious instant inury - breaking your leg when falling from a pyramid, etc.
It was about brain injuries from repeated concussions (and sure cheerleading has head injuries, but it doesn't have them at the frequency of football).
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Realistically its a side effect of the work culture and the family moving from stay at home mom to dual income. Latchkey kids became common and parents slowly realized that their jobs didn't allow them to pay the same level of attention to their kids that their parents paid to them. They were ashamed and felt a need to prove that they do care about their kids, even if they don't have time to spend with them. That leads to overprotectiveness as a proof method and the precious little snowflake situation. Add that kid success is also used as a societal status claim for the parents, that our politicians have figured out that fear is a vote getter and so push the danger of crime, that we have an overabundance of lawyers and that we have a serious dislike of someone being treated better if they haven't been seen to earn/deserve it and this is the result you naturally get.
Doesn't every generation talk about how the next generation has it so much easier than the last? Does this kind of talk really get us anywhere? Feel free to do an actual scientific study, rather than just saying "such kids grow up and lead the ones who were coddled (e.g. US kids) during their early years."
There is way too much speculation in the world today. Back in my day, we did experiments and only told the truth! Damn kids, get off my lawn!
North American culture is more "protective" of personal comfort and hygiene than most European countries.
You're missing the point a bit, its not a problem with "personal comfort and hygene", nor litigation, its a problem with personal responsibility. The culture is obsessed with finding someone to pin the blame on, rather than instilling any rational sense of personal resposibility for anything. ANYTHING. Nevermind personal responsibility for having caused harm or financial loss. American children are being shown how bad it is for them to raise their hands or ask for ANYTHING, except food. Such people don't make great leaders.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
It would, in fact, make a decent dystopian story. We use human judges because sometimes we have to realize that the facts of the case sit very well with the law and we should clearly execute these fuckers; but the spirit of the case is ridiculous, the law is being twisted cautiously, and new precedent needs setting. An absolute system would condemn everyone in this country to jail time.
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Scouts and regular education have become a lot more alike over the last several decades. In school kids go to "environment camps" and there's much more hands on education (e.g. designing and building bridges to learn about engineering)
Scouts have made rank advancement (something which didn't exist in Baden-Powell's method) ever more elaborate and challenging, and focused more on citizenship and explicit moral lessons. The original Eagle Scout requirements were twenty-one merit badges. Later requirements focused on woodcraft and personal self-sufficiency. Currently six of the twelve required merit badges for Eagle rank are focused on social adjustment: Citizenship in the Community, Citizenship in the Nation, Citizenship in the World, Communication, Personal Management, and Family Life. Since the 1970s scouts have to pass both a one on one review of personal morality with an adult leader and a community board of review,
So what happened? Well, it turns out a youth program like scouting fits well with the Mormon Church's missionary training. That's true of other churches, but the Mormons took to scouting in an organized way. Consequently scouting in the USA has evolved to meet the needs of it's largest and most organized bloc, and in some cases even serving the church's ideological ends (e.g. rejecting the Unitarian religious emblem badge on doctrinal grounds and barring Wiccans from membership entirely).
So in effect Scouting in the USA is a program geared toward developing leaders consistent with Mormon views of leadership. Non-Mormon sponsoring organizations and troops just live with this, quietly ignoring bans on homosexuals, agnostics, and pagans, and sucking up Mormon oriented advancement requirements. This has spawned a "Traditional Scouting" movement, which is much more focused on scoutcraft and self-sufficiency and less on indoctrination.
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The question is, by teaching kids in essence Camping/Survival Skills, are we really teaching them leadership?
Yes the Boy Scouts teaches Leadership skills, and the Boy Scouts teaches Camping/Survival Skills, and some of them a joined together... However There is a lot of leadership training outside camping skills, Putting children in positions of authority, being able to give commands and take the consequences of such commands, are important leadership skills... However Camping and Survival Skills, don't really make you a good leader. It just means you can fend for yourself better (This is a good trait, however it doesn't make you a leader, it may just make him a more effective servant.
Good leaders don't need to be tough, they need to be smart, calculating, thoughtful, and ethical.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
On the upside, people in Switzerland go to school or work if they have a cold [...].
On the upside? When you are sick, stay home. Don't spread your very communicable disease to others. That's as much a problem in the US, btw. Drives me nuts every time I see someone coughing their lungs out at work....
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
There is a protectionist culture in the northeast and far west, but no such shared culture in the Deep South or midwest,
Who's homogenizing now?
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
It's the "fear" part, not the "ration" part. He was indicating that, rather than being paranoid and frightened, they had a policy in place based on simplistic interpretation of their moralistic views. They can be homophobic, hysterical, or militant; but they can also simply be following stricture.
You'll find the same in churches, really: some ministers are insane and flame and condemn homosexuals; others actually preach that it goes against their holy texts, and that such behavior shouldn't be engaged in, but offer their moral support to those that bring such issues forward to them (i.e. they insist it's 'wrong', but also insist that having those tendencies don't make you a bad person--they tend to press that homosexuals should remain chaste, though).
Belief systems are strange. They make more obvious sense when you want to burn the evil people at the stake; they make much less sense when you actually try to enforce your beliefs without inflicting harm--could you imagine employers barring all homosexuals like the US Military did? "Just policy" becomes "Removing your ability to live," and to some people the decision would become extremely complex: the 'sin' or 'amoral fault' or whatnot of homosexuality stands in opposition to the sin of condemning a man whose sins are between him and God (somewhere in there didn't we say you're not supposed to pass judgment?). It's easy to abstract away the consequences of your actions, much harder to hold firmly to your beliefs of what behavior shouldn't be supported while not violating other beliefs of not harming other people.
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Public education has been a big target since the early part of the 1920s when Progressive reformers realized it was the perfect tool for turning dirty immigrants into model citizens. Of course, prior to that it was something to occupy kids in the winter when there was little farm work to do until they were old enough to work full time, at about the 9th grade.
Catholics never trusted it -- they were often the dirty immigrants targeted -- which is why there is such a huge Catholic school system in the US, which is becoming kind of the discount private school system in many areas as public schools disintegrate and desperate parishes de-emphasize religious education and chase fallen/non-Catholic money to keep their schools and parishes from becoming ghost towns.
Since the 1920s, though, the public education system has been repeatedly targeted by political activists. Option 1 was always get your propaganda to be the curriculum -- hence the emphasis on anti-communism and values in the 1950s and early sixties.
In the mid-late 1960s, the emphasis changed to the war on poverty and schools became both educational institutions and social welfare delivery systems (free lunches, immunization clinics, etc). In the 1970s it was desegregation as the mission --- we were going to fix race by putting the kids together.
In the early 70s, though, there were a glut of new teachers thanks to the baby boom and draft deferments for college students studying education. This basically was the liberal/academic colonization of education where you get all kinds of weird curriculum and a relentless focus on the "education gap", which I find to be like the emperor's new clothes -- a failure to realize that minority kids do badly in school not because we aren't teaching them right, but because they come from a failed social milieu. But accepting that means being racist and giving up your cultural relativism.
All you're making a case for is that the laws are too numerous and wide-reaching, making everyone a criminal, and it's only by the grace of our "benevolent" prosecutors and judges that they only go after those who trigger their ire or win them reelection via PR. I.e. it's not about justice.
The GP makes a point that spreading minor disease builds up a social tolerance of the minor disease. Over time, your body develops natural defenses to things you're constantly exposed to. You pass along that defense to your children.
And for people suffering from constant headaches... the most common cause of headaches is dehydration. Drink water, get better. Relying on advil or aspirin to numb the pain is counter-productive to the unhealthy eating habit of not getting enough fluids.
Thousands of studies have confirmed what we've known for decades: your immune system cannot learn to deal with any microbes unless it is exposed to it.
In fact your own damn example proves the point: vaccines. Deliberate infection with a weakened form of a virus to assist the body in developing an immune response before it may have to face the full-blown version.
For bacterial infections this is doubly true. More-over a few years ago a study (there was a slashdot article about it) found that Staph actually fights off other infections when it's externally on the skin (it's the most common bacteria in 'dirt') merely getting dirty reduces your risk of other infections (staph INTERNALLY on the other hand is a dangerous infection and often requires treatment - on the other hand, if you have had a few small staph infections you greatly reduce the future intensity of such infections since your body has developed an immune response to it).
HIV is the exception to the rule - the body actually DOES have an immune response to it, and the antibodies it develops fights it back just like any other virus. The problem with HIV is it attacks white-blood cells which are a crucial component of the immune system - so even as your body is trying to fight it back it's ability to fight infections in general are worsened.
Technically there is no such thing as an "AIDS" infection you can be immune to - AIDS is a condition caused by numerous possible things. The most common by far being the HIV virus but severe drug abuse for example can also cause AIDS. AIDS is simply an acquired (e.g. not born-with) immune deficiency. When you have AIDS - it's some other infection that kills you because you have no immune system to fight it off.
If a bone-marrow transplant recipient (who has had his immune system killed off by radiation) gets in contact with any microbe he will develop full blown AIDS too.
So yes, eating a dirty hotdog, getting a little dirty etc. does make your immune system stronger. Using antibacterial soaps and that kind of crap makes it weaker - because you prevent your body from getting into contact with germs. Small contact, through the skin (a wonderful protective organ) is the bodies only way to develop an immune response early - the same one it will need if it gets a severe infection.
Of course you also develop an immune response during a severe infection but the extra time for this to happen could mean you die before it's done (in the case of the diseases we vaccinate against: this is practically guaranteed), and not having had small infections greatly increase the risk that a somewhat larger infection will turn into a severe one before the body can react and learn to recognize and fight back the microbe in question.
It's not so hard to understand is it? Your body is ONLY immune to two things: the diseases you gained a genetic immunity to from your parents (very, very, very few) and the microbes you have been in contact with.
In other words, if you don't get dirty, you get dead.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I'm not sure why there is such a fascination for Europeans to try to prove why they are better than Americans.
Because most of "us" (Europeans) grew up in a world which was dominated by the US and we did not really mind as we were thought by our fathers and grand-fathers you were benevolent (I am teaching my children something different ...)
Because most of "us" see (not necessarily watch) movies coming from the US which portrays the US as the land of the "Free" and "Brave" while we know it is not the case and just propaganda for the mindless masses.
Because most (but not all) of "us" see the state of the US economic capabilities (and in case you are wondering ... yes, US is in worse shape than the EU, even in this euro crisis)
Although it may sound weird and alien to you, but Europeans do care about what goes on in the world, just like you would (probably) care if your neighbor is doing something that either harms you, the community or himself. And it seems the neighbor thinks he is the best, brightest, richest, friendliest and best looking person around while in fact he is abusive, rude, dangerous, steals and destroys other peoples properties. The only way to let this guy know his behavior is unacceptable is by actually telling him. (supplying proof in some cases as he otherwise just pretends normal conversation is only an opinion)
Currently America is FAR, FAR AWAY from the utopia your founding fathers had set it out to be ... The current generation is eating up the goodwill and faith, that previous generations have built up, in a record pace and either the American population in general is being kept in the dark or they lack the mentality or intellect to see what is going on.
Your comment "Most Americans couldn't give a rat's ass" is spot on because most Americans believe they are still the biggest, best, etc, ... which clearly they are no longer (in a lot of areas).
Don't get me wrong. I do not have anything against Americans (otherwise I would have used it ... jk). But I find it a shame that a once great nation WITH good foundations (equality) has turned from its roots and only acts in its own interest screwing whomever is on or in in their way. Maybe the US once was able to get away with it, but this is becoming less and less the case.
I am not convinced there is a problem at all.
When there is only a single "warning light", you might indeed be right that there is no problem at all. But to me there are so many and Americans are constantly trying to convince us it is Christmas all year round
Only around 10 americans from 0-19 years die each year due to lightning strikes. My guess is that calling the kids inside during rain will in fact indirectly (more likely to avoid exercise in rain in the future etc.) result in many more fatalities than just leaving them out (of course avoiding reckless behaviour like climbing trees when lightnings are near).
But then again I live in a really rainy country and like rainy weather. And my kids really like to play outside when it rains. In fact they love it. And that is mainly because we as parents have shown them that it is fun to play in the rain.
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