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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."
No American child would be caught dead allowing a Swiss teacher to wipe dirt off their hard-earned American Hot Dogs. Freedom Dogs 4eva!
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
These Forest-Kindergartens are all over Europe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_kindergarten
Where I work, I can see them going by foot up a mountain to reach the forest. I can imagine their immune-system must beat those of TV-watching coach-potatoes.
In other news I read that 5 year olds, who did not go to such Kindergartens had to be rescued on a school excursion.
They weren't able to continue because they had never actually _walked_ a mile in their life, only from the couch to the car and back.
I get where you're coming from, but the simple fact of the matter is that I have never worked for a Swiss boss. Ever. I know nobody who has. If they are such great leaders of (US) men, where are they?
Hum, here, in Switzerland... *waving*
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"
Gentlemen, it pains me to tell you this but, we have a lumberjack gap.
crazy dynamite monkey
They teach crafts, hard work and leadership. The problem is Boy Scouts has become stigmatized, lampooned, and in recent years depicted as homophobic. Girl Scouts spends too much time focused on selling cookies.
Public schools wouldn't put a saw or hammer in a child's hand. It would take five minutes for an upset parent or a lawyer to show up. You can thank our overly litigious society for closing doors on an idea like this. And as a parent, I can tell you I'd need a high level of trust in the instructor before I let them take my kids alone into the woods.
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.
No.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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
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?
Are the trees in Texas really that dangerous? Cant you just tranquilise them?
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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.
I grew up in a different time, a time when children of all ages had expectation of behavior and responsibility handed to them at a very early age, and since I've become an adult I've watched the population coddle children more and more. I remember my uncle literally bubble wrapping the edges of tables and furniture so his little girl would not take a bump to the head. I mean really, he bubble wrapped shit.
If children don't learn right away how to protect themselves they do become rather weak, and the miss very important lessons. Gone are the days when a child could take a BB gun and shoot cans in the back yard. Gone are the days when children knew not to touch a hot stove because they've already learned that lesson. Gone are the days when children would be given homework in public schools an were expected to do more than 5 mins of homework a day. Gone are the days when we expected children to learn a subject well enough that they could write an essay about their knowledge.
Our children are poor in math, poor in reading, poor in data retention, poor in knowing right from wrong. Our children don't know common sense, how can they when an education system has a zero tolerance foundation. What happened to having the ability to stand up for ones convictions and not being suspended or expelled for it.
We American adults only have ourselves to blame. We've coddled the world. But this stems back to our litigious society. We put warning labels on the most ridiculous thing because some child received a Darwin award for drowning in a bucket, or some lady wins 8 million dollars because McDonald's didn't put a warning label on the coffee cup "Caution contents are very hot". We sue if someone wrongs us, even if we failed to read directions, or to use some sound judgment.
I'm not saying all litigation is wrong, just the frivolous ones. I'm not saying some safeguards are needed, but "coffee is hot" is a bit too much. I'm not saying that all kids won't struggle to learn, most will, and it's those struggles (which sometimes end with injury or death) that we learn from the most.
Allow violence on TV. Allow kids to be kids. Stop bubble wrapping our next generations.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
I find the concept that handling saws, and roasting hotdogs prepares children for leadership positions ridiculous. Every child that roasts a hot dog will become a world class leader? Ridiculous. Now, if you want to say group activities will allow a couple kids out of the group to develop leadership skills that I would believe. But really, when my siblings gather in a pack of 5-6, unsupervised in my parents back yard I'd argue that they are developing more leadership skills then some Swiss tikes that have an adult supervisor just about any day.
Leave children zoning out solo on the TV, reading books, tinkering with a computer, or tweaking lawn mower and they are not developing leadership skills. Not everyone needs to be a leader though.
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.
My wife is a grade school teacher and sees the results of this coddling. In just one example, she played a math game with her class and gave the winner a small prize. Most of the kids had a lot of fun and learned something too; but what took her by surprise is that some of the kids began crying. She asked them why, and [paraphrased] it was because they'd been raised with the belief that "everyone's a winner." They had never "lost" before, and it was devastating to them / they didn't know how to respond.
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!
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.
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.
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