As parents of two kids and a half kids, my wife and I
have decided to home school our children.
Bur what I happen to be thinking about is a couple of educational
quandaries that have plagued me for years.
Both fit in the category of dual and incompatible teachings.
1) Don’t
talk to strangers. The ability to talk
to strangers is one hallmark of successful adulthood.
2) Don’t
tattle. Make sure and let an adult know
if something is wrong.
Taken of themselves, the ideas aren’t bad and seem to
make sense. Taken with the corollary,
then the ideas can lead a two or three year old brain into fits because you
can’t follow both at the same time. You
can either follow one or the other. The
kind of teaching that is contradictory just doesn’t work with kids.
I’ve learned very well that “do as I say and not as I do”
doesn’t work with kids. My children act
like my wife and I. If you look at
either of them and observe them, you see tiny little versions without all the
adult pretense that says what you are doing is the right thing. Kids are giant sponges, and they observe and
follow everything they see. You want
your kid to stop screaming? Stop
screaming at the kid. Where do you think
the kid learned it?
The first statement is the one that strikes me as the
biggest failing of education. How is it
that we can’t teach our kids what will cause them to succeed? It’s almost as if schools are doing their
best to get children to fail. The real problem
is that the school just doesn’t see it.
The school is more concerned about teaching precisely what is on a test
so the student can pass the test. Yet
teaching the material away from the context of the test also teaches the
material. Teaching to the test
invalidates the test, anyways.
At the moment, I don’t have an answer on how to fix these
thoughts. I just know that attempting to
teach both ideas is wrong. So we’re
stuck back in a slightly different area, except this time our brains are now
aware of the problem and can spend some time working on the problem.
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