Education - A Child's Choice

The underlying thread of believing kids are dumb and now they become dumb needs simplification to form a base in better understanding a very complex problem. The fundamental issue regarding a child's performance is, and always will be, directly related to the quality of home life, and the child's ability to find solitude in knowing someone is at home waiting for them. Another area of the home is the level of positivity to negativity factor that a young mind is absorbing. Breaking it down to as much simplification as possible, if a child is experiencing positive experiences in the home, his ability to focus and deal with the real world such as socializing and learning at school, will find positive results.  Any teacher will tell you, their job is hindered by what their student's home life experience, but most importantly, a child knowing for a fact that someone is awaiting them, and their sense of protection is exemplified in front of them through parental verbal motions towards others as well as towards themselves.

The school system design appears to be created as a unionized organized government job that ensures job security and pensions. This idea is vastly overused, outdated, and fundamentally nothing more than using a utopian ideal as a mask for leverage to build upon a public sector career guarantee in or to ascertain power by numbers and  a sustainable power by creating a political family which follows the leader without allowing for ideas or and most importantly, innovation to create higher learning. Instead, this system is a fire, which has no other goal than to grow and spread and the cost of anyone who lies it its' path. By this fire, is a corporate type of conscience, where its shareholders are more important than society itself. Yet by this, this fire claims that it cares about its students and their development, however they are slow to react to the size and problems of social learning.

The ideal implementation is to educate children by teaching them how to learn interactively with a computer program designed to help them with memory recall to facts, as well as allow for interpretation. By doing this, the child is able to be his own teacher to the best of his or her ability, and may follow up with a teacher of their choosing. This would allow a teacher to teach efficiently and as close as one on one as possible.

This is not to say that current education is abhorrent, but that it is not effective as it could be. Plenty of children come out of the public school system just fine and continue on to higher learning. But those who are falling through the cracks have something different, and it's not simply their school experience, but their family environment as well as their social concerns within the public school system.

We suffer from social issues more now than ever in the public school system. We suffer from social pyramid learning, which pounds on the esteem of those children who are not so angry or dominant by nature and thus many succumb to the abuse of the few; a definition of adult dynamics as well, but is off topic.

The school system has been treated like a babysitting institution, where parents drop them off because they want a huge break and need to have someone else teach them proper behavior and the remaining fundamentals of life. Parents today and the past thirty years have eliminated physical punishment, a fear tactic, but did not provide a proper substitute to discipline their children in a way that forms those ideals where a child clearly understands that others around them are as important as they are, which is the basic message of adjusting a child's behavior. Instead, children grow up as "potential narcissists" because their esteem is trying to find power when all they feel is shame, the baseline for narcissism.

Without a parent to come home to, the child is then subjected to time spent with those out in the field, like a wild suburban wasteland, the child may have great experiences or simply non-threatening experiences as well. However, those experiences are not what we are talking about. We are talking about the protection of the child and depending on where they live, their experiences will vary. Additionally, their size and stature will determine their experiences and it is naïve to believe that an upscale landscape provides everyone with a great social and educational experience. It does not.

Within this discussion its always the shame of adults trying to move children around a system without performing the one act that all people need, even animals crave, which is a right to choose. We give game show contestants a choice behind door number one, number two, and number three, but we never ask our child if they want to work with this teacher, or be around these kids, or to be schooled at home or another school altogether. That child needs to feel empowerment, as this is the very issue that determines our sense of esteem. Self-empowerment is the very notion all adults have been fighting for since the English immigrants came to America. So why don't we give children empowerment over how they wish to learn and environments they want to be in while learning, as well the teachers? Instead we send a message to children, they have no choice but to go to this place and face all these people you may not want to be around and they must attempt to survive.

This is not a commentary on pampering children, but more of choice at its base. Choice is important, because it instills and determines so many internal notions in a growing brain and to believe they can do anything in this world, which is reflected in children of higher economic levels because they experience choice at an early age. With choice comes responsibility and discipline, but those are all good things. Negotiating with children is important because they understand how the world works though this very act and they crave it. We all need to negotiate our children's welfare to place him in an area of choice so they can focus and concentrate on the things that matter without the fear of social retribution and isolation.

Returning to the context of our educational system, it now feels bleak and shameful. What we have is not the best we can do. Fearing change is only a fear of our own fear, and change instead needs to be embraced. No longer should be treat K-12 as a babysitting institution where parents believe their children will be reared. Instead the emphasis is on providing choice for the child so they feel empowered to educate themselves with the modern tools provided. As important as these essentials is harnessing their focus and concentration so they can learn efficiently.

Children by nature are genius's because the human brain at that age can absorb so much in language, math, spatial thinking, and all without prejudice. It's a time to harness that with much ambition by providing them a safe positive environment where they can believe they can do anything and start achieving early on in life. The start is the most important achievement for parents and teachers.  A bad start leads to an imbalance both physically, emotionally, and psychologically, it would be hard to lower those tides and assist them in bouncing back. This is all founded on choice by providing environments which may deal with the reality of children who may not be receiving all the attention and life skills at home, and may require to be in an environment that assists them in those areas. This is not segregation, but an offering, especially to the child, where they wish to be drawn towards those very needs. Children aren't dumb, they just can't fully put all the pieces together without knowledge and experience, but they do have instincts. If they understand that they can make a choice immediately or over time, and by granting that choice, the child can hope for better things in the future.

Kids are not dumb, yet we often refer to them as such as our society does not respect children or the elderly nearly as much as the taxpayer themselves. We treat them as cattle and herd them within a fenced environment. But most importantly, we have created an institution this is farther away from higher learning and achievement by focusing on building the fire of the institution itself. Instead of empowering the institution, it's time we remove that power and give it to the children. By these notions we set a precedence and acknowledge that we wish to evolve and respect our children in a way that we wish to be respected.