Welcome Parents, Teachers, Learners. I have set this site up as a way to share my passion for science education, learning through trial and error, and challenging students to become creative problem solvers.
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Rage Against the Institution
I have been quite this week on the blog. For those who know me in real life, you know that when I am quiet in my writing it is because I am filtering, revising, rolling around something complex with in me. I have started several blog post. All felt disorganized, judgmental, cynical, and unproductive. While I love a good rant, I like to think I that I don't rant for the sake of speaking, but because I want something changed. Improved. A wrong corrected.
What am I so riled up about? Well lots frankly, but specifically humanity's treatment towards our youth. See, as humans we do fall in the scientific category of animals, but we like to think of our selves as beings and not animals. Yet, what I am seeing in my day to day life, feels like our youth are being raised as animals rather than as beings, and I must say that I also feel that raising them in the wild, would be a far cry better than many of a modern ways of shuffling kids around or off to the side so that the world can go about its business.
Why am I so disturbed by this right now? Well I am usually frustrated with this, and it is something that stays in the back of my mind constantly. See, my own personal children are the victims of being forgotten. One son was left to rot, literally, in a crib 23 hours a day for 2.5 years, to the point of physical, emotional and intellectual scars that will stay with him for life. Recently, my husband and I went to see the showing of the documentary STUCK which takes an in depth look at the impacts on children, families and society when kids remain unparented due to bureaucratic hurdles that leave them trapped in orphanages. Almost all of the footage was something I had seen before, but never had I seen it all together in 85 minutes of back to back fotage.
What struck me to my core, was seeing the Romain orphanages and the profound effect that emotion, physical and emotional neglect had on the children stuck in the institution. Kids who were mostly born healthy were exhibiting symptoms of psychosis, autism, ADHD, ADD, PTSD, ODD, PDD, and failure to thrive.
While I know that there are many genetic variables that can increase the probability of a child to have one or more of these disorders, there was no way that 100% of the children in the orphanage had inherited genes that would cause such wide spread mental and physical impairments. These cases were clearly caused by the act of willful negligence by society. We, all of us, caused this, directly or indirectly. Human beings, were reduced to treatment worse than stock animals raised for consumption and the price was outstandingly high. The extreme example of the Romanian orphanages, felt like a wake-up slap in the face judgment on a problem that is much more subtle, but all too real, with other institutions geared towards youth.
Then there is the here and now. Me as a parent of two boys, who both survived their early months and years in an institution. With that come the labels of SPD, PDD, OCD, and PTSD. Then, there is the other here and now of my life as a public school teacher, and an active member of the homeschooling world Something I am hearing over and over again is, "my child is not succeeding at school because they are ADD, ADHD, not hearing anything the teacher says, not challenged, has so much homework they feel like they are sinking." Sadly, I am mostly hearing from parents of young children. Parents are being told in the masses that something is wrong with their child, and than medication is needed, so that they can become "regular learners" in the institution of education.
Seriously! If I was a CEO of a company and 30-40% of my staff needed to be medicated to perform their duties asked of them, I would not all of the sudden assume that the work force was falling apart. I would re-think my company model. I feel like we (society) consider our youth to just be shorter adults. Not true! Kindergartners are not just smaller adults. They are goofy, wiggly, unsure of where their body ends and another person's body begins. Some of them are physically ready to read and write, some are not. Being ADHD is basically acting like you are a kindergartner when you are not one.
Unfortunately, I am finding that in this day and age of standardized test, and efficiency and constantly being technologically plugged in, we do have an epidemic of attention deficit. There is a deficit of people truly being present and paying attention to the people and places around them. I have yet to hear of a natural system where 30 animals would be put together in a small confined space that were all the same age with a non-relative in charge. Of course our kids apear to be hypervigilant, hyper aware, agressive, territorial, dissacociated. My son, who is extremely sensory aware, might be labeled as ADD in such a situation, or I would say, I want him watching my back in a crowded place, because no one is going to sneak past him. I feel like we are going in the wrong direction with our educational system. I re-watched a TED talk "Bring on the Revolution" which implores us to really think how we should be teaching today.
I don't feel like the initial idea of educational institutions were originally terrible. And, I feel like sticking with it in this day and age is unconscionable. The epidemic of emotional and psychological acronyms seems to correlate directly with the widening gap of how the "real world" works today in the 21st century, and the way we operate the educational institutions for our youth.
So now what? Well, I am sure I will have more on that later.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Hear Hear, sister!
ReplyDeleteMy guess is that you're troubled by the state of the educational system because you adopted kids that are unable/unwilling to do the very basic things that are expected of them in a classroom - listen to the teacher, try to follow instructions and not antagonize their peers. You're a teacher -- you presumably enjoyed school enough to spend your adult life in school.
ReplyDeleteWhile a whole lot of the expectations in schools are out if whack (my 4 yr old gets homework in kindergarten and is expected to write his full name, sit sentences AND do some basic math; in kindergarten I was expected to not eat glue and not hit the kid who tried to steal my juice box), school in its current incarnation works pretty well in terms of teaching kids the basics of how to behave like a civilized human being.
Your kiddos clearly had a rough start in life -- but pulling them out if public school, removing basic expectations (sit still, learn to cooperate, don't hit the kid next to you even if he stole your juice box) and opportunities to interact with their peers is doing them no favors. Kids have had rough starts since the dawn of time - getting them alphabet soup labelled makes you feel better about them but doesn't actually help them. As grownups, they're not gonna have the opportunity to stay home with people who buffers them everything (aka being homeschooled by mommy).
Kids who survived wars, concentration camps and famines, say 60 yrs ago didn't get labelled alphabet soup and just got on with it because they didn't have any other options. You've created other options for your lil muffins. Who'd probably be just fine if you stopped indulging/coddling them. (My theory is that it's like upper middle class girls who have nervous breakdowns in college -- because they CAN, because they know their parents will rescue them vs the kid from a lower socioeconomic background who doesn't fall apart, because she can't, because she knows damn well nobody will pick up the pieces for her).
Wow Kate,
DeleteJust so you know, I did not pull them out because they could not behave, or sit still. Our son from China suffers from PTSD. If you know or have stuided anything about PTSD, the more time a child's trama is triggered, the more permanate the damage is later in life. Every day in Kindergarten they were playing with food, taking food away from him and rewarding and punching him with food. Our son reverted back to two hours of intense raging night terros, stealing and hording of food, and major emotional regression. My husband and I have both worked with teens who suffered from PTSD, and it is a whole lot easier to deal with their trama early and when theya re young. As far as the coddeling coment, reducing my child to a trama trigger is not what I would concider coddling, and if you actualy knew the expectations we have for our children, I dare say you would not label us so.
Oh and by the way KateK, what is exptected in most classrooms, is not actualy what is expected in the world, but what is expected in the institution. I would like to preare my kids for more than just being shuffled up a notch.
Delete