Why is it the schools job to teach you values?
I'll never forget asking my niece one time what time it was, she must have been 10, and she could not tell me. When I mentioned this to my Sister in law at the time her response was that's the schools for you. My response was why aren't you teaching her? That's my response to Jerry. you want your kids to learn your bullshit? Fine. you teach it to them.
4 comments:
IMO, there ARE a few values that the schools have a role in teaching. In my view they are universally-regarded values, and not specific to any one dogma or another. They also serve well in a purely secular environment.
HONESTY. Do your own work and do not pass off someone else's work as your own. Be honest about your role in your own schoolwork.
(Example, later in life. As a college tutor in English, I caught two freshmen passing their notes to one another to [share] between sessions I was running. I reassigned them both to sessions taking place at the same time and gave them both a zero score for the session they passed notes on.)
FAIRNESS. Treat your classmates fairly. If you are working in a group with other students, don't withhold information you have and then later claim you shared it. Be fair and put everything on the table.
TRUTH. Tell the truth, even when it is problematic. Make sure that those who do the work get the credit. Make sure that nobody takes credit for something they had no part in. Fair is fair.
RESPONSIBILITY. Take responsibility for doing your own work and "own" both the positive and negative feedback you receive. Take the former as encouragement and the latter as incentive to grow. Never blame others or external circumstances for what you have produced or failed to produce.
[Example. A student in my Comp 101 class at UCSB didn't understand why he was flunking when he'd done only one assignment, attended maybe two class sessions out of a semester, and blew off the midterm before showing up utterly unprepared for the final. I explained it to him in vivid detail when he had the gall to come in during office hours to ask why he wasn't passing...but if he'd internalized the value of [owning] his own work earlier in his educational experience, I wouldn't have had to thump him like that. He'd have had a clue...I hope.
Anyhow, point is: these are all areas in which the public school experience can reasonably be assumed to impart some standards and/or values.
Of course it's better if the parents and family as a whole reinforce them.
I know Jeremiah's viewpoint is all religious dogma, and why don't the schools teach abstinence and Jesus and all that whole shebang.
OUR kids are learning an actual *curriculum* alongside our own liberal values, which he apparently abhors.
HIS kids will, perhaps, pick up some of the values our own kids pick up in the schools - I hope, the Honesty, Truth, Responsibility stuff enumerated above.
But, while our kids will have acquired things like, you know, actual scientific METHOD and an understanding of the historical RECORD; his kids will go into their University years burdened with this point of view that the Earth was created only thousands of years ago, Moses was responsible for the Grand Canyon, and Adam and Eve rode on dinosaurs.
I just don't understand what kind of parent would want to send his or her children out into the world with such a load of bigoted ignorance on their shoulders.
Jeremiah, by all means, impart your values to your kids...but don't undercut their intellectual development at the same time. Let them use their god(dess)-given gifts to their fullest and don't hamstring them with garbage before they even have a chance to stretch their wings!
I hope to heck you don't actually have children.
I don't disagree with you. I just think the things he wants the schools to teach HE should be teaching.
No doubt, Count. Our pal "Jeremiah" wants the schools to spew his own personal dogma. The whole Jesus-centric, science-negative, if-you're-not-saved-you're-damned curriculum.
Have to demur. And have to debunk it big time.
Come ON?! Jeremiah, pal, say your son wants to pursue a career, in, say, marine biology. Do you REALLY think the Noah's Ark flood theory you've inundated him with (yes, pun intended) is going to stand him in good stead with his teachers?
Why this silly rivalry between the language of faith and the language of science?
Oh! Maybe it's because you deny both, not to mention the basic language of SANITY?
The thing that infuriates me about the fundamentalists is their inability to interpret scripture metaphorically rather than literally.
I challlenge Jeremiah thus. Show me a segment of Scripture which you interpret metaphorically, rather than literally.
Bring. It. On.
All Jerry wants is for school children to be taught proper,zealous,zionist,hateful Christian rhetoric.
Is that so much to ask,Amurkah?
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