A 2018 New Jersey Star-Ledger guest column calls for An emerging voice we should listen to: Our young people. The authors, Healthy Schools Now activist Jerell Blakeley and high school junior Justis Brown, speak out against unhealthy physical deterioration in the schools and end with a pivot into the gun control contraversy. *
Before we delve into these issues, let’s back up and address more fundamental issues.
Before you can learn to be “advocates for causes,” you need to know what you believe, which presupposes learning to think independently. You need to realize that feeling isn't thinking; that reality doesn't bend to your arbitrary demands (“Healthy Schools NOW”); that full context is crucial, and mental integration of facts and experience is crucial to grasping context; that there are other perspectives based on experience, not a teacher’s training; that almost all of what you learn in your lifetime does not come from school: It is still in your post-school future, if you are really willing to learn.
Education is about learning to think and self-govern in pursuit of self-flourishing; about transforming the whim-worshipping two year old into the free-thinking, reality-oriented, rational adult. Your not going to get there by being a mouthpiece for a school establishment dominated by a monopolistic, ideologically oriented political institution--the teachers union. When I listen to the young, I’m really mostly hearing their teachers.
School children, by definition, lack the wherewithal to form permanent uncompromising positions on crucial issues. That’s why they are called school children. They are in the process of acquiring the mental tools of rational, objective thinking. Take the gun issue. You want control NOW. What about the crucial starting point of any discussion on “gun control”--the individual right to self-defense, what that right derives from, and the proper role of government regarding this right. Today, the big rage is Greta Thunberg and her Children’s Crusade against Climate Change, which is firmly ensconced in the biased, one-sided climate catastrophist camp. Clearly, these children are tools of the adult-driven, quasi-religious Environmentalist/Political/Industrial/Climate complex.
School kids should understand where they are at. High school is the minor leagues. Students’ (and their teachers’) main focus at this point in time should be to develop their own critical faculty, not go looking for causes to advocate for or against. They should be focussed on how to make convincing arguments, not making arguments. They need to learn to organize their thoughts and the facts of reality, and integrate them into principles. In short, they need to know what they are talking about. That comes from listening, without strings attached—which means, listening to even what they see as the most outrageous ideas, because “outrageous” ideas might actually be the truth.
Teachers should know this. The big leagues come later. I’ve been there. Looking back, I can honestly say that my k-12 years were mostly a waste of time. Almost all of what I know, including how to think about causes and deal with opposing opinions, I had to self-learn. I had to reach the big leagues on my own.
I want to make clear that I am not saying that “children should be seen and not heard.” That is not education, either. What I am saying is that school children need to do a lot of listening themselves—in fact, a lot more listening than talking. Children lack the life experience of adulthood. That’s reality.
* [Jerell Blakeley is a campaign organizer for the New Jersey Work Environment Council and coordinates the Healthy Schools Now coalition. Justis Brown is a junior at International High School in Paterson and a graduate of the Healthy Schools Now Student Leadership Academy.]
Related Reading:
The Anti-human Tyrade of an Ungrateful 16-Year-old
Education: It’s the Philosophy, Stupid!
Maria Montessori: Her Life and Work by E. M. Standing
No comments:
Post a Comment