Klarinet Archive - Posting 000293.txt from 2001/02

From: "Karl Krelove" <karlkrelove@-----.com>
Subj: RE: [kl] chaos being sold for freedom...
Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2001 23:10:44 -0500

"Why can't they be like we were, perfect in ev'ry way?
What's the matter with kids to - day.....?!"

This wasn't written about 1990's kids - it was set in the fifties. And to
some extent it was meant as parody of every generation of adults back to
Adam and Eve. Every generation has complained about its children - their
lack of respect, their lack of industry, their lack of just about any
quality adults consider virtuous. There's a quotation that I remember
reading when I was in school from one of the famous Greeks - maybe
Socrates - that I can't this minute put my hands on, making the very same
complaints about children of that era.

I, too, teach in a public school system. I am sometimes exasperated by what
is certainly disrespect and laziness in some of my students. Those students
have always been there. They were in my classes in the late fifties and
sixties when I was a public school student. They were in the one room
schoolhouses in the nineteenth century. They were apparently there at the
time of Socrates (or whoever it was). We tend to notice the problem kids
more than the other children. They are more of a teaching challenge and get
under our skins, so we focus on them.

There are without doubt areas where schools have deteriorated to the point
where nobody has much respect for anything that goes on inside them or
anyone who works in them. Kids learn most of what they do by example. If bad
examples exist in abundance in a particular community, then the kids will
learn the lessons the bad examples teach.

In the schools where I teach and work the students are for the most part
respectful and obedient when they are treated with respect and given
reasonable expectations to meet. The ones who incorrigibly behave otherwise
aren't unique to the decade, or the century, or even to the recently ended
millennium. And I doubt if those children ever were changed or improved much
by any discipline adults tried to administer.

IMHO

Karl Krelove

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