Excuses for Laziness

This post, well it doesn't really have much to do with my life or being a mom, but it's something I have an opinion on - and those of you that know me know that I love  to voice my opinion. :)

The other day while watching the Today Show, there was this woman - a mother - who had made a documentary about education in our country. The entire base of the documentary was that we are asking too much of the kids in the country, and putting too much stress on them. That we should go easier on them and require less. And I was shocked to see the amount of support this film got. Really?! I mean, I'll be the first to admit that there are definitely flaws in our educational system. For example, I have a younger brother called Tanner, but his first name is really Matthew. And his Spanish teacher was failing him because she didn't have any of his assignments. In truth, he'd handed in all of his assignments, but written his name Tanner on the top, instead of Matthew. This woman didn't know my brother at all! She had no idea that Tanner was really Matthew, so she clearly never spoke to him. (I'm also left wondering why she wasn't pondering why she had all these extra assignments for a student she thought she didn't have.) However, I don't think that over-work is a problem in our schools.

I went to High School at a private school in South America. I did eight hours of homework a night. I would take a nap at midnight and have my dad wake me up at 1 so I could get up and finish my homework. However, I was working to graduate a year early, so in order to get all my extra school work done I had to work eight hours a night for my normal work so that I could have eight hours on Saturday for my extra work. And it was stressful, yes. Super stressful. But it prepared me. When I went to college, the work load was so much easier that I was able to get all my work done, work 2-3 jobs at a time, and maintain a B average. In High School, I was still able to hang out with my friends at least two nights a week, I was a member of Modern Music Masters, I took Voice Lessons, I had monthly musical concerts, and I was in several High School Plays. I never felt like I was missing out on a social life. I still went on family vacations, and I still found time for leisure reading. And I never did homework on Sundays. Which leads me to ask, "If I was able to maintain a normal life with an enormous work load, why is it so impossible to believe that American teens can maintain a healthy, active, social life, with an infinitely smaller work load?"

I feel that rather than asking too much of our children, we are asking too little. Our culture is forever getting grief for being lazy - and for good reason. We have such a sense of entitlement and superiority, but we don't really deserve it! I was a nanny for a boy in Italy. Kevin was 14, multi-lingual, and went to school 6 days a week - as did all the other kids in Italy. He still had a healthy social life, he played on a competitive basketball team, and he found plenty of time to watch TV. So if these kids, in other countries, can spend more time in school, and still have a healthy social life, why is it so difficult for our children? I think it's because we've trained them to feel entitled to perfection without any work. We and they feel they should get straight A's while only dedicated a couple hours to homework a week.

In addition, our country's test scores are already awful in comparison with other countries. Do we really feel like teaching our kids less, and requiring less of them will help them in the long run? In this age of easy travel, and international communications, it could only hurt our nation's children to train them even less than we already are. They will be ill-prepared for jobs, or for interacting with their international peers. We will be further isolating them, rather than helping them to branch out and grow.

In an International Test covering Math and Science scores between millions of students in 41 different countries, the following were the results:

In short, the tests showed U.S. fourth-graders performing poorly, middle school students worse. and high school students are unable to compete. By the same criteria used to say we were "average" in elementary school, "we appear to be "near the bottom" at the high school level. People have a tendency to think this picture is  bleak but it doesn't apply to their own school. Chances are, even if your school compares well in SAT scores, it will still be a lightweight on an international scale.

1. By the time our students are ready to leave high school - ready to enter higher education and the labor force - they are doing so badly with science they are significantly weaker than their peers in other countries.
2. Our idea of "advanced" is clearly below international standards.
3. There appears to be a consistent weakness in our teaching performance in physical sciences that becomes magnified over the years. ( http://nces.ed.gov/pubs99/1999081.pdf)

One of the arguments of this documentary is a girl who committed suicide because she didn't get an A on a test. Another is kid's who get migraines because of the stress. Perhaps it's our approach? Teaching children that they're better than their international peers, expecting them to be the best, yet also telling them that they shouldn't be expected to work more than they choose. Training them that things should come easy to them. Then being surprised when they don't know how to handle to pressures of working. 

So in short, I don't think we're asking too much of our youth. If they're stressed, let's teach them the value of time-management, stress-management, and hard work. If the educational system is failing, let's re-organize it. Let's require a higher standard of lesson planning and teaching. But if we continue to teach our children that their problems are the fault of others, that it's not fair, and they're just being worked too hard, we're just setting them up to fail. Over and over.