We've Removed Consequences From The Curriculum

We do our kids no favors when we raise them to believe there are no limits, no restrictions and no boundaries. I came face to face with this fact a week ago when an anguished looking young man came into a room where I was substitute teaching.
He was looking for the regular teacher. When I told him she was out for the day, he looked sicker than when he came in. He mumbled something about seeing her later and stumbled back out of the room. When I saw that teacher later, I asked what was up.
“He just learned that he may not be graduating next Tuesday,” she told me. Of course by then the invitations had been sent, his parents may have gone as far as to reside the house (I’ve known parents who did this for an “Open House”) and all was in readiness. Except the graduate.
I know that school. They spent four years warning him. The warnings got very serious In his senior year. But life didn’t get real to him until the day he looked at his grades and realized the long fantasized ceremony and party weren’t going to happen.
Many times I’ve looked at a particular knot of students who spent an hour with unopened books, leaving their assignment sheets untouched at the end of the hour, wondering what they thought was going to happen. Suggest that they do some work during class and the answer is: lol. They do, they literally “laugh out loud”.
Teachers eventually get quite cynical. They comment very blandly on the third or even half the class that isn’t passing this or that course. No amount of bonus pay for the teacher is going to make the kid who came into my classroom care—until he realizes the party is off. No amount of penalties inflicted on teachers is going to make that kid care—until it’s too late.
It’s time we adults ask, “What on earth have we done to this generation?” If they met an angry lion, they’d try and pet it. If pain is a protective mechanism that keeps us from really hurting ourselves, then certain kinds of fear are equally protective. Many kids have none.
They don’t fear drugs. They don’t fear sexually transmitted diseases (that can render you sterile or even dead). They don’t respect the power of liquor. In some neighborhoods they have no fear of weapons. They have no fear of failure in school. They brag about police records.
We’ve raised them to express themselves, to “feel good” about themselves (no matter what shape they may actually be in), and to believe they are absolute masters of their own fate—no matter how badly they shoot themselves in the foot.
The rights of every citizen are posted on school house walls. I often look in vain for any mention of the duties and responsibilities. The most elementary forms of common sense seem to be off the curriculum for too large a number of students today. (Like the kid in the same suburban school whose pants caught on fire because he stuffed a smoldering joint in his pocket before entering class.)
I cannot help but wonder if the matter of the two American reporters detained by North Korean troops isn’t a bit more of the same. After all, these young women were also raised as part of what has become the “What, me worry?” generation.
Let alone pet a peevish lion, they went to poke a stick in his eye. If you are fool enough to do such a thing, do it from a safe distance. Or at least at a border post where Chinese troops are liable to take a dim view of an incursion by North Korean soldiers.
Could it be that Laura Ling and Euna Lee actually believed the stuff that is written on school house walls about empowerment and entitlement? That the rights of an American to go anywhere and do anything are sacrosanct? That impinging on these American entitlements is unthinkable to anyone?
Are these two more sick looking young people who have suddenly discovered there are situations in which you do not walk away with a diploma? Sometimes the party may be cancelled, no matter how much you have prepared for it? It is not written on the walls of any classroom I’ve been in that sometimes you aren’t entitled to an “Open House” just because …. It should be.
I’m making no book for the North Koreans. They are obviously playing dirty politics with these two young women. Some have called them a “Mafia nation”. They seem to be. Kidnapping is part of their normal diplomacy.
But this reality alone should have warned the young women. It wasn’t just any lion they were annoying –it was a very nasty lion, one that plays by no rules, one that has gone rogue time after time. They should have been especially careful around such a beast.
It is just possible that we may have done them the disservice in our schools of inadvertently teaching them they didn’t have to be careful—around any kind of beast or danger. They are, after all, fully entitled Americans, aren’t they?
They’ve just learned that there are markets where that kind of currency has no value. They are in a market where a human life—a human future—is merely a commodity to be traded for something that is wanted. I suspect neither young women ever dreamed that she could be reduced to the status of a lowly pawn to be traded for something else.
We did them no favor if we didn’t make this clear to them as students. I’m not saying that the victims are at fault—I’m just suggesting that, for their own safety, we should warn potential victims about the very real dangers—and consequences—out there.
If they choose to ignore reality, there really isn’t a lot we can do after the fact—unless you want to send another half million troops back to Asia.