The Earth Is Flat But No Polar Bear Will Be Left Behind

Hi So we keep hearing “our public schools are failing”. Time to push the panic button. In a 2012 study, we ranked 35^th out of 64 countries in math and 27^th in science. We suck! And our poor and/or minority kids are performing even worse than other kids. This is the “achievement gap”. Solutions: No Child Left Behind, Common Core, charter schools and……the results are actually a little worse. Doh.

In 2015, the national graduation rate was 83 percent—a record high. (So much for “failing” public schools?). For Asians the rate was 90 percent, for white students 88 percent, Hispanic student 78 percent, and black students 75 percent. And these rankings seem remarkably consistent no matter what measurements you uses: SAT scores, ACT scores, Common Core scores, you name it. Asian students do the best followed by whites, followed by Latinos, followed by blacks.

Is it classroom sizes? Child poverty? The laziness of complacent unionized teachers? The need for more charter schools? The need for more standardized tests? All of these issues have been addressed, if not entirely solved, in one way or another in the past 50 years but progress still seems sluggish.

I don’t have the answer, so for lack of anything else to do, why don’t I use myself as a test case? Allow me to briefly summarize my own academic career……

From kindergarten through 8^th grade I was a good, but not great student. Could I have been great? Maybe, but I didn’t have parents that pushed too hard for straight A’s (believe me, that’s not a complaint) so I generally did well enough. Once high school started, I decided I was going to be “cool”. A bad ass. I had my jean jacket dipped in bleach and an Appetite For Destruction patch sewn on the back. (Sewn on by my grandmother at her sewing machine probably after a meal of chow mein and bread pudding but that shouldn’t subtract from the badassery in any way). I grew myself a killer mullet. I was ready! And of course I purposely tanked in school. Do I look the kind of kid who has TIME for your rules or homework?

But it slowly dawned on me that I was a total failure in the role of a teenage hooligan. Aston Kutcher gave a better performance in Dude, Where’s My Car? Sure, I would bum a Marlboro Red here and there, but I never had the commitment to buy my own packs of cancer sticks and become a full time smoker or even frequent the smoking lounge between classes in school. Sure, I sipped the occasional $3 vodka and Hi-C but I was always terrified my mom would smell it on my breath. Sure, I got sent to the Vice Principal’s office for wising off in class and on the bus, but I was sooo terrified. And my brother had already carved out the angry young rebel role in the house and he did it so much better. He was James Dean to my Kirk Cameron. No mullet, but FULL heavy metal long hair. No jean jacket, but a black biker Hell’s Angels leather jacket. Earring? Check. Me? Ow, that probably hurts. Plus I worried about driving my poor mom to a nervous breakdown if she suddenly had to deal with TWO teenaged punks in the house at once. Worst. Rebel. Ever.

But I pretended for two years anyway.

When my junior year arrived the combination of realizing I was no hooligan and glimpsing the terrifying finish line of high school on the horizon caused me to think I should probably start trying. I had ZERO plans after graduation and I didn’t want to have to go to a junior college, so I decided to become a good student again. The C’s and D’s turned into A’s and B’s overnight.

But that wasn’t the end of the rollercoaster. Fearing I might have scammed them when they let me into UConn and I might be in over my head, I was pretty studious my first couple of years of college and I did well. Then the challenge went away when I knew I could get good grades whenever I wanted to. Boring. Also I had adjusted academically better than socially to school. I had no real friends (due entirely to my own standoffishness) and it started to get to me and I decided I hated school and do I really have to get up and go to class? So I stopped. My clumsy desire to be a rebel resurfaced in a new form. Except I kept going to the one class I liked: Eastern Philosophy and Religion. That made sense to me! So my semester grades looked like this:

F

F

F

F

A

I kind of thought that was a little funny. A stinging indictment of Western Civilization from this undergraduate! I had to meet with the Dean of Liberal Arts over the summer (or maybe it was the Assistant Dean—the Dean was probably on The Riviera) and she told me my semester was so bad they could expel me, but since I was a good student prior that, I would get one more chance. She said, “Were you depressed?”. I said yes and felt gratified that she understood me!

So I did better. Again, fear was a healthy driver. If I didn’t have plans after high school, boy did I have no plans after college, so I better not flunk out. But my grades did become more mediocre—more C’s than before. This was because I had moved to a new dorm where everyone was so social that even I came out of my introverted shell. And……then I took up college drinking and partying. But I had to “make up for lost time” after all those trips to the library on Thursday nights before walking back to my dorm to eat Doritos and drink Coke while listening to the radio on my boom box. So class attendance became sporadic, papers became a little more half-assed—not because I was depressed or rebelling this time, just your garden variety hangovers and indifference. But I stumbled to the finish line and graduated and lived happily ever after.

I provide this brief summary of my checkered academic career to illustrate a point. At times I was a good student, at times I was a bad student, at times I was a mediocre student. And it never had anything to do with the curriculum itself. It was always related to outside the classroom stuff: faux teenage rebellion, college loneliness, Long Island Ice Teas….these were my academic barriers. Nor did my success really have to do with any Dead Poets Society-style inspirational teaching either. (Although I did have some good teachers). When I did well, I can’t really say it was due to my teachers’ brilliance. When I did poorly, I can’t say it was because they failed me. For the most part, they were along for the ride and I was driving the bus—for better or for worse. They always led the horse to water, but sometimes the horse chose to drink, sometimes he chose not to. Or the horse chose to drink Natty Ice instead of water. It less about my teachers and my aptitude than my attitude.

And I have a hunch my experience is not entirely unlike that of most kids. Some are perhaps a bit more mature and grounded than I was and never hit those ebbs in performance. Some have more severe outside-the-classroom issues (like a dad in jail and a mom on crack) which preoccupy them and cause them to lag behind more consistently than I did. But it’s always primarily about attitude. And school itself has a very limited ability to steer attitude. Guidance counselors? Let’s get serious.

And I think our attempts at educational reform which seemingly try to filter that out--the most important factor of all—may be part of the problem. The “high stakes testing” which started with No Child Left Behind in 2002 and continues now with Common Core (a “refinement” of NCLB) seem to float on the fantasy that standardized tests can somehow serve as a magic wand and cure all problems. All you have to do is let test results reveal the problems, close a few failing schools and/or fire a few deadbeat teachers, and schools will get their act together and finally start trying harder and really educate the crap out of our kids. This is probably how Einstein got started! A few heads rolled in his failing German schools and, voila, out came the theory of relativity. Imagined how much more brilliant he could have been if they had charter schools back then. 

Also the Easter Bunny is real.

I think about my wandering in the academic wilderness during my freshman and sophomore years in high school. What if that had happened at a time when schools had Common Core hanging over their necks and this caused them to drill lesson plans more? What if they “tried harder” to get me to study? Would I have likely listened? HECK no. In fact I probably would have pulled away from studying even more if they were making school drearier with more “teaching to the test” boring facts. I didn’t want to do well in school and that was final. Nikki Sixx didn’t care about Earth Science and neither did I.

And turning kids off with this style of teaching may be exactly what is happening. No Child Left Behind was passed 15 years ago. High school seniors weren’t even in kindergarten yet. If high stakes testing worked, we should be seeing results.

The NAEP, aka “The Nation’s Report Card” is a standardized test that is given today and was also given before NCLB. The highest NAEP scores for black students with the narrowest gap was in 1988, the gap is higher now. Hispanic achievement gaps have shown zero improvement since NCLB. SAT scores have declined for all groups since 2006 except Asians. This is despite the fact that the SAT has been dumbed down. Ten years ago they eliminated analogy questions. Recently they eliminated difficult vocabulary words in favor of “evidence based reading”. Like if you said the impeachment of Richard Nixon would divide people into two parties, does two parties mean, like, Republican and Democrat? Or a frat party and an all-night rave? You are also not penalized by penciling in a wrong answer. Yeah I would say that’s dumbed down. They added an essay in 2005 but they took it away again. The College Board wants scores to remain consistent so they felt they needed to dumb down the test as a result of kids’ declining performance.

But that brings us to another reason why using standardized testing as a focal point for education is probably stupid to begin with. You can create any storyline you want. Let’s say you believed in self-fulfilling prophecies and you wanted to instill confidence in our school system because you assume outcomes will improve if more students and parents are buying into the system. You could create standardized tests that yield healthy results. (I don’t mean one of those Facebook tests, mind you. You know, those “Only people with an IQ of 180 can answer this question: the opposite of day is _?”). 

But let’s say you actually wanted to trash public schools and use of the phrase “our failing public schools” lights up pleasure centers in your brain like a Christmas tree. You could design……Common Core. It tests math and language arts. It raises the standards so high that the majority of kids fail the test. Is that really a productive thing? Will that really provide a wake-up call that will result in teachers getting out of the break room and getting every kid college ready—as Common Core promises? Again, this is all based on the premise that those lazy unionized teachers just aren’t trying hard enough. Fire a few of them for low Common Core results and watch the learning flourish! In the end, all Common Core seems to do is build a case that our schools suck. Betsy DeVos and Co. love this because they can then argue that charter schools are the savior. Is that the whole unstated point of Common Core, in fact? 

Except charter schoolkids tank on Common Core too. Oops. And that’s despite them finding clever ways around the law to screen out kids with disabilities as well as other potential poor performing students. They also expel kids like there’s no tomorrow—which should help their scores too. And the teachers have no unions! Still doesn’t help learning. Maybe unions aren’t the culprit after all? The evidence that charter Schools benefit kids seems inconclusive at best—but they do help the rich get richer. If you invest in a charter school, the government gives you 39 percent of your investment money back. (Oh yeah, charter schools don’t really save tax dollars either). That’s on top of the interest you will earn with your loan. So within 7 years, your money doubles. Donate $10 million, wait seven years, deposit $20 million in the bank. The best way to make money is to have money. Tax payer provided subsidies and tax exemptions have turned modern public charity into a huge profit maker. Also, opening charter schools means more buildings—which has created a gold mine for real estate developers. Real estate mogul Donald Trump appointed a charter school fanatic as Secretary of the Department Of Education. I’m sure it’s all just a coincidence.

Another absurdity of the high stakes standardized testing craze: it doesn’t matter to kids. I remember taking those tests in school: the Iowa tests and the like. But they always told us, “Don’t worry about it. It won’t count toward your grade”. And it didn’t matter much for the school or teachers then either. Now teacher heads are poised and ready for the chopping block yet apparently the tests are still meaningless for the kids. They know it won’t affect their grade and, unlike the SAT’s or the ACT, it won’t affect their future. And these tests are now grueling three day affairs. Um, maybe some kids aren’t trying? Maybe a lot of “guess C and move on with your life” is going on? Nothing is on the line for them, everything is on the line for their school and/or teachers. That’s like being a football coach whose job depends on his team’s performance not in the Super Bowl, but in the 3^rd preseason game.

This situation is so bad that apparently some schools bribe kids to try harder. One article I found noted that in the early days of No Child Left Behind, a school in Colorado offered certain kids free iPods, cameras, and other cool stuff if the proctor could tell they were like really into it while taking the test. Another article noted that a couple of years ago in Fairfield, Common Core scores were WAY higher in both math and language arts in one high school compared with the other high school in town. Now this is Fairfield. I don’t think there are any mean streets of Fairfield. I don’t think there are many kids living below the poverty line. So the superintendent dismissed the tests results as invalid because they made zero logical sense. Unless…….one of the high schools offered free pairs of Beats headphones and iPhone 7’s to kids who decided to give a f#%% about their Common Core tests and the other just told them to sit down and shut up?

So standardized testing appears to be a joke. Even if was a valid measuring stick, it seems to do nothing to elevate education. Rather, it apparently just leads to robotic rote learning which bulldozes art class, music class, and even science and history classes because that kind of meaningless fake news nonsense is not going to be on the test. Let’s make school seem boring and like jail to kids. That’s just what these devils need! Performance will skyrocket!

This is so obviously counter-intuitive and I would think all anyone really has to do to see this is reflect back on their own experiences in school or, if they are a teacher, look around. But it seems education has been hijacked from the teachers, principals and even superintendents. Now state Department of Education bureaucrats, US Department bureaucrats, and members of Congress are calling the shots. Oh yeah, and private for-profit test makers. What they put on the tests drives the curriculum. And Common Core tests are kept confidential! A private company issues a private test. Is this still even public education? Standardized testing kids to death may be doing nothing to improve education but the testing companies are laughing all the way to the bank. Imagine if we took all the taxpayer money we give to private test makers and the money we give to billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg to encourage investment in charter schools and instead used it to pay for classroom supplies so teacher didn’t have to pay out of their own pockets? Or maybe hired more teachers to reduce classroom sizes? I know. I’m really living in a dream world.

But recently there has been a huge backlash against Common Core and it might be heading out the door. Maybe the whole era of high stakes testing will bite the dust. I’m not smart enough or informed enough to say what should replace it. But I think restoring education to the teachers and principals would be a good place to start--the ones who actually got degrees in education and committed to a career in education, not billionaire dabblers like Betsy DeVos and Common Core founding father Bill Gates. Bill Gates is a really smart guy, but he’s a computer guy. Mark Zuckerberg is a smart guy, but he’s a social media website creator where people play Candy Crush and post pictures of cream of cauliflower soup. Donald Trump is a smart (?) guy, but he’s a real estate developer. We live in an era in which the super-rich think they can steer areas of society they have no formal training and experience in just because they can.

It might also help if we remember who ultimately decides the fate of our country’s education. It’s not bureaucrats, superintendents, principals, or even teachers; it’s students. Kids decide how hard they are going to try. Just like I did in school, they may sometimes willfully try to not do well. And what can you do? Ground them. Fail them. Keep them back. But what if they don’t care? What can you do then? With that in mind, dare I say the focus should be on making education fun, not just about dreary test preparation? But with a system so overrun by politics and profiteering schools probably have one hand tied behind their backs when it comes to engaging students and building their trust in school and getting them to buy into the idea that it actually benefits them if they take it seriously—they aren’t just being punished through schooling. Distrust in the educational system can’t sully distrust in learning and knowledge itself. 

Cleveland Cavaliers star point guard Kyrie Irving made headlines this weekend when he said he believes the earth is flat. He’s apparently not trolling, but the jury is out on that. His explanation: “I’ve seen a lot of things that my educational system has said that was real that turned out to be completely fake. I don’t mind going against the grain in terms of my thoughts”. See what I mean? He doesn’t trust the educational system. Is there really an achievement gap or just a trust gap which makes some resistant to learning? Finding a way to re-establish trust might accomplish far more than any standardized test ever could. The earth is round. Just don’t ask me to calculate the earth’s circumference---that’s probably a Common Core question fourth graders are now being asked to answer. Better ask them.

Helicopter Parents, Latchkey Kids, and The Boogey Man

Hi. Boy, are these Millenials sad or what? Kids, come out of your safe spaces because pretty soon mommy and daddy won’t be there to hold your hand when you have to remember to put a cover sheet on a TPS report! Suck it up, buttercup or you will get knocked on your ass in the real world! Now if you will excuse me, I have a fantasy football draft to attend to.

Boy that’s fun to do. Too bad it’s mostly BS. I stopped taking seriously  “these kids today are pathetic” arguments sometime in college after I read an older guy's complaints about the weak, shallow and self-involved younger generation he saw before him. A real collection of selfie stick using snowflakes! Knowing the future was going to be placed in their hands, he was positive this spelled the imminent end of civilization. He said this in ancient Greece in about 410 BC. That’s when I said, “Oh, this has always been a thing. Older people always think the young are this way. Before Millenials were the obvious harbingers of societal decay, it was Generation X, and before Generation X it was Generation Omega”. Part of the problem is we probably cast our younger selves in a better light than we should. We didn’t actually walk uphill barefoot through three feet of snow. We weren’t as cool as we think. Our youthful coolness was often like a garage band that hadn't learned how to play in tune yet, they had just learned how to turn the amp to 10.  We weren’t as good looking as we think. (What’s up with all those zits? What’s going on with that gut? A tucked in shirt without a belt? Holy hair gel!?). And, yes, we were positive the world revolved around us too. Scorn for the young is mostly a refusal to see our younger selves as we were vs. the semi-mythical beings with limitless potential our nostalgia filled minds create.  

But….that’s not to say there are NO generational differences, but I say if you don’t like Millenials, don’t blame the kids; blame their helicopter parents. If stories are true and some of them are still doing laundry for their college aged children, picking their kids’ college courses for them, and negotiating salaries for their adult children, well….is it really the kids’ faults if they are spoiled and lacking in self-reliance? A leaf doesn't fall far from a tree and a snowflake doesn't fall far from the sky.  

But the closer you look at things the harder it is to totally judge. Who are these helicopter parents of today? They were the latchkey kids of yesterday: the kids with both parents working, or possibly only one (working) parent in the house after a divorce, who were left on their own after school got out and before their parents got home. And the summers? Forget it. Teachers and parents: who are they? 

I was a latchkey kid. We even had a chain under the light switch in the garage where the house key hung. (I guess we operated on the hunch that burglars would never think to look in the most obvious place). I can ever remember getting home one afternoon when I was still in elementary school and a strange dog I had never seen before was on our breezeway barking like a maniac. I was so scared I ran to the neighbor’s house instead of grabbing the key and trying to get in the house without getting eaten alive by Cujo.

But I did live.

I also wandered aimlessly all around the neighborhood and town, rode my bike around (without a helmet), played street whiffle ball games, driveway basketball games, Nerf football games,  and Smear The Queer. I explored the woods with the other neighborhood kids who were also home after school unsupervised—and we sometimes got lost in the woods without GPS or a cell phone in sight!, took up temporary residence in the partially built houses down the street, hung out in our neighbor's fort up the street (containing dirty magazines) got into snowball fights (including a black eye from a close range iceball) and got kicked directly in the family jewels by my brother’s very drunk friend after I made a smart remark. Also someone had the brilliant idea to set up huge piles of snow in our backyard. No, not for a snowman; instead everyone trudged through my room, climbed through the open window onto our garage and dove off the roof into the snow pile. Solid, constructive, character building after school activities! When I finally got the nerve to dive myself, I believed I could fly. I believed I could touch the sky. God must have been our helicopter parent because no bones were ever broken.

I’m proud to have been a latchkey kid. I don’t think I would trade it for the more structured and supervised life kids seem to live now. I never got hurt, I was never kidnapped or murdered. In those days, I think parents’ security blanket came from making sure they bought a house in a safe, quiet, sleepy town. After that, they pretty much assumed their kids would be safe. Not anymore. The life I led as a kid apparently barely exists anymore.

And this is apparently because the parents of today have cast a negative vote on their own youth by raising their kids in a very different way. In Jonathan Franzen’s book The Corrections he shows kids living their lives as a correction of the flawed ways of their parents’ lives--all lives and all points of view are maybe only one side of the two sided coin of life. Children of alcoholics become teetotalers, children of teetotalers become lawyers, children of hippies become hedge fund managers, children of hedge fund managers go on Phish Tour… And it seems modern helicopter parents of today—recovering latch key kids of yesterday-- are playing out this same dynamic.

But beyond our desire to be the yin to our parents’ yang, what else created this? Is there a feeling deep down that maybe it wasn't a perfect way to grow up? Admittedly, there was a lot of down time, a lot of unstructured time. And while a lot of my time was spent with friends, I have to admit I was home alone a fair amount of time too. Listening to the radio. Watching World Premiere Videos on MTV...kind of wasting time. "While you were sitting home alone at age 13 your real daddy was dying", sang Voice Of Generation X Eddie Vedder. A lot of us were home alone at age 13. Maybe Millennial parents are just trying to correct that imperfection. Being a latchkey kid was a cool way to grow up but it was flawed and it was the heads to the tails that is the current child rearing model. So that's being corrected until the next generation corrects it again. The only problem? Whenever we try to plug a hole in one imperfection we often just create a different imperfection as a result. Life is hard. But now more day care, more structured after school activities for older kids, less time for them to fend for themselves. I looked up extra curricular activities at my old high school and there seems to be way more options than when I was there. They even have guitar lessons!? So maybe this does represent progress in some ways. 

But I think there's also a less healthy impulse driving this shift. Fear. Many think the beginning of the end of parents’ sense of a safe, secure suburban Eden where no harm could come to their children was a 1983 made for TV movie called Adam. It was viewed by 38 million people on its first airing alone. It was based on the actual kidnapping in 1981 of a six year old boy in a Sears in Hollywood, Florida named Adam Walsh who was found dead two weeks later. (His father John Walsh went on to host of America’s Most Wanted). Soon after this, missing kids started showing up on the back of milk cartons from coast to coast. Our culture of fear was born. 

Fear probably isn’t all bad. It alerts us to dangers. But what if we are afraid of the wrong things? And are misplaced fears viruses of the mind rather than helpful mental alarm clocks? The fearmongering media loves to quote a chilling statistic: 38,000 kids go missing every single year. But this is very misleading because it includes 17 year old runaways, kids abducted by a parent in a custody battle, and kids who get lost at the beach and are found an hour later. Slightly less alarming is the fact that 99.8 kids who go missing are found and the number of kids who are kidnapped by a stranger a la Adam Walsh is just 100 per year--and 50 of those kids return home in one piece.  

“But that’s 50 too many. It’s horrific no matter what the number is”. True. But about 700 kids aged 14 and under die every single year from drowning, yet we still don't have legally mandated swimming lessons for all. An estimated 155 kids die every year from accidental shootings. More than 3,000 people die every year from distracted driving—many of them teens. I think I can confidently state that it’s not an opinion but a fact that guns, cell phones, and swimming pools are far more dangerous for kids than a stranger. Yet we have changed the very way kids are raised out of stranger danger but it seems like we look the other way with much greater risks.

But fear is not a thought or a statistic. It’s perhaps our most hard wired emotion lying in a more primitive part of our brain than rational thought. Maybe the fear of a stranger stealing and harming a child just strikes to the core of people’s deepest darkest fears more than anything else and no facts can shake people away from that. But it’s not just parents. I can remember getting lost a couple times when I was young. I was terrified a stranger would nab me and I was now an orphan. Was I afraid of dying in a car accident? Nah. 

We also have a culture in which we are always listening to experts. Huge mistake! The experts thought Tom Brady was a backup QB at best. The experts thought Hillary was a shoo in. Yet we run to them anyway. And life coaches—be they therapists, social workers, self-help gurus, Oprah, or Ted Nugent—so often give you a “you’re doing it wrong!” brand of advice. You can find countless experts bemoaning the current helicopter parenting style—in fact the term itself came from a 1990 book authored by a pair of experts. They claim we’re suffocating kids and depriving them of developing self-reliance. They say parents are forgetting that parenting is a job in which the object is to put yourself out of a job. Who can argue? But I found an article originally published in People Magazine in 1982 in which an expert of the day declared the permissive parenting style that allowed for latchkey kids was “a national disgrace”. Give the experts credit: they stay on message. You’re doing it wrong—even if you’re doing it the opposite of what they formerly said was wrong. It’s an “expert” game of bait and switch. Remember kids, if you’re doing it right, why do you need an expert? Experts need to eat too!

Then is a slightly less nightmare inducing fear: the fear our kids are falling behind in school. OMG. Kids in Singapore are scoring higher in math and science? RIP America. We will be a 3^rd World banana republic hellhole by next Tuesday. So we’ve decided to shift our education strategy: more homework, more teaching to the test, more rote memorization. But is this going backwards or forwards? This debate is nothing new. In Hard Times by Charles Dickens, a teacher sums up this scholastic strategy: “Now, what I want is facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals with facts; nothing else will be of service of them”. Life does imitate art, doesn’t it? This is a fictional teacher in a book published in 1854, not a Common Core advocate in 2017.

But aren’t facts good? Armed with facts, won’t kids be better equipped to sift out the facts from the alternative facts? No! I think that comes from critical thinking skills. It comes from having some working knowledge and insight into how the world works. Reading and writing sharpen those skills, but blind memorization of facts which may come in handy on a standardized test fosters little of that on the unstandardized test of life. And why are we turning education into some type of arms race with Asian countries? Our educational model created the most booming economy in the world after World War II. Why are we so insecure that we think our way has been the wrong way and their way is the right way? What if our way is right for us and their way is right for them? Everyone is claiming Tom Brady is the greatest QB of all time, but he isn’t perfect. He’s brilliantly accurate with short, quick passes but he’s actually fairly average at throwing the ball deep. Had he been in an offense which called for long bombs all the time, he would probably have zero Super Bowls instead of five. Different players have different skills. Maybe different cultures have different educational models that best suit them.  Is our current system a foolish attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole?

Boy am I in danger of losing the overall thread of this blog! Must be my pre-Common Core education that created my tangential thinking and writing style! Anyway....has an education model rooted in anxiety and fear of falling behind infected kids of today? All day kindergarten. Less recess. Less gym. No home ec? Where will be football pillows of tomorrow come from? And then we get this: “Our kids are all hyper! They all have ADHD! Better get them diagnosed and medicated fast!”. Or maybe go back to a school day that actually remembers that kids are kids and not short adults? Maybe they won’t be so stir crazy that way? Maybe helicopter education is the culprit, not kids' scattered, defective brains that can only be fixed with pharmaceuticals? 

Another apparent facet of helicopter culture: the self-esteem movement. This began in the 80’s and it argued outcomes might be better if we valued “personhood rather than outcomes”. This brought with it those much maligned participation trophies. Graduation ceremonies for kindergarten. Grammar school. Middle school.... Is this bad? I mean isn’t self-esteem a good thing? Critics argue that while self-esteem is of course a good thing, it can’t be given to someone like a gift, it can only be earned. All of us—including kids—are hard wired to feel confident when, and only when, we succeed, not when we merely show up and are praised for it. So let’s say you’re a basketball coach and you tell your players, “You can do it! You can make this shot! I know you can!”. The kid shoots….and bricks the shot. The coach says, “Nice try! So close!”. Then he gives him or her a trophy. But the kid knows they sucked. And they will feel bad about sucking no matter how much you attempt to sugar coat it and encourage them. Maybe a better approach? Tell kids they can make the shot but teach them proper shooting mechanics. Teach them to release the shot at just the right time in their jump. Don’t just encourage them to succeed, teach them how to succeed. And if it works, kids will have genuine self-esteem, not just whitewashed insecurity. And well intentions as it might be, maybe participation trophy culture too often offers little more than whitewashed insecurity. Do participation trophies not breed self-esteem at all but merely a sense of entitlement? Two very different things. There's a certain humility to earned self-esteem because the person who earned it knows they had to work for it, but there's nothing but arrogance to entitlement because it says you should be rewarded regardless of whether you worked or not. 

Fostering real self esteem is like providing a really good corrective lens, fostering fake self esteem is like handing someone a beautiful pair of rose colored glasses that just cause them to bump into everything and stub their toe. Does the self-esteem movement create kids who aren’t very good at anything but think they’re great at everything? And let’s be honest…..that type of person is just kind of annoying.

Besides, kids aren’t dumb. If you give them a trophy but they see you gave every kid a trophy—even the kid who squirts milk out of his nose every time he tackles a milk carton in the cafeteria at lunch  ---how is that trophy supposed to make them feel special? If everyone gets a trophy, does no one get a trophy? Isn’t it like that episode of Seinfeld where a guy calls Elaine “breathtaking”. Her self-esteem goes through the roof! Then she learns he calls every woman breathtaking. She feels crushed and betrayed.  

In summary, according to this self-appointed expert, you’re doing it wrong! But I know what I’m talking about. My lack of teaching experience is perfectly complimented by lack of parental experience. But if I know anything, it's that we need to stop being so afraid! We're afraid of strangers, afraid of terrorists, afraid of scoring below Hong Kong in standardized math tests.... Fear leads to the Dark Side! 

On inauguration day, a woman I work, a doctor born outside of the US, said she wasn't worried about Trump's election. She said she knows it won't directly impact her life very much but she worries about the world her grandchildren will be left with. She then said we have a world where you can't even speak or look at someone else's child without them assuming you're a kidnapper or pedophile. How interesting that that's the thing she singled out. But it's so true. We have a world where people don't seem to talk to their neighbors as much. A world where we're all afraid of each other. We've come full circle since 1983. The movie Adam taught people to be more on guard about potential boogey men, but I think we're  so on guard that we are in a "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" phase. Maybe our society needs some type of correction on this. With constant fear of strangers, you can still have friends and family, but you can't have a community. And does a society need some degree of a larger community to avoid running off the rails? Laws are just the boards and windows of a house, community is the foundation. 

Final observation. (I promise!). I read Bruce Springsteen's autobiography a few months ago. Bruce didn't learn to drive until he was 22 years ago. This is funny because he wrote so many songs about cars and driving all night on that thunder road. But how did he get by before that without Uber or Lyft? He hitchhiked. This was once a common, fairly mainstream thing! People actually trusted each other enough to let a stranger in their car! Or to get into a stranger's car! I'm not saying hitchhiking is necessarily advisable. (I would never attempt it in a million years). But just maybe hitchhiking is a thermometer which measures a society's health and right now the patient has a fever. Bring back the hitchhiker!