A 13 year old boy becoming a father, a 15 year old girl becoming a mother. Probably unheard of before but really not surprising at all to some people. I wonder how are they coping with this. Just a quick flash: I'm over 30 and my first baby is a 2 months old girl. It's really difficult to take care of a baby. She is crying for all sorts of reasons that You the parent have to figure out and make it go away.
But this is not what I wanted to talk about. Triggered by this bit of news making headlines all over the world, I had a quick discussion with my friend Antonio the other day about the responsibility of the educational system in all of this. Nowadays everyone is calling for sexual education in the schools for young people who are becoming more and more prone to have sex at a younger age. I thought that the initiative of educating youngsters about sex was really becoming part of the problem not the solution as it was intended.
Instead of addressing the problem, which is in my opinion having sex at a very young age, the sexual education initiative is concentrating on teaching children how to Have Sex safely. I am not at all saying that the safety of children is not important. On the contrary, I think it's very wise to educate children about their safety and well being. The point I am making is that the initiative has taken the phenomena of early sexual intercourse for granted when it should be looking at ways to counter that problem.
In other words, instead of facing the problem, we are merely dealing with its aftermath effects which are going to pile up as other grave problems like having a 13 year old father for instance.
I think one of the main problems is not providing youngsters with alternatives, with new challenges...
ReplyDeleteI feel that nowadays kids get bored easily as there are so many things that are taken for granted.
If we want to keep our kids out of trouble we have to keep them busy, but not just for the sake of keeping them busy, we have to present them with activities that stimulate their intellect and make them want to know more, to investigate and learn new things.
I guess the problem with the so called "information society" is that we think that media like the internet and 24/7 TV access are the solution to education.
We should start realizing that the availability of information is just a baseline for us to work on. We shouldn't be content with our kids being mere copycats who assemble their academic work from cut/paste material taken from the web. Our kids can be so much more than we were at their age... They have ready access to information that we could only dream of... But sometimes they don't know what to do with it because we pass them the notion that everything is already done, already discovered, just siting somewhere on the web for people to grab.
It's our job, as educators and parents, to tell our kids that there are still worlds, universes of knowledge to be discovered (and constructed) and the pieces of information we find online are mere building blocks, not ready-made solutions.
Antonio
Bingo Antonio,
ReplyDeleteYou have a really good point there. I think that kids are bombarded with all sorts of false issues as “the” things to care about and be preoccupied with either through the media or even through society. The only chance they have is a new educational system that teaches them how to sort out and decode false conceptions. The internet is not the teacher. It’s a vast sea of information that one needs to be very careful with. Just like real life, the internet is infested with misconceptions, biased accounts and crime. The current educational system is preoccupied with mass producing humans rather than helping them evolve. The educational system I’m referring to is not only schools, its all the social medium that one grows into and believe me its turning into one giant universal machine with globalization as its dynamic force.