Another education fad in today's world is to separate the issues that the child faces in life with the family and on the streets, from what goes on in the classroom. The rationalization for this is that the teacher and school have little or no impact on what is going on in the child's life outside of school. What teachers can have an impact on is what takes place in the classroom around the teaching of the basics and course content.
There are even those individuals who claim that schools should not be teaching values and that values education should only be done in the home. Not only is this inconsistent with Thomas Jefferson's view that schools are the place where the values of responsible citizenship are taught, it begs the question, in the absence of family, where are our children suppose to develop values? Are they to learn them from the streets?
If 70% of inner city children are born to an unmarried woman who is illiterate, unemployable and a child herself, where will these newborns receive their values education? Might not a family living class with a sex education component to its curriculum provide some children with an alternative to an education based on street values regarding sex, marriage and parenting practices?
Many of our children come from living situations where there is a single parent who is working two or more jobs to provide for basic needs; food, clothing, a place to sleep, heat, lights, medical and dental care.
Others come from living situations where parent figures are strung out on drugs, are incarcerated or have simply left the scene all together. If it weren't for our public schools where would children from such life experiences receive stability in life? In the absence of stable family life, public schools are the next available support system to provide our children with safety, food, acknowledgement, support, values and yes, love and hope.
For children from such situations to learn to sit still, to raise their hands to get attention and to trust that their needs will be met often by a stranger, is truly asking a child to take a huge leap of faith. And yet, if there is going to be any semblance of classroom order and safety, this one teacher, along with an instructional assistent, if one exists, are going to have to address all of these issues and more.
Often a classroom teacher is confronted with the reality that the child's family will instructd the child in one way to handle conflicts, while the school system requires another means of handling a conflict situation. I have known family members who will tell the child that if so and so "gets in their face," to get into his or her face. If someone hits you, you had better hit them back.
There is a "street logic" to this counsel. If, on the street, a child did not stand up to someone who was "dissing" (disrespecting them), their lack of retaliation will be considered a sign of weakness and they will be considered an easy mark for repeated confrontations and bullying. Those who do not stand their ground may receive abuse as a constant diet from those with whom he or she would come in contact. In this context, to get back into "someone's face" is a matter of basic survival.
On the other hand, the school cannot tolerate such an approach to "conflict resolution. If this street mentality were to rule the day in a classroom, there would be no semblance of order at all. In truth, in order for the classroom to be a safe place for children to be able to learn, the opposite of this street mentality must be the rule and not the exception.
The difficulty with this different approach to conflict resolution is that it requires the ability for the child to verbalize needs and feelings. For many of these children, their facility with understanding and speaking classroom or "Standard English" is limited. In addition for many of these children to verbalize needs and feelings, in essence their expressing what makes them feel vulnerable is totally foreign to their means of daily survival. Often it takes years of consistent, supportive work within the classroom for these children to be able to "learn" to verbalize their needs, feelings, and wants. Before such a learning process takes place, the child is caught between two worlds, the world of surviving on the street and the world of conforming to the expectations of the classroom.
In order to create a nurturing, safe, supportive and effective learning environment,we need to be conscious of the real life issues that our children and those who work with our children are dealing with on a daily basis. In order to meet the needs and provide for the safety and welfare of our students, we cannot be held prisoner by those who are prejudiced or ignorant about what public schools' address to protect and support our children's development of social and learning skills. And yet, we still have those in politics and those who have a hand in creating educational policies who maintain that the public school is no place to teach values. What do you think?
Thank you for stopping by.
Namaste,
Jim Farwell
