Gary Morgan. Spiritual Reflections Of An Economic & Political Nature. We Eat Our Young – A Case For Educational Reform.
Individual safety and a sense of well-being have always been vital elements in a thriving and healthy society. They are cornerstones that must be laid and built upon if the society is to endure. Great wars have been fought and new worlds found and populated all for this crucial need.
Picture yourself as a young man or woman and consider how you would fare if after 6 long years in the warmth of a loving family, where you were taken care of and in turn helped care for others, happy, laughing and full of joy, and then suddenly after achieving success and receiving an un-requested promotion, you were whisked away alone (without option) to another place to find your own way among fearful strangers who didn’t know you nor cared to. How would you feel? How would you fare? I dare say that we all would suffer greatly, to be removed and deprived of the joy that comes from such well-being.
Yet, in our infinite wisdom we give our children to this form of madness. A child grows from a babe, enters into the public education system, is promised safety and well-being, and then upon successful completion of elementary school is ripped from the security, perhaps the only security he has ever know, and is thrown into a middle school system that doesn’t know him or his needs, and cannot protect him from the wolves. His choice is to be either the fleeing gazelle or the charging lion, both driven by the fear of failure. And the cycle continues, an assembly line fit to build machines, instead fitted to grind the bones of another generation.
Nearly half of the students that enter middle school will not graduate. They represent the poor, the lost, the losers, the misfits, those who simply couldn’t cut it. We as a society look down our long noses at them with contempt. How dare they! How dare they become a burden to me! In answer, we build walls to separate them, and prisons to house them, and try to erase them from existence. But they do exist! And we have failed!
These children may be lost, but they are not losers. Many represent the hidden cream and not the dregs of society, and all are worthy of taking their place in the living organism of society. Some simply could not cope nor had the essential support to succeed in a society that rips its children from the womb, that protects the guilty at the expense of the innocent. Still others refused to be mechanically separated and placed on the shelf for consumption. Not allowed to enter society, they turn their creative genius towards a system of survival and reward that mocks our flawed and futile way of life.
If our society/our community is to survive, we must rediscover our sense of family and re-institute systems that nurture first and equip second. A manufacturing assembly line works well in building inanimate objects such as cars and furniture, but is a near total failure at building productive men and women. Imagine what would be the result of an auto assembly line that, at each stage of the assembly process, they didn’t know what parts were needed to be installed. A small few will run well. Many will run poorly. Many more will simply be thrown out in the trash.
The dissolution of the family unit has only exacerbated the problem by removing the family support structure, and our current educational system of passing children through a 3-stage manufacturing process must be reconsidered. 50+ years ago the community based K-12 educational system provided a structure where the students, teachers and community all functioned as a family, ardently defending and supporting each other. That system will work today, at much less cost, with dramatic positive academic achievement and societal results.