Your Children Suck Because You Suck At Raising Them
I was watching the news over breakfast this morning, and the ticker on the bottom of the screen said "Ontario to spend $2 Million teaching students values like respect and manners." The first thought that went through my head was "That's neat, the government's stepping in to teach kids how to behave." Then something occured to me:
Isn't teaching respect and manners the job of the parents?
How shitty is the parenting in this world that the government has to do the job of the parents? School is supposed to be for teaching knowledge, and home is for teaching values: there's just not enough time in the school day to teach what rodents learn after two months.
That time-frame is important, too: two months. I once had two pet rats that lived for four years. If the average life-span is 80 years, the rats learn how to behave in their society in the equivalent of 40 months, or just under 3 1/2 years. This is when these values must be taught: the formative years.
The biggest problem with trying to teach things like manners in public or high school is that the student's core behaviour has already been established. Waiting 10 years to introduce core values is as useless as speaking louder and slower when someone doesn't speak your language. If you teach your children values from the get-go, the values become part of who they are. If you teach them values at age 10, the "values" become something that must be remembered and consciously thought of, and will ultimately be ignored and forgotten. VALUES ARE NOT A SKILL!
It's time for parents to start taking responsibility for their own children. We live in a world where many (not all) parents rely on T.V. to raise their kids, when they should be taking an active role in shaping them instead. If parents are taking so little interest in their children that the government has to spend money correcting poor values, it's no wonder there's such a violence problem in today's youth: the kids just don't know any better.