Broken Schools and Broken Children
I just discovered a writer who, to my delight, seems to be cut from the same cloth I am. While reading his latest article (“If We Want Better Schools, We Need to be a Serious People”) I found myself repeatedly wanting to jump out of my seat and exclaim, “Yes! Yes! Exactly this! This guy is spot on!”
His name is Jeremy Adams. And in the article I recently read, he addresses the pressing question everyone seems to be asking: What can we do to fix our schools and to fix our children? Here are a few gems from the article:
“If we want to face a tremendously daunting truth…in the face of this epochal challenge of broken schools and broken children, then we must acknowledge a reality that [we] simply don’t want to hear: the solutions to our school problems do not come from school.”
“Our literacy crisis starts in the home…Nothing in the classroom can take the place of years of parents’ reading to their children. Nothing can take the place of thousands of hours of conversation and verbal engagement between a child and his or her parents. Nothing can replace the power of a home furnished with books aplenty.” (See my related article here).
“…School failure is, in large part, due to a crumbling of the home, the most vital cultural institution.”
“The habits and behaviors our students bring to school do not start at school. If we want better schools, then we must use our freedom to be better parents and citizens, from putting down the TV remote at night, to checking children’s folders nightly, to protecting them from the moral anarchy filling their social media feeds.
“If we want better schools, then we must fight the urge to fetishize frailty, and instead valorize grit and resilience.”
“Our schools are failing not because of what happens in the classroom, but because of what happens—or more to the point, what doesn’t happen—at the dinner table. If we wish to be a serious people, then we must bolster our institutions with the power to humanize and domesticate the bedlam within us all.”
Mr. Adams has hit the nail right on the head. The answers to our most important world problems lie AT HOME. (See his whole article here).
Get his book, Hollowed Out: A Warning About America’s Next Generation, read it, and orchestrate the education of your children accordingly. And that doesn’t have to mean putting them in a private school next year. It means starting tonight at the dinner table. It means starting tonight AFTER dinner. Will you decide to put your kids in front of a mindless sitcom or scrolling on a phone, or will you read with them?
The answer to this question may have more import on the future of the world than all the policies well-meaning bureaucrats ever conceive of.
The family is powerful, and now is the time to wield its power—before it’s too late.