Growing Up Static

Four bullet-proof topics sure to get my blood boiling even while living in an Abyss of Positivity: School Policy, Parenting, Religion & E-Readers.

Thanks to this article on a few “stressed schools” cutting out recess programs I am slowly climbing out of said Abyss. What is this world coming to? I’ll give you the answer…

The world is becoming a standardized test score. It’s becoming percentages. It’s becoming bar graphs and learning curves.

It’s becoming really frigging aggravating.

I’m not going to get into the illogical reasoning behind eliminating or decreasing recess in elementary schools. I’d be here all day. What I am going to do is harken back to a conversation about a similar issue I had with my mother about 10 years ago.

Around that time I had been working a lot with kids. I had begun to notice a pattern developing amongst, at least to me, an alarming number of families.

It was a pattern that scared me.

Parents were obsessively taking their kids to get extra tutoring after school or after camp.

The tutor service, SCORE, became so damn commonplace to these kids it bordered on abuse...at least in my eyes. I couldn’t help but feel bad for them. They seemingly never got to be kids even though most seemed to think it was normal.

However, their parents were creating robots. They were obsessed with their academic status and achievements in elementary school. Guaranteed they are the same type of parents who put the little green men in their front yard.

It pissed me off.

Back to my mother, I did something I rarely ever did back then and revealed a very real fear of mine to her. I told her I was afraid of raising a child in this ultra-competitive academic age because I simply do not agree with it. How was I supposed to raise my child without SCORE when all the other kids were?

Would it be unfair to my child? Would raising my future child to appreciate “being a child” and learn the “old fashioned way” be considered bad-parenting?

I’d rather pay $200 a month and take my kid out’ve school and go to a baseball game or go camping or do something interesting then pay for extra tutoring. And I got news for ya’, our kids are going to be applying to the same damn colleges anyway in 10 years. And another thing, this just in, the college you go to and the job you get as a result means less than what your guidance counselor tells you.

My mother agreed with my fear. She agreed it would be difficult to maintain your standards and said it was indeed pretty scary. It was a question without a real answer and it still is.

Kids are growing up in front of computers at home, in school, in the car and in the grocery store so mommy doesn’t have to be a mommy. They are on computer overload.

You know the saying, too much of a good thing?

They’re growing up lazy. They’re growing up uncreative. They’re growing up with no imagination. They’re growing up static.

Parents and school systems are robbing their children of childhood.

Now who’s being unfair?