Our Schools are Teaching the Wrong Lessons

The Discovery Canyon Campus school in Colorado Springs has just banned the game “tag” on its playgrounds. This school is following two schools in the nearby Falcon School District who implemented a similar ban in 2005.

School officials at the Falcon schools said the move “encouraged more students to play games.” Banning games encourages students to play? By that logic, if they banned math, all of the students would start studying math? Perhaps that’s what they will try next.

These lazy school administrators are ducking their jobs. Their jobs are to teach children. Learning to play and work with others is one of the most important lessons that a child can learn in elementary school.

By preventing these children from playing together, these school administrators are retarding the children’s social and emotional growth. It’s no wonder that teenagers are so immature these days, with elementary schools like this.

The elementary schools fail in their tasks, and send unprepared children to the junior high schools. The junior high schools do the same and pass their problems on to the high schools. The high schools then graduate the 18yr old “children” and pass their problems on to colleges, businesses, and society as a whole.

How can we expect schoolchildren to mature if they are never forced to mature? How can e expect them to deal with problems in the real world if we constantly protect them from real-world problems such as getting along with their peers?

There is only one adult environment which matches the environment for which our children are being trained — prison. In prison, every inmate must follow a strict regimen where his time and actions are tightly controlled and his every social interaction is restricted and monitored. What environment could be more like an American public school?

If we want our children to succeed, we need to teach them to mature. We need to guide them into becoming adults. They won’t magically become mature, happy, and successful adults all on their own.

We must either demand that our public schools stop abdicating their responsibilities in this area. We can pull our own children from public schools and teach them either at home or in private schools, but that only solves part of the problem. We must do something to ensure that our property tax dollars are well spent and that all the children of our nation receive an education which prepares them to function in the real world. We should probably start by firing some of these failed “educators” who have given up on the task for which we pay them.