Stop Worshipping the Kids School bells are ringing again. Another year. Another beginning. Another chance to get it right. When I think about school I’m reminded how upside down life can be. It seems the most important decisions are required when we’re least prepared to make them. Not all youngsters understand how important learning is and no army of old codgers shaking bony fingers at them will change that. Due respect to the Lord’s Order of Things, I think it might have been tidier if we’d been born smart and gotten gradually dumber. Though I suppose that is how some youngsters see it now. It has been my great good fortune to live in a number of places around the world and the paramount cultural difference here is our undiluted and inexplicable reverence for youth. When wisdom is called for elsewhere, wrinkles are sought. Here we flag someone sporting a MOG tee shirt with cheap jewelry piercing at least one lobe, lid or nostril. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t respect young people. It’s just that elsewhere youthful opinions are taken for what they are; uninformed. That may raise some people’s hackles. If you are among these I beg your hackle’s pardon. There is no shame in youthful ignorance. The only shame is in accepting that ignorance as insight. This observation is not newly acquired just because I’ve gotten older. I remember attending college in the 60’s. Each time a fresh body count was reported from Vietnam, the local media would rush over to campus and ask what we thought about it all. I remember at the time thinking: Who cares what the hell we think? We’re dumb as posts! I just sat through a class with most of these jerks and their ideas of deliberation consisted of smoking marijuana joints the size of small clarinets until the odds of them getting the right shoes on the right feet were reduced to exactly 50-50. Suddenly with a microphone shoved in their faces, they became Henry Kissinger. I can never remember the media storming any of the convalescent homes to see what the WWI vets or their widows thought. Give me the opinion of someone who has survived a few decades spinning on this old globe before I’m favored with the observations of a pre-person who does not yet know what a sophomoric view is, much less that he is the proud holder of one. Please don’t misunderstand. I think kids are wonderful. They are our future. They need encouragement. They need positive reinforcement. They do not need to be worshipped. Back before it became illegal to ask, employment applications had a blank for “handicaps”. Applicants were to fill in what ailment or limitation they had that might impact their ability to do the job. A friend of mine used to write in tiny letters, “I was educated in the public schools of California in the 60’s.” That’s when it became fashionable to revoke textbooks in favor of finger paints and modeling clay. Put children in a room with soft lights and gentle music then release them at day’s end rejoicing in the certainty that no traumatic demands had been placed on them to accomplish anything whatsoever. Standards of learning tests at the state level are affording the three R’s a renaissance, but the Ghosts of 1966 can still be heard hyperventilating and wringing their hands over putting stress on “the children.” In defense of their views, they shake results of highly funded studies in our faces which shrewdly deduce that “children who are forced to take tests feel pressured.” Duh. Of course they feel pressured. It’s a test. I think that is pretty much the definition of “test” isn’t it? Have we lost touch with the process of basic education so completely that the goal is to keep our children dumb so long as they remain unprovoked? Won’t they be forced to take any number of “tests” in their adult lives? Do we really want their first ones to include what job to take? Who to marry? Whether or not to pay their bills? I don’t consider this the fault of school systems. The way state and federal officials (in their blind fervor for reelection) keep throwing fresh curriculum requirements at them, I’m surprised teachers haven’t all resigned in favor of more rewarding careers that involve wearing paper hats and taking orders through a clown’s mouth. I just think we’d all be better off if we returned to a time when adults were less concerned with being their kid’s friends and more interested in being their mentors. Don’t be surprised if you feel your efforts aren’t at once appreciated. Your need to feel appreciated isn’t the point. A shepherd does not ask his sheep how they feel about being watched. He just does it.