Before I venture any further I think its necessary to take a survey of opinions and definitions I have heard about what an education is, or should be.
First I will add in this small piece by Shenith Jackson which for some reason broadly appeals to me:
The definition of education is an act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.
It could be a certain degree, level or kind of schooling. It is a training implying a discipline and development by means of the special and general abilities of the mind, or a training by which people learn to develop and use their mental, moral, and physical power or skill. It is a gaining of experience, either improving or regressing. Education means to learn in every means in order to reach certain goals.
Education is very essential to everyday be able to cope and survive whatever the difficulties and complications one may experience. Without education, life can be hard and frustrating in every aspect. Education will help to attain a certain ambition or a dream in life and to be successful, however that may be defined.
Education can be from anywhere, school, society or home, internet, books or anywhere. It is necessary that everyone needs to go to a form of school, to learn academically and socially. It should help build up the confidence in every person, and give high self-esteem. Also, we need to educate ourself as a society, so that we are aware in catastrophic situations. To know what's going on around us, it is an advantage to be prepared. We need to educate ourselves in the Internet, as it is the biggest technology evolving around the world, for researching or communicating.
Education requires discipline, patience, time, hard-work and effort. With these important behavioral qualities, it will be easier to deal with life.
Having broad knowledge gives high intellect, a power that keeps you ready for anything.
Education can change our life tremendously.
Some good points! However obviously defining sources have a hard time with the concept of education: here are some I found:
a) An education is a packaged measure of a medley of things which should be given to all, in order to raise their consciousness of the world in which they live
b) An education is there to give people job-ready skills so that they go out into the world and contribute and raise their lifestyle
c) An education is something delivered to children so that teachers can have a job, colleges can exist and so that we can all feel good about our educated status
d) education is knowledge acquired by learning and instruction; "it was clear that he had a very broad education"
e) the gradual process of acquiring knowledge; "education is a preparation for life"; "a girl's education was less important than a boy's"
f) the profession of teaching (especially at a school or college or university)
g) the result of good upbringing (especially knowledge of correct social behavior); "a woman of breeding and refinement"
h) education in the broadest sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual. ...
i) Education is a stained-glass window
I think I like the latter the most! Education is a stained glass window.... yet it should be so much more.
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Watching what happens to hands-off parents...and their kids
It has been a while since I have felt passionate about something enough to write about it, at least in this theme of the old and the young. I continue to monitor and think about the previous entries and how they influence the world, but recently I have been an observer of what can and all too often does happen when things go wrong between the generations.
I live in a small cluster of houses which to all intents and purposes forms a small village within the bigger city. Our little community is run as a co-operative and much to my suprise I have lived here now for almost 26 years. Over the years some families have moved away and some have been here even longer than I have, but because of its nature and physical structure, inwardly focussed, we tend to know our neighbours and make welcome the newcomers. For sure there are some tensions here and there, but overall it has been a great place to raise two sons, a relatively safe environment where parents keep their eyes also on other people's kids, which brings about safety, security and a sense in the kids that they are not going to get away with too much. At the same time, it allows them to play and experiment with life in a pleasant and secure environment.
As a result of all this we forgo a degree of the anonimity and a modicum of the privacy which may be had from living anonimously on the street in the gridded city, where many do not know or even speak with their immediate neighbours. This latter environment is surely all a part, especially in large conurbations, of the reason why we see anti-social behaviours, territorial gang wars and a sense that nothing that goes on in your life is a concern of anyone but your own family, the isolationism of the modern city.
So in this alternate, rather socialised environment, where we run our community interests together, it is possible to see the wonderful things that happen when well-raised kids with well-adjusted and responsible parents (and their neighbours and friends) live in co-operative respect. It is possible to look at the kids as they grow up, mature and start their own lives, and to feel proud of them, knowing that you have provided a small piece of who they are, as much as how your friends and neighbours have contributed to whom your own kids have become from the modelling they have had. This is an example of the well-worn phrase "o raise a child takes a village."
On the other hand however, this close proximity and relatively social atmosphere also allows one a window into the ongoing lives of the more dysfunctional families which one may not otherwise see, except in the final headlines which hit the local news. As one observes more, one is far more aware of the results of dysfunction.
Social dysfunction can take many forms. It is an eye-opener to live within it, because much though we are a little different here, we are also very much the same as any group of people. We are individuals and we do all carry along with us the skills which we have, or have not developed in our lives. We bring together our own "things" and we then add them together in sometimes interesting agglomerations called family units. All the families are quite different on the surface and as you get to know them you begin to realise just how different, and yet how alike. One can observe a situation and say quietly to oneself "There, but for the Grace of God, go I..(or we).". It has been an interesting 26 years to be honest.
I can think of families which on the surface of things (and even down deep) are wonderful families who have been really hands on and yet one of the kids grew deeply troubled in the drug culture, had the fully armed Police SWAT team here once. He was eventually cruelly murdered by that culture just as he was finally trying hard to get his act together. I can think of a single Mother of two kids, a well adjusted and responsible daughter who has moved away but stays in touch with her Mother yet who has a brother who is heavily into the drugs trade. I can think of a couple with their two kids, a boy and a girl, where the Mother moved out leaving the father to look after his kids. The father was and is a hard working guy, the daughter has grown up to be a very pleasant and responsible young woman, but the son has always been a serious trouble maker and is in jail for drug-related offenses. I can think of a very respectable elderly widow with several children who come by and look after her, yet whose son has been in jail the last four years after being caught with illegal firearms, a very large amount of cocaine, a larger amount of cash, had a large house in one of the most "elite" parts of the city and drove expensive sports cars. He is about to be released soon to his Mother's custody, which means he is moving back in, or so he thinks, but in the interest of protecting ourselves and the well-being of the large number of young children around here, we are moving to prevent it. I can think of an intact family where social drugs have been part of the culture for a while and where attitudes seem more than a bit strange and their two daughters seem to have mixed with a crowd of not so nice friends who have been welcome in the family home and who were somehow (though of course no-one knows how) mixed up in the fatal shooting on the street outside their house of one of the young men. Their house is now a fortress with video cameras attached to all approaches to the house.
And then there is "Johnny". Why have I separated Johnny out? Well its because three of the previous examples all relate to families where for a variety of reasons, there was no man in the house and the Mother was doing her best to provide. In most cases these Mothers could not be in any way faulted for their efforts, or the results they got from the way they raised their kids. In the case of the Motherless home the Father did his best to keep his son straight, so it is clearly not a matter of lack of effort or awarness of the situations. In the case of the "fortress" house I believe it can be attributed to the general anti-social nature of the parents and their lack of guidance and discipline which brought a gun-death to their doorstep and a lack of social or personal responsibility being taught, in that the kids and their pals simply won't cooperate with the police in identifying the shooter.
And then....there is Johnny. Of all of these troubling social cases this one interests me and troubles me the most. The circumstances here are different, perhaps subtley, but different. Johnny has two parents and two siblings. His elder brother was in trouble with the law and had some personal challenges and probably still struggles with some of them, but he stays away from here now. Johnny's sister lives in her own place here now and has a young child, but no husband to play the father role for the child. Johnny lived with his parents and he is now in his mid 30's. A while ago, the parents moved from their generously comodious house in the cluster to a small house. I think that everyone knew that the change had a lot to do with pushing Johnny out of the nest.
Over the years Johnny has been, at least in memory, a socially challenged kid, rude, nervous, a difficult person. He had however held some part time jobs which gave him some responsibility, working as a camp counsellor for young kids and more latterly as a support worker for kids in High School, though how he got there I am not sure as he has little in the way of formal qualifications. We, their neighbours, were always a bit surprised at him holding these positions, including driving the camp mini-bus full of kids, because Johnny was a known pot-head, a consumer of seemingly large amounts of marijuana. This grew to be more and more of a concern when Johnny's mother made arrangements, when they moved, for Johnny to be assigned one of the 1 bedroom apartments in the cluster. Now on his own, Johnny's behaviour started to become quickly more and more erratic. Some of us took the opportunity to talk to his parents about the observations but they were in total denial about the situations and chose not to see this as a neighbourhood caring about the family and about Johnny....their response was that he is a grown man, living in his own place and they took no steps to be involved with him, something which I believe had been the case all through his growing years. His Father is no example of strong manliness, but deep down he knows that there is a problem. He took no proactive stance to help his son, just improving his own situation by moving Johnny sideways into his own residence.
Well it became more and more obvious that Johnny was moving onto harder drugs. Some times he is seen walking like a matchstick man. His habit was becoming more and more expensive. As well as his "deliveries" from 10 second meetings with a green Honda CR/V from the dial-a-dope service, he started to bring 12-13 year old children home from his duties at school and take them into his place. His parents denied that it was possible. It seemed that everyone knew about this but his parents. Johnny was trafficing. The word on the street was that he was in debt. We grew afraid that some not very nice things may start to happen to Johnny. One night, his sister, who has the same initial, and lived two houses away, had her front door kicked in and her home invaded by several men looking for Johnny. She fled and they left, unable to find him and not realising that he was 2 doors away.
Clearly Johnny was in trouble. He was playing in a game he was too deeply into and had no self control and his parents still did not act to intervene and help Johnny, but remained in denial to the community that there was a problem at all. There were community meetings and we were told what a good boy he was as he was, actually helping another neighbour look after things. She had just lost a 20 something year old developmentally disadvantaged son to the ravages of cancer. She herself was terribly ill with resperatory disease and she shunned often-given offers of help with shopping because her neighbour Johnny was looking after her...... she had given Johnny her bank card and her password and he took money out to pay for things for her. She had recently come into an inheritance from her Mother who had recently passed away. It was all in the one account and Johnny relieved her of $51,000 ontop of her shopping bills to partially pay off his drugs debts, to buy a car and to feed his crack-cocaine habit. Johnny of course crashed the car and has an off-work claim with insurance paying him a living allowance. Yes he still has his job at the school to return to! When the neighbour finally caught on she called the police and Johnny has been to court three times now but its been put off again because "he cannot find a lawyer". Because he has a job and income, the court will not appoint one for him. He still lives here and has been arrested again for threatening behaviour to his neighbours and breaking the terms of his release, but he is now out on bail and he is still buying and using hard drugs.
I hope he does go to jail. I hope he is ordered to pay back, somehow in time, the money he stole from an ailing nighbour he befriended and deceived. I hope that there is a rehab program that may take him 6 or more years to get straight on. But most of all, I hope that his parents stop being in denial that it is their total hands-off parenting and lack of responsive action years ago which caused the problem when Johhny started to go off the rails, when his elder brother started to go off the rails and that now another very young child is going to grow up without the benefit of a father's guiding hand.
This is a supreme example of the dysfunction of kids not being trained and educated, watched and supervised by their parents.
As a footnote to this, in case you are wondering what kind of neighbourhood I am living in......this is 6 out of 66 homes. Other kids who have grown up here at the same time have become RCMP officers, school teachers, technologists, air force pilots, contractors , shop keepers, dental assistants, nurses, construction workers, some are working on becoming lawyers, engineers, tradespeople, physio-therapists....... doesn't it just go to show what happens when older people, in this case parents, are not there enough to keep things straight. It's hard for single parents. They deserve all the assistance they can get. Don't be afraid to help a kid who has a single parent. Check with the parent that its OK to be there, to be a friend, but do ask. If you know there is a family dysfunction, try to befriend the kids in a non judgemental way and don't be afraid to be a friend and a surrogate. It won't always work, but if it helps just ONE.......
And finally, what happens to the hands-off parents. Well, Johnny's father, who has been in hands-off mode, in total denial, looks like death warmed over. He cannot ignore the fact that his son should be going to jail. The whole community knows it and we are glad and hopeful it will happen. Perhaps some rehab will be possible and forced upon him, something his parents should have done a long time ago..... We don't want this kind of thing happening in our community. We were willing and able to help if the parents were willing to say "Yes, we have a problem.... and any help would be appreciated". But the community was attacked as though they were attacking. The Father has deteriorated and looks really sick. The Mother hasn't changed at all, either in her denying manner or her aggressiveness, as though we are all out to get her and her family. A lot of people who cared have reached the end of their tether and would quite happily invite them to leave our community and find their peace somewhere else.
Somehow, deep down, I think we can forgive the parents, even now, if they can find a way to forgive themselves. The son is, alas, I believe beyond redemption.
I live in a small cluster of houses which to all intents and purposes forms a small village within the bigger city. Our little community is run as a co-operative and much to my suprise I have lived here now for almost 26 years. Over the years some families have moved away and some have been here even longer than I have, but because of its nature and physical structure, inwardly focussed, we tend to know our neighbours and make welcome the newcomers. For sure there are some tensions here and there, but overall it has been a great place to raise two sons, a relatively safe environment where parents keep their eyes also on other people's kids, which brings about safety, security and a sense in the kids that they are not going to get away with too much. At the same time, it allows them to play and experiment with life in a pleasant and secure environment.
As a result of all this we forgo a degree of the anonimity and a modicum of the privacy which may be had from living anonimously on the street in the gridded city, where many do not know or even speak with their immediate neighbours. This latter environment is surely all a part, especially in large conurbations, of the reason why we see anti-social behaviours, territorial gang wars and a sense that nothing that goes on in your life is a concern of anyone but your own family, the isolationism of the modern city.
So in this alternate, rather socialised environment, where we run our community interests together, it is possible to see the wonderful things that happen when well-raised kids with well-adjusted and responsible parents (and their neighbours and friends) live in co-operative respect. It is possible to look at the kids as they grow up, mature and start their own lives, and to feel proud of them, knowing that you have provided a small piece of who they are, as much as how your friends and neighbours have contributed to whom your own kids have become from the modelling they have had. This is an example of the well-worn phrase "o raise a child takes a village."
On the other hand however, this close proximity and relatively social atmosphere also allows one a window into the ongoing lives of the more dysfunctional families which one may not otherwise see, except in the final headlines which hit the local news. As one observes more, one is far more aware of the results of dysfunction.
Social dysfunction can take many forms. It is an eye-opener to live within it, because much though we are a little different here, we are also very much the same as any group of people. We are individuals and we do all carry along with us the skills which we have, or have not developed in our lives. We bring together our own "things" and we then add them together in sometimes interesting agglomerations called family units. All the families are quite different on the surface and as you get to know them you begin to realise just how different, and yet how alike. One can observe a situation and say quietly to oneself "There, but for the Grace of God, go I..(or we).". It has been an interesting 26 years to be honest.
I can think of families which on the surface of things (and even down deep) are wonderful families who have been really hands on and yet one of the kids grew deeply troubled in the drug culture, had the fully armed Police SWAT team here once. He was eventually cruelly murdered by that culture just as he was finally trying hard to get his act together. I can think of a single Mother of two kids, a well adjusted and responsible daughter who has moved away but stays in touch with her Mother yet who has a brother who is heavily into the drugs trade. I can think of a couple with their two kids, a boy and a girl, where the Mother moved out leaving the father to look after his kids. The father was and is a hard working guy, the daughter has grown up to be a very pleasant and responsible young woman, but the son has always been a serious trouble maker and is in jail for drug-related offenses. I can think of a very respectable elderly widow with several children who come by and look after her, yet whose son has been in jail the last four years after being caught with illegal firearms, a very large amount of cocaine, a larger amount of cash, had a large house in one of the most "elite" parts of the city and drove expensive sports cars. He is about to be released soon to his Mother's custody, which means he is moving back in, or so he thinks, but in the interest of protecting ourselves and the well-being of the large number of young children around here, we are moving to prevent it. I can think of an intact family where social drugs have been part of the culture for a while and where attitudes seem more than a bit strange and their two daughters seem to have mixed with a crowd of not so nice friends who have been welcome in the family home and who were somehow (though of course no-one knows how) mixed up in the fatal shooting on the street outside their house of one of the young men. Their house is now a fortress with video cameras attached to all approaches to the house.
And then there is "Johnny". Why have I separated Johnny out? Well its because three of the previous examples all relate to families where for a variety of reasons, there was no man in the house and the Mother was doing her best to provide. In most cases these Mothers could not be in any way faulted for their efforts, or the results they got from the way they raised their kids. In the case of the Motherless home the Father did his best to keep his son straight, so it is clearly not a matter of lack of effort or awarness of the situations. In the case of the "fortress" house I believe it can be attributed to the general anti-social nature of the parents and their lack of guidance and discipline which brought a gun-death to their doorstep and a lack of social or personal responsibility being taught, in that the kids and their pals simply won't cooperate with the police in identifying the shooter.
And then....there is Johnny. Of all of these troubling social cases this one interests me and troubles me the most. The circumstances here are different, perhaps subtley, but different. Johnny has two parents and two siblings. His elder brother was in trouble with the law and had some personal challenges and probably still struggles with some of them, but he stays away from here now. Johnny's sister lives in her own place here now and has a young child, but no husband to play the father role for the child. Johnny lived with his parents and he is now in his mid 30's. A while ago, the parents moved from their generously comodious house in the cluster to a small house. I think that everyone knew that the change had a lot to do with pushing Johnny out of the nest.
Over the years Johnny has been, at least in memory, a socially challenged kid, rude, nervous, a difficult person. He had however held some part time jobs which gave him some responsibility, working as a camp counsellor for young kids and more latterly as a support worker for kids in High School, though how he got there I am not sure as he has little in the way of formal qualifications. We, their neighbours, were always a bit surprised at him holding these positions, including driving the camp mini-bus full of kids, because Johnny was a known pot-head, a consumer of seemingly large amounts of marijuana. This grew to be more and more of a concern when Johnny's mother made arrangements, when they moved, for Johnny to be assigned one of the 1 bedroom apartments in the cluster. Now on his own, Johnny's behaviour started to become quickly more and more erratic. Some of us took the opportunity to talk to his parents about the observations but they were in total denial about the situations and chose not to see this as a neighbourhood caring about the family and about Johnny....their response was that he is a grown man, living in his own place and they took no steps to be involved with him, something which I believe had been the case all through his growing years. His Father is no example of strong manliness, but deep down he knows that there is a problem. He took no proactive stance to help his son, just improving his own situation by moving Johnny sideways into his own residence.
Well it became more and more obvious that Johnny was moving onto harder drugs. Some times he is seen walking like a matchstick man. His habit was becoming more and more expensive. As well as his "deliveries" from 10 second meetings with a green Honda CR/V from the dial-a-dope service, he started to bring 12-13 year old children home from his duties at school and take them into his place. His parents denied that it was possible. It seemed that everyone knew about this but his parents. Johnny was trafficing. The word on the street was that he was in debt. We grew afraid that some not very nice things may start to happen to Johnny. One night, his sister, who has the same initial, and lived two houses away, had her front door kicked in and her home invaded by several men looking for Johnny. She fled and they left, unable to find him and not realising that he was 2 doors away.
Clearly Johnny was in trouble. He was playing in a game he was too deeply into and had no self control and his parents still did not act to intervene and help Johnny, but remained in denial to the community that there was a problem at all. There were community meetings and we were told what a good boy he was as he was, actually helping another neighbour look after things. She had just lost a 20 something year old developmentally disadvantaged son to the ravages of cancer. She herself was terribly ill with resperatory disease and she shunned often-given offers of help with shopping because her neighbour Johnny was looking after her...... she had given Johnny her bank card and her password and he took money out to pay for things for her. She had recently come into an inheritance from her Mother who had recently passed away. It was all in the one account and Johnny relieved her of $51,000 ontop of her shopping bills to partially pay off his drugs debts, to buy a car and to feed his crack-cocaine habit. Johnny of course crashed the car and has an off-work claim with insurance paying him a living allowance. Yes he still has his job at the school to return to! When the neighbour finally caught on she called the police and Johnny has been to court three times now but its been put off again because "he cannot find a lawyer". Because he has a job and income, the court will not appoint one for him. He still lives here and has been arrested again for threatening behaviour to his neighbours and breaking the terms of his release, but he is now out on bail and he is still buying and using hard drugs.
I hope he does go to jail. I hope he is ordered to pay back, somehow in time, the money he stole from an ailing nighbour he befriended and deceived. I hope that there is a rehab program that may take him 6 or more years to get straight on. But most of all, I hope that his parents stop being in denial that it is their total hands-off parenting and lack of responsive action years ago which caused the problem when Johhny started to go off the rails, when his elder brother started to go off the rails and that now another very young child is going to grow up without the benefit of a father's guiding hand.
This is a supreme example of the dysfunction of kids not being trained and educated, watched and supervised by their parents.
As a footnote to this, in case you are wondering what kind of neighbourhood I am living in......this is 6 out of 66 homes. Other kids who have grown up here at the same time have become RCMP officers, school teachers, technologists, air force pilots, contractors , shop keepers, dental assistants, nurses, construction workers, some are working on becoming lawyers, engineers, tradespeople, physio-therapists....... doesn't it just go to show what happens when older people, in this case parents, are not there enough to keep things straight. It's hard for single parents. They deserve all the assistance they can get. Don't be afraid to help a kid who has a single parent. Check with the parent that its OK to be there, to be a friend, but do ask. If you know there is a family dysfunction, try to befriend the kids in a non judgemental way and don't be afraid to be a friend and a surrogate. It won't always work, but if it helps just ONE.......
And finally, what happens to the hands-off parents. Well, Johnny's father, who has been in hands-off mode, in total denial, looks like death warmed over. He cannot ignore the fact that his son should be going to jail. The whole community knows it and we are glad and hopeful it will happen. Perhaps some rehab will be possible and forced upon him, something his parents should have done a long time ago..... We don't want this kind of thing happening in our community. We were willing and able to help if the parents were willing to say "Yes, we have a problem.... and any help would be appreciated". But the community was attacked as though they were attacking. The Father has deteriorated and looks really sick. The Mother hasn't changed at all, either in her denying manner or her aggressiveness, as though we are all out to get her and her family. A lot of people who cared have reached the end of their tether and would quite happily invite them to leave our community and find their peace somewhere else.
Somehow, deep down, I think we can forgive the parents, even now, if they can find a way to forgive themselves. The son is, alas, I believe beyond redemption.
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