Feel good or do good?

Apr 26, 2009 Editorial

It has been a week now that our children have returned to school where we are sending them to be “educated”. However, it has long been recognized that schools alone do not, and indeed cannot, perform that critical task.
The old adage, “it takes a village to raise a child”, offers us a clue as to the web of relationships with feedback mechanisms that have to work in unison to produce a well adjusted and productive new member of society.

Today, unfortunately, even in our Guyanese backwaters, our villages have lost their coherence and inter-connectedeness due primarily to external and internal migration, and the job of socialisation of our future generations rests primarily between the school and the family.
The latter has especially had to pick up much of the slack and the added responsibility can be witnessed especially in the area of “play”. It has been truly said that it is on the play fields that our character is moulded; where we learn about fair play, perseverance, team spirit, initiative, honesty, kindness and so many other values that are necessary to take us through the rest of our lives.
We have bemoaned the abdication of most of our schools in utilizing sports as part of the educational curriculum – with the possible exception of Queen’s College.

Our schools have become factories for mass-producing children whose heads are literally crammed full with facts and figures but who have no inkling about reasoning or more importantly, about making moral choices.
In fact, in the obscenely mad rush to earn accolades in producing the highest number of “top students”, parents and schools conspire to confine their young charges to lessons before and after the regular school hours. Where is there time for play?

The Ministry of Education has expressly stated that these lessons are not necessary for excellence at exams and that the curriculum can be comfortably imparted during school hours but this is routinely ignored. The lesson for the young mind is that “winning is everything” and one should do so “by any means necessary”.
In the past, when at home – especially during the weekends and holidays – children would be allowed to play unsupervised in their neighbourhoods – whether city or village. This has practically disappeared and parents, especially middle-class ones, have picked up the American habit of ferrying their children around in a frenetic round of “supervised” activities.

The children, having no opportunity to display any initiative, become automatons that are totally dependent on being told what to do. The adults that are around ensure that the children do not settle the inevitable disputes among themselves and we ought not to be surprised when as adults, these individuals have no skills in settling inter-personal disagreements and resort to verbal or physical abuse.

The parents have unfortunately also picked up the American proclivity of insisting that the children “feel good” rather than “do good”. What this means in practice is that there is a single minded drive to raise the “self-esteem” of the youngster by showering him/her with praise whether deserved or not and neglecting the need for reality-based feedback. While well intentioned, these parents stunt the moral and emotional development of their children.
It has been observed that while some children have high self-esteem, they are self-centered and lack empathy.

Another trap is set by the parents who insist to the child that getting into a high-status school is not important to them, yet they spend huge sums on lessons and books: the subtle pressure is even more insidious on the child and the hypocrisy and insincerity certainly does not constitute moral guidance.

The pressure is really a reflection of parental status anxiety and it appears that the more successful parents are, the greater is their fear of their children failing. However, rather than being comfortable with setting boundaries and allowing children to become disciplined within those boundaries, the parents fall back on the empty praise and “feel-good” hype.

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