A friend of mine recently sent me this article from the New York Times about the adverse effects of praising children. A number of studies have now shown that praising children for their intelligence will actually cause them to try less in the future because they become afraid of failure. When their success is attributed to their intelligence fear of failure arises because then to fail indicates to them that they are not actually smart. Conversely, children that are praised for their effort and taught that effort is the key to success showed improved growth over their peers.
I've noticed that parents and teachers in our society feel compelled to praise children for everything that they do. Sometimes this is taken to ridiculous ends. I've also seen praise be used insincerely and manipulatively. I like how this article suggests a reasonable alternative to a constant stream of praise with encouragement the praise of effort. Kids do need to be encouraged just as adults do. I imagine that telling kids that they'll never amount to anything would be just as damaging, if not more, then telling them that they are great at everything. Instead of either, "you'll do well if you try hard", is more helpful.
I just wanted to point out to everyone that there are some great online books available online at The Spurgeon Archive. in particular I wanted to direct people to his book Come Ye Children—A Book for Parents and Teachers on the Christian Training of Children. I haven't finished the book yet but just from the first few chapter I can tell that it is going to be a gem. If you are a parent or involved in ministering to children then you might want to check out this book.
I've recently come to believe that our society is over-educated in some areas and grossly under-educated in other areas. Let me explain. As I mentioned in my previous post I've been learning a lot of domestic skills lately. This made me think about how dependent I was and our society is on businesses and companies to produce the things that we need. Until I knew how to preserve foods I was dependent on companies to do it for me and to supply me with food for the winter. Before I knew how to sew I was dependent on stores to sell clothing. I realize now how under-educated our society is in some of these basic survival skills. This leaves us in a very weak position should we face a large disaster.
While we're under-educated in this area I think that we're over-educated in academic areas. I went to school for 15 years (2 years post secondary + k-12). What skills do I still use? Well, basic math, reading and writing. I also have a lot of useless factual knowledge buried in my brain. I know that some of my education has helped me be able to think more clearly but I don't think I needed to spend as much time as I did studying to get to the place that I'm at. If I hadn't spent so much time learning useless things I could have learned more practical life skills from my mother. Schools are so driven towards heavy academics. They assume that everyone should strive towards degrees and academics after high school but this is simply not true.
I think that these conditions leave us in a bad position as a society. Not only are we at risk if a disaster occurs but it also affects families. When girls are encouraged through their childhood and teens years to go into academics many of them feel like they have to in order to be successful. Life skills are consequently undervalued. When they start to have families a lot of these woman don't know what to do with themselves and then feel useless. Consequently, a lot of them will look to work for fulfillment and this will affect their family. I don't think it matters if they got through a degree or not. Educated woman as well as less educated woman are trained to think that work is necessary to be useful. Please don't think that I'm saying that woman should stay out of academics. Some woman, especially single or childless woman, may be very happy and useful in these fields.
The push for academics can also have a negative impact on men. Some men are not going to succeed in academics. If they don't succeed school they may feel useless. Trades are also undervalued. This will also have a negative effect on their families.
I've also seen people get absorbed in less then useful education. People spend years working on philosophy or sociology degrees with no idea of what their end goal is. Surely they could be doing something better with their time and money. Why is this considered a respectable thing to do? What I'm trying to get across is that people should be more willing to be happy and respected with out a lot of education.
For those of you that don't know, I've got two toddlers that I'm staying home to raise. Eventually I'm planning on homeschooling my kids. I've recently started thinking about being more intentional about teaching them some academic things like shapes and colours. I was discussing this with my husband and he made a very good point. He pointed out most of the focus in our society is to teach children academic things and we tend to under teach constructive inter-relational skills. I think that this is very true. I think that part of the reason for this is that academic skills are quantifiable. I can look and see that Faith now knows what the moon is or that Paul is counting. We can measure our progress. With inter-relational skills and emotional skills progress is harder to notice or quantify. We can't easily determine how our child measures up to other children. I think that it is a lot more difficult to focus on this because our insecurities feed our desires to see our kid as the best and so we naturally fall into trying to make our children the brightest on the block. For myself I know that I struggle to realize that I don't need to buy my kids fancy educational toys or craft supplies in order have them grow into healthy intelligent adults. A loving stable environment will take them miles further than these aids would. I'm going to try to pour more attention into building my children up emotionally.
I just read a wonderful criticism of the public school system by John Taylor Gatto. I've been sold on the idea of homeschooling for a long time but this has just reminded me of some of my reasons. I think that one of my main goals as a parent is to raise children that can think. If they can think then they can grow and change throughout their entire lives. When I debate the issue of abortion with people I can't believe how many people are really stupid. They seem completely incapable of following a logical argument. It also amazes me how people are sucked in by political propaganda. It seems fairly obvious to me that the public school system does not teach children to think. The vast majority of people don't seem to be able to believe anything that is not the opinion of the majority. I think that we are trained to conform.
Well, I think that I'm done my little rant now. I'll write more of my opinions on this later.