Words from WW Blog

It was a simple conversation that my wife was having with a fifth-grade boy who was watching his brother’s soccer game. When she asked him what middle school he would go to next year, he said that his dad was going to send him to the school where he could have the best soccer experience. It caught my wife by surprise.

In our old traditional ways, we had become accustomed to parents choosing a school or, better yet, a community on the basis of how good the education would be. You know…math, reading, science! However, things have changed. Many parents have changed. Families have changed. Priorities have changed.

Quite honestly, kids are reflections of their parents, and their parents’ priorities. The cynicism Dad has toward life is filtering down into the next family generation. In like manner, the time and energy the parents put into the leisure activities of life are also finding their way into the next generation.

Parents communicate what is important by showing up at every athletic contest, but never at a parent-teacher conference. They show their true colors by keeping track of their seventh-grade son’s football stats, but being disinterested in checking whether he has any missing assignments in any of his classes. They send clear signals of where their priorities lie, when they plead for grace for their daughter whose grades have made her ineligible to play the next week of volleyball matches.

Truth be told, there are many parents who do not believe that education is the vital element for a purpose-filled and productive life. They have been sucked into the lie that colleges will be more interested in their son’s jump shot and their daughter’s spike than their ability to solve a math equation or write a well-thought-out essay.

And so, the ripple effects are middle school kids disinterested in their education and absorbed in the peripherals. Teachers and school administrators get blamed in the media and by their elected officials for test scores that have dipped, but the blame that gets heaped on them is not as great as their frustration trying to teach students who have gotten the impression at home that it’s not important enough to learn.

In writing these words, I recognize that there are a multitude of parents who take seriously their children’s education and have their priorities in order. Their understanding of what their child will need to be successful in life is clear, and they are committed to staying on the course to make it happen.

Sometimes it’s the 20% or even 10% who are unbalanced that leave a sour taste in one’s mouth for the state of our youth and their mentors. We can blame it on the pandemic isolation that has happened, climate change, the price of gas, housing costs, social media, or any of ten thousand other things, but the building wave of troublesome trends has been going on for a while.

Meanwhile, there are more situations of kids basing their lives on being able to “Bend it like Beckham” instead of adding things together that make sense.

This entry was posted on August 26, 2023 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.