My First Blog 2013 Dedicated To The Teachers Who Teach Listening And Facts!
I like to dedicate my first blog of 2013 to elementary school teachers and all teachers for their love and passion of teaching. I like to thank all of you out there who are teaching the future generations and realize the immense influence you have on the lives of the children of today. With that emphasis on the value of education I like to recommend some more accent on world geography, world cultures and even the world politics in early years.
Attention and emphasis on what is going on out there in the world not only brings the knowledge of the world to the class but it also highlights what we have here in USA. The appreciation of what one has is always easier via comparison.
Appreciation of our voting system, the freedom of speech and the know how of having a voice in our own government can mobilize children to want to become more involved in the politics in their future. By that I don't mean to recruit more politicians, I mean to create more informed citizens. As a nation of people who live in the "government of the people, by the people, for the people” it is of essence that our society should know a lot more about politics. In fact I’m always amazed to see that our nation who has the ability to vote their government in and out of the office has one of the lowest interest and knowledge rates about the politics in general.
Therefore we witnessed many who their sole source of knowledge is biased TV or celebrity news magazines, making crazy contributions to the debates of the past election year. People who do not know a thing about the world around them and never read about politics, people who their weekly reading is about the shoe sizes of celebrities somehow thought since they could vote they should also open their mouth and talk politics!
I did wish they would shut up, but mostly I wished to guide them to a class which teaches politics 101. But more importantly I was thinking of the children in those households and what they were learning from their non-political parents who felt obligated to spew ill-informed knowledge at the dinner table. A friend's son, not yet even double digits in years , said to us while eating at our house one day, "I hate so and so (a kid we all knew) he’s so bossy like Obama!"
(I assure you we were not talking politics at the dinner table and his saying truly came out of left field!)
WOW! Where'd this come from? I immediately saw the dropped jaws of my own older children who did not reply to the uninformed utterance of a child who clearly did not know what he was talking about and was perhpas mirroring the emotional sentiments in his own household in the heat of the election year.
I still think about what the little boy said and where did it really come from?
I'm proud to be able to hang out with people who do not think like me or do not believe in what I believe in. I find shared grounds with them and go on living. I don’t like to shut my door and only allow in people who are exactly like me. I want to have a wide view of the world and this has always brought me deeper insight in terms of educating myself, my children and in some rare cases maybe others!
Learning about facts, listening and common grounds should have a place in schools. Racism, hate and more are taught to children in their homes as early as their pre-school age. We need to have the education which can offer other options to the impressionable youth.
Teachers you're my only hope. War, hate and racism can simply not solve a thing. We must all believe that if we want to go on as a race, we must learn to live together and listen to each other, curb the urge to shut each other out and create conversations to educate ourselves and each other. We must learn to talk about informed facts and truly listen and then may be we "shall not perish from the earth" as our wise man Lincoln said.
In closing please feel free to send a copy of this to the congress!