Wednesday, October 21, 2015

A Society That Treats Its Children This Way Is Failing Badly

When you erase caring, supportive relationships from people's work and school experiences, you endanger the precious balance that allows them to live fulfilling lives.
The style of management that has swept through our workplaces and invaded our schools, depending heavily on fear and intimidation, is steadily eroding the social fabric
As more and more young people who can't and won't accept being tested, barked at, punished for minor infractions, and deprived of recess arts and sports are pushed out of or drop out of school before graduation, and others graduate with a deep sense of pessimism about their futures, we find ourselves facing a youth heroin epidemic of disturbing proportions in suburbs and rural areas.
When you couple that with the gentrification, gang violence, and relentless police surveillance that characterizes the life of young people in low and moderate income urban areas, you get a picture that no one in our political leadership seems ready to face.
When the primary face of authority our young people face consists of testing, punitive discipline, and round the clock surveillance, is it any wonder that the response is rage, and despair.
If you standard for judging a society is how humanely we treat our children, we are failing badly.