I just came across a passage in Michael Ende’s famous book, “The Neverending Story”, a passage which eerily reminded me of one of the reasons we wish to found a better kind of school:
… to a schoolboy arriving very very late, the world around the schoolhouse always seems to have gone dead. At every step he felt the fear rising within him. Under the best of circumstances he was afraid of school, the place of his daily defeats, afraid of his teachers, who gently appealed to his conscience or made him the butt of their rages, afraid of the other children, who made fun of him and never missed a chance to show him how clumsy and defenseless he was. He had always thought of his school years as a prison term with no end in sight, a misery that would continue until he grew up, something he would just have to live through.
But when he now passed through the echoing corridors with their smell of floor wax and wet overcoats. when the lurking stillness suddenly stopped his ears like cotton, and when at last he reached the door of his classroom, which was painted the same old-spinach color as the walls around it, he realized that this, too, was no place for him. He would have to go away. So he might as well go at once.
…
Clearly, school should not be a place of constant fear and humiliation, nor even (for the various bullies there) a place where they hone their basest antisocial instincts. It should never be a prison. It takes a radical shift to reform a prison-like institution into a place of fulfillment, growth, and learning for a life in liberty.
DB, writing for Jefferson Sudbury School, an enlightened alternative school for the 21st century in the area of Fredericksburg, Virginia
I still don’t really know how the interconnection among blogs, tweets, etc. is supposed to work, so I may be going about this the wrong way. That said, the blogger called (or a blogger on?) “Parenting And Stuff” clicked the “like” button here. I get a notification about such “likes”regularly (how these people find my blog posts, I don’t know), and I frequently peek into the posts of those bloggers. This time this led me to a blog post about teen self-injuring: http://parentingandstuff.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/the-frightening-world-of-12-years-old
This blog post and its commentaries prompted me to research the issue a little more. I came across this page on Adolescent Self-Harm: http://www.aamft.org/imis15/content/Consumer_Updates/Adolescent_Self_Harm.aspx
Two things jumped out at me: one, unsurprisingly, was the “fad” dynamic of getting the idea from “friends”, all the more ominous with today’s inter-connectivity through social media which often completely bypasses parents, teachers, and others in a supervisory role. The other one was the overscheduling to which many of our children are subjected nowadays. Early childhood education, high stakes testing, packed school curricula, loads of after school programs, etc. — When can kids still find the time to work out their issues through play and other healthy interaction with friends, family members, and a larger community? When can they still just be kids?