Last week, I described my after-school volunteer experience and what I believe to be wrong with it.
More recently, I read an article about the bottle-flipping trend in middle and high schools, as well as the Facebook comments. Most commenters were teachers expressing their frustration at the distraction it had caused in their classroom. A few said they were glad children had found an activity that forced them to be social, potentially outside, and not in front of a screen.A couple more suggested starting a club for it. When I mentioned the article to my mother, she said that my middle-school sister’s cross-country coach had told the boys on the team, that there was a time and a place for bottle flipping, and that practice was not that place.
But where is that time and place? It is my belief that children are no longer given that free time to do silly things like flip a bottle of water. They must act like the mini-adults we wish them to be. Yet I believe this unfortunate childhood culture shift is causing some of the problems with young people adults often complain about.
Issue #1: Lack of social skills
As mentioned in my previous article, children are given the opportunity to socialize without fear of repercussions in about two to three fifteen minute spurts every day. In my opinion, that is not nearly enough time to learn basic social skills, make close friends or to truly develop a sense of self or community, which is truly a shame. Also, children have more energy, a shorter attention span, and, I believe, a greater need to blow off steam. Consistently cutting recess (particularly for bad behavior) I think is almost counter-productive. Yes, more information might be crammed into a student and discipline meted out, but education on how to be a human being is lost.
Issue #2: Disrespect of authority
While it is quite likely that parents have, in fact, become more lax in the past 20 years, I believe the modern youthful disrespect of authority also comes from another source: too much of it. As previously mentioned, kids are shuffled from authority figure to authority figure on a daily basis. Instead of needing to conform only to the standards of their parents and teachers, elementary kids must now remember and follow the rules of their parents, teachers, babysitters, daycare providers, coaches, scout leaders, church leaders, and so on. At what point, exhausted by the different standards and constant expectation of perfect behavior, will they just give up and act out anyway, realizing it is impossible to please everyone?
Issue #3: Lack of problem-solving skills/critical thinking skills
Along with this lack of freedom and perpetual adult oversight comes the loss of trying things out for oneself. If kids are always being told to follow step-by-step instructions, or called out for doing something different, they will never learn to think for themselves. Continue this pattern through high school, and it’s no wonder why so many students are unprepared for college. All their education has taught them is how to produce work to a standard set by someone else.
While I should attempt to come up with some solutions for the issues I have raised, I don’t know where to begin to start. In a perfect world, a complete overhaul of achievement-obsessed American culture would happen, and all kinds of gifts would be praised, not merely the academic and athletic ones. People, especially children, would participate in activities for the fun of them, not to win any sort of award. I think that’s why the bottle-flipping has become so popular—it is rebellious. It needs no adult supervision. It is fun for its own sake—something fewer and fewer people know.
(Next week, I will talk about the effect of achievement culture on high school students.)
