NN&V Exclusive
(Barbara Altman) – Educating our children today has become a major problem in our country.
Why? That is a good question. Why have we settled for mediocrity? Because our family structure changed.
Our children have been given too much power over themselves and their parents’ strength has been taken away by shear virtue of the fact that parents have allowed their children power over them. It may seem strange for this to have happened—we all remember that when we grew up, our parents were in charge of the family, not the other way around.
Now in 2011, parents are left out of the nucleus. The children have their social networks, computers, Twitter, etc., and a life that does not include their parents. This change has caused problems in schools and at home as well.
Instead of the parents having a common area for the computer, the children have a computer in their rooms that are locked, so that parents cannot enter. Is this their house? Do they pay the mortgage or the rent? If not, their room belongs to the family. But families, as I said before, have turned their power over to their children.
We were number one in the world in educating our children and now we are 17. Why is this all right with us? Obviously we have not fought hard enough to change what is happening in our schools.
The schools are being run by liberal thinkers, and knowing this, where have the conservatives been? It is time we took a stand with our legislators and let them know that the time has come to put our children first. We will not elect one legislator who is for social promotion.
We want discipline brought back into the classrooms. We want teachers to stand up to any child who disrupts a class , send him or her to the principal, and then call the parents to the school.
I could go on all day, but one thing is for sure: Just going to School Board meetings and watching the bureaucrats at work is not enough.
Unfortunately, today we find the school boards are mostly made up of government workers and not the butcher, the baker, or the candlestick maker the way it used to be, and that in it self is a problem.
The school board needs to be an independent body that is able to look inside and make its judgments apart from Clark County School District.
If that doesn’t happen, then nothing will change and we will continue to do the same things over and over again expecting different results. We’ll sit back and watch our future work force disintegrate before our eyes.
How in good conscience can we do this to our children?
We need to lobby for our children and make their voices, and ours, heard.
(Barbara Altman is the Chairwoman of The Nevada Innovative Coalition for Education , which has sponsored Forums on Education for the past five years. She also serves on the Board of Beacon Business Education Alliance for the Children of Nevada and the Silver-Haired Legislative Forum committee for Governor Sandoval.)