With the return of the school year, why not focus on creating a civil environment to learn and teach? Much has been written about what such an environment would look like. Respect, inclusivity, and diversity are considered civil characteristics; schools are expected to conform to and reflect on them throughout academic and extracurricular activities. One cannot argue that these are worthy goals; however, the challenges to achieving them are often marginalized or ignored.
The two specific gates to creating civility in schools are antiquated systems and poor parenting. Systems that worked decades ago have become overwhelmed and outdated with new technologies, increased responsibilities, and a diminishing supply of resources, including teachers. For example, I have chatted with many students who have shared how challenges abound in their schools, where students with learning disabilities are taught in the same classes as other students. This dynamic creates an unnecessarily stressful situation, is unfair to everyone, and reduces efficiencies of both learning and teaching. As stress levels go up, civility goes down. Educating our youth needs to be a higher priority when allocating financial resources. Increase the resources and watch the stress levels decrease and test scores improve.
Poor parenting is a much more formidable challenge. Thanks to significant scientific research into trauma and its long-term effects, we can begin to understand how parenting influences children both short and long-term. Most of us grew up in households where there was little understanding of the effects on children’s emotions caused by the physical, mental, and emotional stress from parents.
Parents must navigate a much different world than their parents and grandparents did and never had the opportunity to discover and learn how to adjust to this new terrain. The situation is likely to improve only with a significant learning curve. This scenario presents real problems because of the changes in family dynamics over the past few generations.
For example, both parents must now hold jobs, sometimes more than one, to make ends meet. As a result, the American Dream has fallen by the wayside, with soaring financial mismanagement on the part of the government due to incompetence and the power and control model they live by. In Canada, the rights listed in their Charter of Rights are inaccessible to most citizens. The inability to achieve and maintain a decent lifestyle has become the norm, and children pay the heavy price of not having their parents around after school to ensure homework gets completed and they stay out of trouble.
As a result, most families live in a chaotic world filled with unnecessary stress and fear. This overwhelming sense of unsafety makes it impossible to thrive and reason. We need to feel safe so we can concentrate on things other than regaining a sense of safety. This makes learning far more challenging, especially when students bring their emotions to school. What are teachers supposed to do?
Fellow civility authors Jay Remer and Michael Benedict are co-writing a new book that addresses personal barriers to achieving a civil life while outlining helpful solutions anyone can implement. This post is the seventh in a series of weekly, solutions-based articles.
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