Personal Development In Schools How do you create a better society? This is a question that I have started think about because of all the recent shooting, teen suicides and bully incidents in our country. It seems that with the great opportunities we create in this nation, we also create an environment where mental health issues are the norm.
We promote political correctness, violence, speaking your mind, success and humility all at the same time. I think that one of the issues we have as a society is that we do not know who we are. We don’t even know who should want to be.
There are not any clear paths to personal development or as Steven Hopper said, there are not any clearly defined pathways to adulthood in our society.
If you turn on television, recklessness is all you see. We have reality shows where adults have the maturity level of 8 year old’s. They fight they curse and they are not productive. Although, everyone loves to watch a train wreck, it is our society that has all the injuries. I suppose that is just collateral.
Can you even point to a modern day hero? I can’t think of anyone in pop culture who can be labeled a hero. We have replace heroes with the anti-hero, this character who is morally and spiritual flawed who we champion despite their flaws. After all the favorite saying of the youth is, you can’t judge me. But yet we can, we judge you unmotivated, weak minded and headed for self-destruction.
Robert Ellis, one of the founders of cognitive behavioral theory said that he wanted to see CBT taught in every school in the country. He foresaw the issues we have today. It is now 40 years later and out public schools still do a poor job at teaching personal development.
How does a child really learn how to make great choices and how to stay motivated. Where does their power to say no to foolishness come from. We expect them to automatically learn these things, as if common sense were common.
We set our children up to fail from the start and we pretend that we are shocked when they do stupid things.
As solution is needed. The solution can be found in teaching life skills classes from elementary school until 12th grade. These classes will teach students who to think, how to make decisions, how to stay out of trouble and how to keep their head when everyone is losing there’s.
As the Author Michael W. Shines, famously said, we must teach our children how to become their own advocates in life. Heroes have been absent since we decided that personal needs come before the good of society.
If there is anyone thing that is left to see that is, train your children in the ways that they should be so that they will not lose their way. We no longer parent and we never teach these simple things that help children become adults.
