A World Under Siege What or who is teaching your kids and what?
Home Schooling is obviously, again growing in strength. The world's original and most successful educational system has
been resurrected from history as families across the country are seeking answers to the alarming problems, lack of education
and unethical character being built into our Children’s belief systems.
For articles warning against Charter Schools and a vast amount of home school info you must see;
Home School Legal Defense Association (Website HERE)
In a world gone rogue, family values crumbling and our public schools refusing to teach ethical character, but rather, re-
engineering their thought in order to assimilate them into conformity, children are to often left to decide right from wrong by the
merit of the medias.
Because school boards have adopted Social Engineering (Link to article HERE), many moms, and even some dads, are giving up
the expensive homes and cars to stay home in order to home school their kids.
Here is a website that deals primarily with children's education concerns - Issues in Education (HERE)
It is good to give your child a strong foundation before they step out into the world, however, there are major drawbacks to our
current form of public education. Do not baby your kids!
It is imperative that you teach them that the allures of this world are much like a trap.
Warn them where these traps are so when they get there, and they will, they will know how to avoid them. Please do not set
them up to fail, teach them how to say "No" to the toughest of worldly characters.
Excessive praise may be doing kids more harm than good.
A new study shows that when kids are “overpraised,'’ they lose their will to do better.
In today’s modern society people appear to place to much focus on self-esteem, self-actualization and confidence building,
rather than on honesty and character building.
Parents and even some teachers may be giving real goals and achievements a rather short shrift.
Eighth graders in Korea and the United States were asked whether they felt they were good at math.
Among the American students, 39 percent said they were excellent at math, compared to just 6 percent of the Korean eighth
graders.
But the reality was somewhat different;
The Korean kids scored far better in math than the over-confident American students.
The notion that you can praise a kid too much is heresy to parents and teachers who have long believed that building self-
esteem should be the cornerstone of education. And if kids believe in themselves, the thinking goes, achievement will naturally
follow.
However, confidence doesn't always produce better students, rather humility does.
"Scholastic cites" a 2006 report on education from the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center found that countries in which
families and schools emphasize self-esteem for students lag behind cultures where self-esteem isn’t a major focus.
The problem with this “rah-rah mentality,'’ as the magazine describes it, is that it can take away the sense of satisfaction that
comes from genuine achievement.
“Self-esteem is based on real accomplishments,” Robert Brooks, faculty psychologist at Harvard Medical School, told the
magazine. “It’s all about letting kids shine in a realistic way.”
However, the downside of too much praise is that kids may start to focus on the reward rather than what they are learning.
Worse, failure can be devastating and confusing for a student whose confidence is based on an inflated ego, rather than on his
or her actual abilities, the magazine notes.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't praise our kids or that teachers shouldn’t encourage self-confidence, but rather, self-esteem
should be the result of good grades and achievement, and not based on false accomplishments.
Parents and teachers should be specific rather than general when they dispense praise.
An example of general praise is telling a child, “You’re smart.'’
Specific praise would be to say, “You did a good job reading,'’ or “You did great on your math test.'’
Kids who receive general praise about their abilities are more likely to exhibit “helpless” behavior when they encounter problems
with learning, compared with kids who receive specific praise about their achievement on a task.
The reason appears to be that when a child who knows she’s is a smart girl, feels defeated if she has trouble reading a
sentence. But a child who has been told she is a good reader is more likely to have confidence in that specific ability and work a
little harder to tackle a more difficult book.
In a nut shell; If we give positive feedback, followed by positive tips on betterment, we grant our children the desire to further
achieve, rather than rob them of a desire to improve.
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