I was talking to my girlfriend, a teacher, the other day, about the American education system. We were reminiscing about how teaching is hard because its not the kid's fault, its mostly the parent's fault for not providing their children with a healthy home environment.

This was not only my girlfriend's sentiment, this is the general sentiment I hear from most of the girls I know who are teachers. ( And I know quite a few ) Also, this is something I have noticed myself. From the several instances I had to deal with kids (like at CASA, camping trip, and on the bus), I find that their bad behavior and rude attitudes are the handy work of their stupid parents.

Now, before you go off talking to me about what is considered “good” and how we go about measuring that, I am going to ask you to shut up. I am not interested in having a philosophical argument about the definition of “good”. To make it simple, I am just going to assume that we all know what good is. Its like what that judge said, “I cannot define porn, but I know it when I see it.” Same is true for “good”.

Anyways, back on track to my point about how to improve education… My girlfriend suggested that to improve education, we need to start by improving the environment that kids are taught in. She argued that old schools, dirty playgrounds, outdated books, and lack of resources, will not make kids feel good about themselves. She hypothesize that we are all a product of our environment, and if kids are given an unhealthy, poor environment to study in, they will just become poor and intellectually unhealthy kids. She suggests that we should build nice schools, have clean playgrounds, and provides kids with the best resources available so that they can perform better. In her opinion, its easy to become a bad child, if you are always exposed to bad things. I completely agree with her on this and I can relate. For example, when I drive my old honda civic, it makes me feel poor. Because I felt poor, I didn't care what other people think of me. I had this attitude about me that was like “fuck them, those rich bastards.” But now, that I am no longer driving my old civic, I don't feel that way that much anymore. I just feel normal. I don't have this weird defense mechanism lurking around me anymore. My point is, if I can feel that way about a car, kids probably feel the same way about their education when they have to use old books and go to a broken down school.

Although I like my girlfriend's theory, I would like to expand this theory even further. I personally believe that the government need to spend more money on social programs. And I think that parents should be punished for their children's bad behavior. For example, there needs to be more after school programs so that kids don't go stand around after school or cause trouble. If kids do not show up to these programs, the parents are held liable, and the parents can go to jail or have to pay a fine. Also, parents should be forced to go to parenting school. They need to be taught how to discipline their children and they need to be given the proper resources to do so. Basically, my idea is to force parents who cannot teach their children properly, to give their children up to authority so they can be taught. And if the parents are just as dumb as the child, then they should be brought in and taught too. For example, lets say you have a family where the parents don't care about their child and just let the child do whatever they want. In this case, the government should step in and force the child to attend mandatory tutoring every day after the child get off of school, and on the weekend. The parent's wages will be garnished to pay for the child's tutoring and they can only get off the list when they have completed a certain amount of hours of parenting classes.

How can we identify these families you ask? Simple. If a child is reprimanded by their teacher numerous times, or the child has a history of trouble with the law, the family will be put on the list. You may think this is a hard task, but if you ask my girlfriend, she can name right off the top of her head all the kids she has problems with. Those kids, AND their families all need to be reprimanded.

Why will this work? Nowadays we always punish the child, but never the parents. Kids can get sent to the principals office, but the parents don't have to do anything. My reasoning is, we need to start punishing the parents too, because the parents are the real reason why kids are bad in the first place.

That reminds me. This system is designed to work with small children. Kids in elementary and middle school. This is because bad attitude is learned at a young age. If we can stop it at the source, then we can help control it later. By the time a child reaches high school age, it would be too late for something like this to work.