Re-post jogged by
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1. The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world.
This defies the experience of thousands of years. A close
study of what big people were up to was always the most
exciting occupation of youth, but nobody wants to grow up
these days and who can blame them? Toys are us.
2. The children I teach have almost no curiosity and what they
do have is transitory; they cannot concentrate for very long,
even on things they choose to do. Can you see a connection
between the bells ringing again and again to change classes
and this phenomenon of evanescent attention?
3. The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, of how
tomorrow is inextricably linked to today. As I said before,
they have a continuous present, the exact moment they are at
is the boundary of their consciousness
4. The children I teach are ahistorical, they have no sense of
how past has predestined their own present, limiting their
choices, shaping their values and lives.
5. The children I teach are cruel to each other, they lack
compassion for misfortune, they laugh at weakness, and they
have contempt for people whose need for help shows too
plainly.
6. The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candor. My
guess is that they are like many adopted people I've known in
this respect - they cannot deal with genuine intimacy because
of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a
larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces
of behavior borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate
teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves
to be the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy so
intimate relationships have to be avoided.
7. The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead
of schoolteachers who materialistically "grade"
everything - and television mentors who offer everything in
the world for free.
8. The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in
the presence of new challenges. This is frequently masked by
surface bravado, or by anger or aggressiveness but underneath
is a vacuum without fortitude.