48

STOP SHOOTING IN THEIR MINDS

 

 

 Violence in schools has been turning into a more and more common subject in our every day life.   Now it is happening not only in the “wild west” or in “crazy” California.   Death from violence has knocked on our schools’ doors in Minnesota.   The Government can create more and more programs, multiplying special counselors and services, trying to treat the consequences instead of dealing with the cause.   The utilization of the mind-set on education, the cuts of the humanitarian studies at schools, removing world classics from the school curricula, very superficial knowledge of history and culture, insignificance of the arts education — that is all that stops the right side of our kids’ brain from development.   And this is, by the way, the side, which is responsible for the best in us:  our conscience.

 

 I have heard from both American and Russian parents that their kids did not need classical literature.   Their kids are not going to make money or feed their families with the help of Shakespeare or Dickens, Goethe or Dante, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.   So everything they need from school is providing their kids with the elementary knowledge of the English language, some math and profound knowledge of computer science.   Do we realize, how dangerous that kind of mindset could be?   It is devastating and destructive not only for our kids or their generation.  That kind of mindset is giving birth to a new type of a human being: insensitive, cold, feelingless, violent, cruel one-side brained “smart machines”, for whom life does not have any value as it is just part of the game in reality.   Our children do not learn how to feel or how to live through their own or the others’ pain, how to be compassionate to your neighbor, how to treat the others like you would want to be treated, and even worse: how to handle disappointment, loss and even failure.

 

 Literature and history as well as teaching cultural values — this  all contains the human wisdom passed to us through generations and centuries that has been fighting evil in human minds and safeguarding good in human hearts.   Now it is being eradicated like something useless and insufficient.

 

Let’s give our kids a chance: let’s stop shooting in their minds.   Let’s keep them as humans for us, for themselves and for their children.   Let’s give them a classical book, take them to the opera, bring them to the Fine Arts Museum, and tell them about their ancestors… Otherwise their knowledge may turn into a weapon against the others and themselves...  

 

 

 Return to the world’s wisdom, to the classical education, based on creativity and imagination, though using modern technology — those are the main purposes of School Bookvar, which opens its doors not only for Russian immigrants and their kids, but for all those who want their children to be open to other cultures, other languages, other traditions and other wisdom and who are lack of snobbery and are not afraid of diversity.

 

                                                                                                         Svetlana Laboe

                                                                                                        Teacher in School Bookvar