Back to School Means Return to Fear for Some Kids
For some children, those with hidden disabilities and underdeveloped social or emotional skills, the end of summer vacation means resumption of the fears they had managed to set aside while school was out.
Peterborough, Ontario (PRWEB) August 29, 2006
For most grade school children, back to school is a happy time, a time for skipping and playing football, of renewing friendships, engaging in schoolyard activities and get on with that heady job of learning the stuff of life.
For some kids the end of summer vacation means resumption of the fears they had managed to set aside while school was out.
Over the past few decades schools have found ways to identify children with learning problems, accommodated themselves to kids with physical handicaps and taken pride in their ability to provide an equal education for all children. Some children have what are called hidden disabilities, which teachers are not equipped to deal with.
Even some streams of childhood development cannot be addressed by schools because of a lack of time and support from their school boards.
Education systems of modern times were created to provide a basic education to every child and to assist with the intellectual development of as many children as they can. Most address the physical development of kids, introducing them to activities they can continue outside of school so that their bodies can develop the strength and agility they require.
Few schools address, by plan and with full support, the social or emotional development of children. Any prison psychologist can tell us that these institutions are filled with people with underdeveloped or maldeveloped social skills. Any family doctor will attest to the underdeveloped or maldeveloped emotional/psychological skills of many of their patients. It’s time to look at the direction our schools take.
We have become accustomed to believing that psychologists and therapists will put back on track adolescents and adults who have not been able to manage the conditions of their lives. Their patients lack the coping skills they require to manage their current life situations. Therapy helps.
When these medical professionals fail, it’s usually because they don’t have enough time or money to fulfill what their patients need, which is always extensive. When trying to repair a broken adult, money and the time it buys become the key issues.
More than anything else, schools prepare young people for jobs they acquire on graduation and for the lives they will live as single adults in those jobs. However, in today’s post-industrial society, any young adult may have as many as ten jobs in ten quite different occupational fields during their working life.
A post-high school institution can train a young person for only one or two of those many career jobs. Experience must kick in eventually to allow the person to fend for themselves when the formal education no longer satisfies the needs of potential new employers.
In the primary grades of school, we have children learning skills they will use as employees of the near future, but not skills they can use when having to deal with problems in their social lives, problems with their parents or emotional problems they experience.
A child with a crisis involving another child, a parent or the inability to make supportive friendships has the same difficulty learning as a child with a newly acquired bad cold or allergy. The child’s ability to learn is severely hampered and friendships are difficult to make.
In a child’s mind, a social problem involving friends or lack of them, or an emotional problem involving a parent or any emotional problem they can’t cope with always takes precedence over learning new material in class. That child may do adequately or even well on standardized tests, but learning in class is nearly impossible. “Not meeting his potential” is a common report card comment.
Being unable to learn like other kids often results from a fear situation. The child may be afraid of another child, a parent, the teacher or the breakup of his parents, for examples. The fear of not being able to keep up with work his peers are learning easily creates a feeling of inadequacy, doubles the fear.
A child in fear may demonstrate this in ways that adults don’t understand. It may involve acting out in class, stealing from other classmates, fighting in the schoolyard. It may also show as withdrawal from activities others are involved with, which may be interpreted as standoffishness or even arrogance. It may even result in episodes of bullying or other antisocial behavior.
A fearful child is an unknown quantity to adults. Adults with fears find ways to cope, usually by avoiding situations where these will show. Children have no way of hiding from their fears because their location and what they do at most times of the day are regulated by adults. Kids reroute the expression of their fears to take the forms of we call discipline problems.
Schools need to be granted the ability to teach knowledge, skills and coping mechanisms to children, the same material that patients of psychologists and therapists learn as adults to solve their problems.
Only when schools can address the social and emotional development of children will teachers be able to advance the intellectual development of their students with the equality of opportunity promised by their political leaders.
About Bill Allin:
Sociologist and educator Bill Allin is the author of 'Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems' (The Writers’ Collective, 2005).
He taught primary, junior and intermediate classes of all socio-economic categories for nearly two decades, then adults for another two decades. As a result of his close work with kids and his unique personal background, he gained an unusual perspective on children’s needs, social skills and coping mechanisms that other professionals have overlooked.
A feral child who learned to read and write as an adult, Bill holds a Master of Education degree in the Sociology of Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.
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