Our society values productivity over life.

Look around. The signs are everywhere.
Ecosystems are collapsing.
A vast % of the population is now on psychtropic medication.
Our minds are bombarded by absurd corporate, scientific, political, religious messages/marketing/advertising/nonsense thousands of times a day.
All these powerful interests keep us all confused to maintain power.
Adults barely understand how thier minds work with this onslaught/deluge of information/mis-information.
My gosh, can you imagine how a child copes?
I’m sorry you are seeing what you are seeing at DHS but is it really that suprising?

This will never change until children are taught how to think, not what to think.

We have entered a new age. The culural period of the Renaissance created tranformatoin of the way people thought about everything…. politics religion, science, intellectualism, etc. This period lasted almost 500 years. I was recently reading that we are going through the same type of radical transformation…however instead of 500 years its happening in about 30 YEARS.

Can you say future shock?

You wonder why people are drugged up, you hear about mass killings all the time, we are killing the planet before our own eyes and people can’t even see it because they are so confused.

Its no wonder kids are on pharmaceutical drugs to cope.

Perhaps our generation is addicted to thinking and now our thinking has run seriously amok. Teach a kid about his mind and the tricks it plays. Let him notice the endless cycles of thinking his mind gets trapped in. Teach him how his mind works so he can become clear.

One more repeated chat to have with the kids as they grow–do not share hats, combs, brushes or pillows, stay with a buddy when walking around town, no trick or treating over age 12, no parties in the back of elementary schools, roam but let your parents know where you are, leave any event where you feel uncomfortable, call your parents if the police or legal system want to question you, and do not share or take any kind of medication from anyone but authorized adults, no matter what they claim.

Frankly, I don’t see Decatur High as immune to this problem at all. I have a very open teen boy (as teen boys go) and am very aware of the fact that ADHD meds are being passed around at DHS as “study aides” (along with other drugs). The problem is that a couple of kids start doing it, then others think they are at a disadvantage so they start in on it too.

Summer is too short here for high schoolers to get involved in meaningful jobs/ internships/programs and still fit in any family time for vacations, much less a significant amount of time just relaxing.

Also, many kids who do sports or extracurricular activities at DHS feel that they can’t go on family trips on all of the so called “school breaks” because they are pressured to attend practices or games that are scheduled even though the week is supposed to be off. Add to that assignments that are often handed out over the breaks, and the weeks off really aren’t the wonderful “rest time” that CSD intended… at least not for the students… maybe for teachers.

In addition, DHS students not only have their AP and substantial summer reading loads and projects (to get done in 8 weeks rather than a full summer), but now they have sophomore and senior projects to work on in June and July. It seems like we could get the curriculum done in the 180 days that are available… kind of like they used to do when I was in school.

Maybe I’m going to be raising a bunch of slackers, but I think teens need a little down time when they aren’t thinking about an assignment, big game, test, project, etc. That time used to be summer when I was in high school. Somehow I managed to relax and enjoy my summers/school breaks but still get into a competitive college and eventually become a lawyer…… without the use of amphetamines to get the work done.

On a side note, I dropped one of my girls off for sleepover camp this past weekend. At the nurse check-in stand, I was amazed that probably more than half of the kids were checking in meds. I have a sickening feeling that most of them were ADD meds (I hope not), and this concerns me.

Am I just showing my age or laziness, or have times changed so much that schools have to impose constant rigor to the point where kids are drugging themselves just to keep up? What does this mean for these kids and our society when they are all adults?

Kyle Wingfield had a great comment on the AJC blog the other day (although i’m generally not in agreement with all that he says):

“So, maybe the questions we ought to ask ourselves are not how much to spend, and where, but whether we can afford to subsidize people’s choices to live far from work — and, if so, whether there’s a cheaper and smarter way to do that.”

http://blogs.ajc.com/kyle-wingfield/2012/05/24/t-splost-is-traffic-really-a-problem-in-atlanta/?cxntfid=blogs_kyle_wingfield

Of course, this comes from a Penn State grad who has been following the opening of the Jerry Sandusky trial all day