Welcome.
This blog will be devoted to exploring some of the issues covered in “The 50 Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School.” And it will also try to update the parade of inanities involving our kids that helped inspire the book. I’ll try to provide links to stories and studies that might have appeared after the book was completed
IT TAKES A PARENT
Saturday, November 17, 2007 (96 reads)
I was a guest on Betsy Hart's show this week. You can listen to it here on the National Review Website.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2007
Charles Sykes and “Adult Supervision”
Charlie Sykes, author of 50 Things Your Kids Won’t Learn in School, just wrote a really great piece for the Wall Street Journal called “Adult Supervision.” In it he describes a culture that seems to want to shroud our kids in bubble wrap. Take the reporters at ABC News, for instance. They recently revealed that — gasp! — many playgrounds have germs! (ABC should see my kitchen. Actually, they shouldn’t.) What’s an overprotective culture costing our children? Charlie Sykes has added it up. Tune in.
LISTEN |
|
|
COMMON SENSE IS COUNTER-CULTURAL
Wednesday, November 14, 2007 (498 reads)
A nice profile in the Washington Times:
Charles Sykes may be a smart guy who knows his way around a computer, but he's not a software mogul.
Why, then, do so many people think that Microsoft founder Bill Gates wrote a list of "Rules Kids Won't Learn In School" that Mr. Sykes first published more than a decade ago?
A successful columnist, author and Milwaukee radio talk-show host, Mr. Sykes mostly blames a number of Internet and individual e-mailers who circulated the list with the false attribution.
It was at first "flattering, but ultimately somewhat annoying," Mr. Sykes says about his list of rules being attributed to a computer genius with a fortune estimated at more than $50 billion.
Why Mr. Gates? Well, it might have been Mr. Sykes' rule No. 11 (in a list of 14) that said, "Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them. We all could."
The rules list "started popping up on thousands of Internet sites" and — despite debunking as an "urban legend" by Snopes.com and others — are still making the rounds.
He doesn't complain that this is unfair, however, perhaps because Rule No. 1 on his list is: "Life is not fair. Get used to it." ...
Read More |
|
THE STRANGE WAR ON HOMEWORK
Wednesday, November 14, 2007 (225 reads)
My piece on The American Thinker:
American students continue to fall behind much of the rest of the world in math and science and recent surveys of their literacy and knowledge of history, civics and geography hover between embarrassing and "Oh my God."
But one of the hottest issues in American education today is the crusade to cut down on "excessive" homework; and the war is being waged not by educrats, but by parents.
Read More |
|
|
|
OUR PERMANENT ADOLESCENTS
Monday, November 05, 2007 (113 reads)
Columnist Suzanne Fields notes that we have a growing-up problem:
Boomers came of age eager to offend everybody but were so indulged that anything that offended them became taboo. The social slights sensitive adolescents always decried were writ large with narcissistic perception codified in political correctness.
Edgar Friedenberg's "Vanishing Adolescent" has been succeeded by books analyzing perpetual adolescence. Charles Sykes, in his "50 Rules Kids Won't Learn in School," looks at what happens to children and grandchildren of boomers who suffered institutional and parental permissiveness. Rule 4 of the rules not learned: "You are not entitled." Examples include "the double latte with cream, Michael Jordan running shoes, a cell phone with limitless text-messaging." "You'll have to work for all of it," he writes, "and then figure out how to pay for it."
Diana West in her book, "The Death of the Grown-Up," says trouble began when children started aspiring to adolescence rather than adulthood. They replaced information with animation: "More adults, ages 18 to 49, watch the Cartoon Network than watch CNN."
An adolescent lurches within minutes from fear and insecurity to self-confidence and bravado. A culture sustains perpetual adolescence at deadly peril. It's our collective identity crisis.
|
|
 |
|