Month: April 2014

Dear Kids,

It happens a few times every year, mostly on Mondays after a school break, but occasionally in the winter dimness of an early weekday morning: grumbling, coming from under your bed covers, with the occasional declaration: “I hate school.”

As a kid, school is your “job”, and you have to go every day the same way your Mom and Dad have to go “the office”. (Yes, I know some Moms and Dads don’t go to work, but even those people have things to do every day. Most of them anyway.)

I suspect your “hating” school really comes down to a simple desire to just relax, without demands placed on you. Schools, like offices, are busy places with rules of conduct – no TV or video games – and occasionally you just want a day off. I’m right there with you – we all need a “mental health day” every now and then.

People who aren’t fond of school love to talk about how much stuff you learn that you’ll never use. Beyond reading skills and some basic math, they say, everything else is “trivia” that can be learned as and when you need it, especially with our modern access to the Internet. (I suspect they’re also the ones who don’t actually do well in trivia contests, or who create game shows like Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?.)

These people miss the point. Yes, very often school is about learning and repeating facts, but that’s just the mechanism for learning. Education is about training your mind, about exposing you little by little to the larger contexts that shape everyone’s life, and preparing you to think about them on your own terms. I probably won’t need the encyclopedic knowledge of the Grimsby area I learned from colouring satellite photos in Geography, but I do know how to read a map. I can’t remember the exact year Champlain came to Canada, but I understand how my background has shaped modern culture. I’ve forgotten how to titrate a solution, but I can cook a hot and tasty meal.

All of my current skills and knowledge would have been much harder to learn without the basic concepts I learned in school. Even my ability to still learn new things at all has been made easier by that previous practice. And then there are the social skills I couldn’t help but learn by mixing in with hundreds of other students along the way.

And who knows? Maybe one day someone will ask me a million dollar question, and I actually will know the answer.

Now, if you really hate school, we need to sit down and have a serious discussion, because dropping out isn’t an option. You’ll find examples of successful people who didn’t finish school, but you’ll also find they had other ways of training their minds, and that their success was mostly luck on the order of winning the lottery. Practically speaking, if you have (or will have) any kind of ambition for your life’s work, you’ll need at least a high school-level education, and probably more. And the further you go, the more you’ll find it’s about applying a disciplined mind to solving problems, and not so much about knowing facts.

So yes, school is work, and you’ll occasionally feel the desire to not go, especially since you’re not being paid. But trust me – the day will come when you’ll never have to go to school again. And all that schooling will pay you back every day after.

Love, Dad

[Originally by published on Oakville.com.]

Dear Kids,

I can understand why you might be mad. No kid likes their parents going through their stuff, and that feeling just gets more intense the closer you get to being teenagers. If you were shocked when I pulled that surprise audit of your smartphones the other day, I can completely sympathize.

Actually, I don’t think I can. When I was your age, nobody had the free and easy access to electronics that today’s kids have. The most we had to worry about in our day was that Mom and Dad would read our diary, or find that stash of magazines we kept under the mattress. And we couldn’t get that stuff nearly as easily as you can today, much less carry it around in our pockets.

I myself am a technology guy, strongly tethered to my phone, so it seemed a little hypocritical of me to refuse your requests for one, especially when it lets us keep in touch with each other. You’ll remember I favoured the basic model – it was only by pure luck in that raffle that you ended up with the iPhone. But even “dumbphones” have their problems.

So, the audit. I hope I made it clear to you that its purpose wasn’t to get you in trouble. It’s just so easy for everyone (including grownups) to forget the dangers of a near constant Internet connection, we need to be regularly reminded of a few things…

1. There’s no such thing as “Delete”. Snapchat selfies can be saved, disposable texts can be copied, and anything you post can be shared. And there are archive web engines that record everything they come across. So once something is out there, it’s very difficult and likely impossible to completely remove it. And it could all come back to haunt you someday.

2. The crazy stuff is only a click away. We grownups don’t like to draw your attention to that fact. But it’s just so accessible, even by accident through a simple spelling error in a web address, that you can easily wander into places where your young age makes you vulnerable. Not just from predators – you can be spied on or get computer viruses on these sites. And while it may be tempting to go see what you can see, just remember: once you’ve seen something disturbing or upsetting, you can’t un-see it.

3. Even if you’re being safe, you’re still in danger. This is the most frustrating thing of all, and it’s the biggest reason for the audit. Those seemingly-harmless little game apps you fill your phones with can sometimes be fronts for data theft. Some apps get permission from your phone to access your private photos, or your contact details, and who knows what they do with that stuff? And even the big Social Media sites like Facebook can change their privacy settings without warning – suddenly the stuff you thought was super-private is open for the world to see.

Look, I get it. Sharing is the new way of things, and all this auditing might seem paranoid to you. But the fact is, no generation before you has ever had the technology to communicate with the world like this. We just don’t know what staring into a tiny little glowing square all day is turning us into, or how all this communication will affect our lives as we all get older.

We’re still your parents, and we want whatever you’re turning into to have the best chances in life. So I completely understand why you’ll grumble when I ask to see your phones. But I’m still going to ask.

Love,
Dad