Dropouts, Like Us

I was talking with a teacher, down here in Florida today. She was lamenting about kids having little interest in school, and that half her kids were dropping out. We talked about solutions, but curiously, the more we got into it, the more we could see that there are no solutions within the context of normal parameters.

She said that kids can think no further ahead than a few weeks, and that their only interest was in satisfying sensual pleasures. Alcohol, drugs, sex, and money were their chief concerns. (same as most parents!). And we wondered how many parents would like to return as a student to the school their kids attend, and put up with all the social pressures and competition. The kids feel trapped.

There are reasons that kids are dropping out, and these reasons can’t be nullified through reasoning. Teens are not going to listen to rationale, and threatening them with a life of destitution if they don’t memorize a bunch of junk they cannot relate to does no good at all – because they can only plan ahead for a short period of time.

We can’t say that kids are not challenged, this has nothing to do with it; kids don’t want challenges. Like us, they only want constant pleasure. The difference is; we want pleasure so badly that we are willing to sacrifice our time and sweat in order to get it. The kids aren’t.

Kids are impatient. They look around and see what their parents are going through in order to support them, and the kids, although they might not say anything, want out. Why struggle through school and everything else just to end up again struggling through life? Therefore, many kids don’t look upon their parents as virtuous, but rather as fools. So the kids take short cuts.

How could you change minds such as these that are sharp enough to see the hypocrisy of our educational system, a system that merely spits out clones of yesterday and insures that the alumni will go down the same road? You can never change these sharp minds; it’s far too late, and they are far too astute. All you can do is provide vocational schools to help pick up the pieces of those who finally do decide to knuckle under to the pressures of a mechanical society, and provide prisons for the rest.

The reason that it’s hopeless is that as a society we have lost our hearts. We have removed our hearts from our children, from ourselves, and given our hearts to something else. We have lost our interest in the important things in life, and expect our kids to do better than that. How can they when all they have is us to emulate?

So the solution, if there is one, is to stop kidding ourselves by blaming our kids. We need to begin looking closer to home. It’s a classic psychological escape to blame someone else, create a goal, set up an ideal, because when we do these things, we can escape from what is real. What is real is where we are right now, not where we want to be, but what we are doing this moment, this day. What we plan to do in the future has nothing to do with today; only today is real, and the kids instinctively know this.

Today they are in boring classes being indoctrinated with things that they will never use. They don’t worry about tomorrow. Today is their reality, and they are absolutely correct in this. They are ahead of us. But the problem is; because of the state of mind that they are in, only sensual pleasures can fill the void they are experiencing, This is no different from us, except that we accept responsibility because society says that we must , and we are fearful conformists.

How can all of this change? It can you know. Many people have created unbelievable changes in themselves, and in the process rediscovered their hearts. They usually discover these things because of a trauma or terrible suffering – the aftermath of an accident or illness, the recovery from an addiction. This is why there is hope for these kids. They will have problems, and from these problems will surely emerge a more spiritually mature society.

Someday, maybe some of these kids will do something really radical, such as teaching their young children about their children’s own hearts and minds. No indoctrination of somebody’s idea of this or that religion, which the kids see through all too easily as hypocrisy, but actually teaching them how to understand themselves. If that ever happened on a large scale, these children, because of the shifts in consciousness that result from this kind of emphasis would see life from an entirely fresh perspective.

Then schools would no longer be baby-sitting empires filled with inane conceptualizations and theories. Schools, instead would be active places of discovery. Colleges would no longer be money-making apparatuses turning out moneymakers, and merely prolonging the baby sitting process with drugs, sex and alcohol as incentives. They would instead become centers of open innovation, places where the heart can be found again and humanity seen once more as sacred, and not just marks to feed the insatiable money machines.

This could all start happening now, but it has to begin with the little ones. Teach them how to sit quietly and watch their minds and hearts. Don’t brainwash them, let them find their own truths, and with a little help from their parents, they will.

Maybe parents will find their hearts again as well.

Copyright © E. Raymond Rock 2007. All rights reserved

Article Source: http://www.new.citynewslive.com

E. Raymond Rock of Fort Myers, Florida is cofounder and principal teacher at the Southwest Florida Insight Center, www.SouthwestFloridaInsightCenter.com His twenty-eight years of meditation experience has taken him across four continents, including two stopovers in Thailand where he practiced in the remote northeast forests as an ordained Theravada Buddhist monk. His book, A Year to Enlightenment (Career Press/New Page Books) is now available at major bookstores and online retailers. Visit www.AYearToEnlightenment.com

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