Even though my three kids are middle-school aged or younger, we're already feeling significant pressure to help them aim at their college career. Regardless of my kids' actual strengths or interests, does every lunch or dinner conversation with the other parents have to include the phrase, SAT? And I don't go anywhere without hearing about strategies to get your kid into an Ivy League school, or conversely, discussions about lesser known "gem" schools we should focus on in the future. I hate the whole thing. The angst that rises in me unbidden just feels like a hangover from when I applied to college. I don't want my children to feel that pressure, but I doubt I can hope to shield them entirely. Did you see the recent New York Times Magazine issue that focused entirely on the strategies and "stories from the trenches" of parents and high school kids applying for college? Ugh. They should market that magazine with Tylenol tablets or at least put a warning label across the front.
I bring all this up, hoping for sympathy, naturally, and because of Marion Jones. The famous (and now she will be in-famous) track star has admitted her great successes from the 2000 Sydney Olympics were the result of her taking illegal performance enhancing drugs. Jones will have to give up her medals and prize money. And this is so very sad, for so many reasons but not least of all, we can see where succumbing to the pressure to win at all costs took her. Can we at least find a teachable moment here for our own children? And teach our children that Jones was wrong, terribly wrong in what she did.
The concepts of ethics is too important to expect our schools to teach on their own. We parents need to teach our children right from wrong. You will start hearing more about the concept of ethics for those on the internet - or as it's been described, cyberethics. There is a burgeoning movement to teach children via a program called the C3 Principles: cybersafety, cybersecurity and cyberethics. Cyberethics lessons will teach that hacking into someone's computer and taking information is just as wrong as breaking into someone else's home. Cyberbullying is just as wrong as bullying someone on the playground. Rules and codes of acceptable behavior must be set in the virtual world, just as they are in the real world. We want our children to learn about cyberethics within the construct of their school system, to have them learn as part of the normal curriculum that when we are online we cannot lie or steal or cheat. Not because we will eventually get caught, as Jones did. But simply because it's wrong.
Message Edited by marianmerritt on 05-19-2008 04:12 PM