Parents Must Push, Prod Kids To Learn

The thrill is gone.

- B.B. King

To understand my discouragement, you have to go back some. Back to the dinner table where, night after night, my youngest child regaled us with the wonderful things that went on in school. She rattled on non-stop about what her teacher had said, the lessons she had learned in class, the fun she had had on the playground.

If you didn’t know better, you’d have thought she actually was in school.

But if pressed, Onjel would admit, amid much exasperated sighing and rolling of the eyes, that she was only “pretembering” - that’s “pretending” for those of you who don’t speak child language. Onjel has been rehearsing for school almost since the day she was born.

So it was with no small amount of pride that I watched my daughter prepare for the big day this year.

The other children left the house glumly, like inmates marching to the plug-in chair. But when the big yellow bus rumbled to a stop in front of the house, Onjel beamed like the July sun and climbed aboard her dream.

What a difference a month makes.

Already, it requires blasting caps to separate her from her bed. She flops around like a rag doll and sometimes whines, “I don’t want to go to school today.” School, she says, is “dumb.”

The problem is not an aversion to learning. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Onjel wants to learn everything yesterday. She was disappointed, for instance, that after a whole day in school, she still didn’t know how to read.

In that, she’s much like her 13-year-old brother, Marlon. When he started school, a delighted teacher pronounced him a “learning machine” and said her only problem was keeping up with his voracious desire to know.

But now, the kid slumps off to school each morning as if he were going for a tax audit.

I am stumped. Having tried both punishment and cajoling, I’m no closer to understanding why some kids turn off when it comes to school.

Where does the spark go? What becomes of that urgent need to know?

Maybe routine swallows it. Maybe the ABCs can’t win in the competition with MTV. Maybe an appreciation of learning for its own sake isn’t practical in an era when families are more dysfunctional than functional and attention spans are shorter than Danny DeVito.

Nowadays, it seems you have to trick, push and prod kids into learning.

Sometimes, you hear about educators who have vowed to perform some outlandish stunt - eat a bug, kiss a pig - in exchange for academic performance.

Part of me says, “How undignified.”

The other part says, “Would you like some ketchup on that grasshopper?”

Whatever works. I’ve grown partial to bribery myself.

A couple of years ago, I started paying my boys for good grades, an arrangement that struck me then as a devil’s pact.

But their grades improved, and now, each time I reach for my wallet, I find myself thinking this is the smartest bargain I ever struck.

Moral purity is all well and good, but the truth is: In the struggle to teach your children well, it doesn’t matter how you play the game. Just win.

I say this not out of abandonment of high purpose, but rather, recognition that the hour is late, our kids are losing ground in global competition and the information revolution can leave the ignorant only further behind. I’ve heard social scientists say that the relevant cultural gap of the future won’t be between the haves and the have-nots but between the learned and the unlearned.

Ah, but I am a purist at heart, so I’ll leave you with an image that is pleasing to folks like me:

At the end of her first day of school, Onjel bounded off the bus and into my arms. I asked her what she’d been doing since I had seen her last. Usually in the past, she answered, “Playing.”

But this time, she gave a different answer. “Learning,” she said.

Her voice was emphatic; her eyes were radiant with the pure pleasure of it.

And I found myself hoping she could be ever like this. I stood in the driveway and hugged my little girl for a long time.

xxxx