Shaming a Child

The schools we send our children to have a vital mission to fulfill. Teachers at the elementary school level introduce malleable young minds eager to learn, to be exposed to interesting and valuable knowledge, how to make sense of the world they live in. It is also a profoundly socializing experience, throughout the course of a child's early education, to mingle with peers, to take lessons from a qualified instructor, to learn to imbibe knowledge and seek out answers.

For the most part our schools do a fairly acceptable job of it. For the most part, unfortunately, too many teachers - and school administrators - behave as though they have a mundane job, not an elevated professional avocation. Men and women should, in a perfect world, enter the teaching profession only if they have a passion for exciting young minds, enticing them to learn how to learn for themselves, exposing them to fascinating things they had no previous knowledge of, encouraging them to love learning.

It's a demanding vocation, energy-draining and mind-numbing, engaging with eager and sometimes not-so-eager-to-learn young minds. The responsibility inherent in the profession is staggering. That is, if teachers and administrators took their jobs as seriously as they should. For far too many who may have started out as idealists it soon becomes a means to a well-earned pay cheque and little else.

It's tough to constantly entertain and intrigue and enthuse boisterous young children more given to physical expression than intellectual dimensions. For some who excel at the profession, their success at imparting knowledge to their students, and witnessing young minds opening up is its own reward, supplemented by that very nice salary. For most others it is a headache-inducing interplay fraught with frustration.

Those are not the instructors and teachers that most students will recall in their later years with anything approximating gratitude. Which brings us to the unfortunate reality that some schools are going out of their way to play another kind of game; to instill their idea of environmental responsibility in their young charges. As has done a school in Quebec, which teaches its kindergarten children that school lunches should be packed in reusable containers, not plastic baggies.

If schools commit themselves to teaching their charges about nature and the environment and our place within both, they should focus solely on imparting to the children an appreciation of nature in all its forms and manifestations. Teaching respect and an admiration of nature. Most definitely not manipulating a child to feel shame if that child's parents somehow fail the test of responsible environmentalism by packing a sandwich in a disposable plastic baggie.

When a child is made to feel ashamed of his parents' lack of commitment to what his teachers inform him is a stern obligation, by failing to wrap his lunch sandwiches in a washable/reusable plastic container, rather than a disposable plastic bag, this represents a gross interference in a family's right of private choice. Exploiting the feelings of a vulnerable child does no credit to the school system.

The child is punished multiple times by his parents' unforgivable environmental transgression in the mind of the school. It is made public that his parents' lack of commitment to the environment reflects on him personally. He is humiliated by this unwanted attention, and made to feel ashamed, and by extension he is ashamed of his parents' unwitting carelessness in the eyes of the school.

And then he is punished again by being forbidden as a result of this failure, to take part in a draw for a free toy.

What the Laval kindergarten teachers are doing is teaching their young students the misery of humiliation and the value of societal-approved bullying.