“The medicine can be worse than the disease”
Risk management by a school system is a legitimate issue but the implementation of risk management carries its own risks.
Recently a book was written called NurtureShock. It was written by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. The central premise of this book is that many of modern society’s strategies for nurturing children are
in fact backfiring – because key twists in the science have been overlooked.
from the book “Nurtureshock” -](http://www.nurtureshock.com/)
“Teens need opportunities to take good risks. They need more exposure to other adults, and even kids of other ages—and less exposure to teens exactly their age. They need part of their life to feel real, not just a dress rehearsal for college. They will mature more quickly if these elements are in their life.”
One of the big revelations to me personally is how students have gone backward in their development relative to a generation ago. They do not know how to deal with adults, they are losing their creativity, they are not as capable of independent thought and problem solving.
These ‘risk managers’ are creating new societal risks in advancing the pool of low performing students.
Teens ( and younger and older ) people need to understand inappropriate behavior. There are ways to deal with inappropriate behavior.
There are a lot of things that affect student’s academic performance. Should we separate the sexes so there is no risk of daydreaming about the hot guy or pretty girl across the room ?
How about eliminating sports so that there can be no injury. If robotics teams had injuries at the rate sports injuries occurred there would not be a robotics team in the country.
What if a teen in crisis needs to talk to a trusted teacher, mentor, or other adult ? Slam the door and say “get lost”. Refer them to a non-responsive faceless non-trusted government agency that is no good at dealing with a crisis, ( yet another government answer to everything - sheesh - don’t even get me started )
The primary purpose of the policy is to protect the school system from liability, and on a good day hopefully manages some of the risk for the student.
The student is still at risk from others, still not necessarily capable of handling the risk themselves, and society as a whole is no better and probably worse off.
Going off on a different ‘risk’ tangent.
NurtureShock says “Teens need opportunities to take good risks”. Instead of teens taking a negative risk in the backseat of a car, they can join a robotics team and learn how to take positive and safer risks, like a risky game strategy, a risky robot design, how to make a business decision about their team, etc. Learning how to fail, and succeed here is preferable to doing it as an employee or adult head of household.
A society that has eliminated all risks will also eliminate all chance of success and maintaining a leadership position in the world. You only have to look to the other side of the world where they tried to eliminate the risk of sin by implementing the burka. They are stuck in the stone age.
I am all for eliminating risks where it can be done intelligently. But fire walling off the population by age and gender isn’t going to get it done.
Preventing adult / student interaction in a non-classroom environment is backward thinking and doesn’t reflect how students really learn.
Students today just do not get enough interaction with responsible adults. When I grew up I interacted with a lot of adults. Some were great, most were good, and a couple of them creeped me out, but I knew how to run away and take care of myself.
An acquaintance of mine, Vietnam era veteran Clebe Mcclary once told me when he was a kid he had a ‘drug’ problem. His dad ‘drug’ him to work, drug him to church, drug him to school, drug him fishing, and paraphasing - ‘drug him to a lot of rich experiences that allowed him to develop into a man’ -
I had the same ‘drug’ problem. It worked out for me and I personally think a lot of other kids could use a nice dose of appropriate and healthy adult interaction.
Ed