The shaping of young minds

It has been said that teachers shape and sculpt young minds. They form the future citizens of our ever-changing society. Teachers not only educate, they guide children into bla bla bla... yeah. You get the picture.

So I can tell you this: when we get these kids, some of them have been pretty much molded and sculpted into some unrecognizable masses of crap that often spew obscenities and pretty much act like wild animals that haven't been fed in days. You wonder: "What parents raise their kids to act this way?" Well some parents are indeed shmucks and some are powerless to their own kids. Who is to blame, then?

Scapegoat #1: School? Puh-lease. Try herding 30 boob-or-makeup-obsessed lunatics and then tell me if I should be responsible. I'm just hoping they don't kill each other before the end of class. Don't expect miracles, folks.

Scapegoat #2: Videogames? Jack Thompson thinks we should blame them. But I would like to point out that in my 7 years of teaching, I have never heard a student describe (let alone act upon) a violent scene from a video game. They are more likely to quote violent or misogynistic song lyrics. I don't know what is more pervasive: a song that plays non-stop on their MP3 player or a video game that they will play for 2 or 3 hours after school. It's easy to blame something that one personally thinks as being too violent. If it's bad to our eyes, then it must be bad to everyone's eyes, right? Wrong.

This is the kind of abusive generalization that my mom used to pull on me, and it infuriates me. No matter how much you try and rationalize with that man (or my mom even), he'll just pull some other weird excuse he'll pass on as rational and legitimate. I applaud Penny Arcade's valiant efforts to make him see the errors of his ways, but if it's anything like what I went through, they might as well get a comfy chair: it'll take a while...

Scapegoat #3: Reality? From where I am standing, this one is what warps young minds the most. It takes one bad seed and the entire crop might as well be tossed into the dumpster. I have seen malicious little twits influence a group of 10 kids to act like... a bunch of malicious little twits. And this is not from TV, this is not from any videogame (I can picture it now, Grand Theft Malicious Twit) or from any song I have heard. This is beyond any normal rebellious adolescent behavior. I can only figure that it must originate from some real behavior seen in their environment. And who's part of their environment: family and friends.