Our society today is advanced. From necessities to education, our implements of
industrialization allowed a variety of products and services, as well as knowledge, to be available
to the majority of the population. However, our society is not perfect, along with its marvels it
also has flaws that we created. One of such flaws is the perspective of the parents, of the adults
toward children in our society. This wrong perspective involves the wrong understanding and
thus the misuse of our current education system, a “mass education” one, designed to bring
literacy to the large number of our population in which our children are the most numerous
participants. To make sure children have the complete development as they are meant to have,
and achieving success in their future, everyone, especially parents, should understand that our
current education system is not capable of solely teaching our children, and that only with a
combination of both academic knowledge and parental guidance will children be well-developed.
Childhood, as science defined, is the period that starts from when a person is born, and
last until the end of their adolescence, of which they are transitioned into adults. Childhood is
also traditionally described by its characteristic as a great era of life for a person to explore, to
learn, to play, and live happily with little to no concern about adult worries, as for children are
usually under the care, observation and protection of their parents and/or guardians. Thus, a
child’s life is usually "carefree", of which they are only supposed to be biologically grown, and
mentally prepared, through being taught or playing, with the knowledge they will need to join
the society not as a protected but a responsible and productive member of it, as an adult. And
only when they are such prepared that the transition from childhood to adulthood will be smooth.
However, as our society evolves with time, especially with the recent industrial
revolutions, our perception toward childhood, as well as our actions, also get influenced and
changed along. For example, our industrialized society fastened the parents lifestyle, and the
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parents, in turn, hurried their children into adulthood. In Childhood’s End written by David
Elkind, he refers to another author, Alvin Toffler, who in his book, The Third Wave, states that
“If young people could be prefitted in the industrial system, it would vastly ease the problems of
industrial discipline later on.”. Indeed, since our industry requires its workers to focus and spend
more of their time in the factories, as well as the requirement of preparing the next generations to
join in the same system, we came to design an new education system that fits our needs which is
mass education. To ensure worker's issues on their children are taken care of, and thus free them
from worrying of the family and allow more time into work, mass education is advertised and
believed to be specialized as a system that can solely educate children without much
requirements or responsibility from the parents side. While it works and is efficient in spreading
knowledge, especially that of job expertise to large number of people (and children), mass
education is anywhere but near to the image it is advertised or believed to be. Unlike a family,
where the close relationships of each of its member allow the needs, the problems of each child,
especially that of mental issues like stresses or depressions, to be carefully supervised and
solutions to be specifically tailored according to the child’s situation, the amount of children
institutions in mass education system have to tend to is simply too large. Coupling with the fact
that each child's circumstance is different; teachers – as believed as a part of the mass education
systems – are responsible for taking care of their students, one-by-one, in helping them
overcoming stresses, in motivating and inspiring them, or even help them solve personal issues;
regardless of how strong the relationships between the teachers and each of their students is, with
the ratio of teacher-student rarely go below one by dozens. At the same time, they still have to
keep up with their original intention of teaching and tracking student academic performance and
thus, the workload and responsibility of the school is overwhelmingly large and is practically
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impossible to implement, at least, not at our level of civilization. Nonetheless, a large number of
parents still regard schools as the go-to places to teach children on every aspects, not aware that
while mass education can give children a rich source of knowledge, it does not have the
capability of replacing them as parents to effectively take care of the children mental health, and
even more unlikely since teachers and students are not usually required to reach an
understanding, especially on emotional issues. It is practically impossible for any educational
institution to ensure a child’s mental well-being.
Having misunderstood and misused our current education system, the parents also
consequently, neglect their roles and responsibilities as the children’s first and closest teachers.
According to Robert Bly, in the excerpt “A World of Half Adults”, “Having made it to the oneparent family, we are now on our way toward the zero-parent family”. Bly is basically
addressing two significant social issues, in the United States and in other societies as well, today:
the increasing numbers of single parent families, and the carelessness of the parents toward their
children in general. “Zero-parent” family describe a situation where both parents in the family
are rendered busy with their issues that they can’t invest enough time for their children in
anyway. This situation usually happens in the form of parents busy with businesses to make a
living, another raising issues due to increasing living standards, and little time is spared for more
familial activities. Single parenting, a usual result of divorces and early pregnancy, is becoming
more and more common nowadays. While it’s already considerably hard for a normal family
with both father and mother to raise just one child, the amount of burden a single parent had to
take is even worse. It means half the income, half the resources available to nurture the children,
and even half the opportunity of the child to go to school, to get educated; and furthermore since
that single parent will have to take care of the child as both his/her mother and father, that is
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twice the burden of raising child on one person, and perhaps, also means less time for anything
else, including works that’s needed to allow more resources and opportunity for the singleparented child to equal to the others. This dilemma create a huge stress on to the parent that is
very hard to handle, and at some points the children will have to “grow up”, to understand their
families situation, and acknowledge their responsibility to share the work load of their parents.
While this means a child’s life end short, it is yet a better scenario, however in most of the case
the children usually don’t recognize such problems while single parents still choose to divert
their times on working, believing that with better income comes better education for the child,
and just like zero parenting, less time is used for looking after the children. Regardless of
reasons, both single-parenting zero-parenting usually result in the same outcomes: Parents
carelessness in watching their children activities and in communicate with them left the child
stuck. Perhaps the children are stuck with not knowing how to deal with school performance
pressures and stresses, perhaps with their own identity forming without advice on who they
should be, or perhaps most importantly on things that they interact with, without anyone one to
clarify if it is right or wrong . It is concerning that: with the media system so well developed,
especially the Internet, children can get access to educative information more easily, but without
parental supervision, stumbling upon harmful material like commercials, movies promoting drug
use, alcohol, pornography or violence is equally simple as well. Consequently, children might
develop bad habits or personalities like laziness, selfish or impatience, or having the wrong
approach toward sex or violence uses; all left unchecked and unadjusted, not until they are so
deeply imprinted in the child’s actions and start to become more visible, but by then it is usually
too late to effectively remove them from the child’s mindset.
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The generic education system we made, the carelessness of the parents, and the
overwhelming but not filtered information of our media all have a combined effect on the
children: they might be knowledgeable and learning, but the development of their moral
standpoints are left unchecked. As efforts to mimic adults without considerations, as well as
being bombarded by social media, children start to engage in smoking, drinking, and even sex or
crime, at an increasing number. What used to be spontaneous cases in the past have now became
common signs, and are the results of the wrongdoings we made in teaching children today.
Therefore, it is necessary that the education of children take on the perspective that children must
be treated differently from adults, with a combination of both parental efforts and school
education, or as David Elkind insists, in one of his excerpts, from “Chilhood’s Ends”: “To treat
them (children) differently from adults is not to discriminate against them but rather to recognize
their special estate.”. Elkind means that children think, act and feel differently from adults, and
thus need to be treated, or in this case, educated, different from adult education. The most
important difference is perhaps the fact that children are mentally more unstable than adults, and
that mental development result in future personalities of a person. While it is possible for a
normal adult to alter his/her knowledge, to learn new information accordingly to changes, there’s
also a saying that “changing a mountain is easier than changing a personality”. The mental
instability of a child is not a shortcoming but an opportunity for children to form their unique
personalities. What’s needed is that this period of personal formation does not result in hard-tochange, bad personalities that can and will bring consequences in the future. For instance, crimes
are usually caused by bad habits, and while criminals alone are already problematic, “educated”
criminals, with the knowledge they obtained, can be and will be devastating to the society. Thus,
it is needed that the society, and more important, the parents, to supervise and guide the children
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through this development from the beginning, to help them develop good, acceptable habits and
personalities that would made them productive members of the society.
Children have been long regarded as the most important group of every country and of
humanity as a whole, for they are our future. It’s necessary that children be treated delicately –
by both the inner factor (their families) and the external ones (their schools) – rather than
industrially (knowledgeable and functional, but lack social skill and moral compass), to ensure
their comprehensive development. The education system may or may not be as efficient as the
parents expected, but it’s high time they start to take on, or rather take back, a part of their
responsibility in parenting, if they still care and love their children.
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