Introduction

 

In your community today you can find members of the Flapper generation, Baby Boomers, those who lived through the Beatnik and Hippie eras and members of the Me generation as well as Xers.

 

Many terms have been used to describe the current crop of American young people. One term used recently by the media and therefore likely to stick, is “Millennium” kids.  They are distinguished as the first generation to grow up with computers. However, “Challenge” is the term which comes to my mind when I think of today’s teens as a group. This identification has evolved naturally over the past three or four years as I poured over essays submitted to the Harry Singer Foundation concerning social security, health and child care policy, the national debt, individual liberty and the common good, school safety, responsibility and other subjects.

 

Teens challenge the status quo as young people of all generations have done; some more, some less. But more than challenging others, they beg to be challenged. They have been given watered down sappy everything, including parenting and education—and that’s when they’re not totally ignored. Some are given good grades just for showing up—given awards and recognition for dialing 911 in an emergency or returning a lost wallet. They get a pat on the head, pre-packaged snacks and TV time if they will only leave adults alone to do the work that needs to be done.

 

What the Harry Singer Foundation has heard, and what you will read in the pages that follow, is this generation telling adults they don’t want their younger brothers and sisters and their future children to take it any more. They know they are better than this; they know they can do great things if given the opportunity; they don’t want to be warehoused, they want to be useful, they are eager to win your respect—they want to knock your socks off!  They can see they are needed. Adults are overworked and frantic. Teens can help, but will anybody let them? Does anybody know or care that they are capable of so much more than they have been allowed to do?

 

School curriculum has been dumbed-down. Jaimie Escalante made calculus a prestige subject and poor kids in East Los Angeles rose to the challenge. The beautiful writing of a 17 year old student posted on our web site  brings tears to my eyes every time I read it. The writer may be an American student but he was nurtured in an ethnic culture where he assimilated two important lessons: that all life is sacred and actions have consequences. Make it worth their while and today’s young people will surprise you. They are smart, they are capable, and they are creative and energetic. They know it, but do you? All they want is a chance to prove it. They want to be challenged, not patronized.

 

In their essays teens speak with pride of grandparents who struggled and won wars and conquered personal poverty. They fear adults think they are less capable. They believe they are not, but how will they really know? They want opportunities to prove their mettle. They challenge you to raise the mark higher and higher—to challenge them.

 

Kids today want what adults want: to be better (Don’t we want to reach our potential? Don’t we want them to fulfill their potential?); to be better than their parents and grandparents—to make them proud (Don’t we want our children to be better than we are?).

 

Kids want to be accepted into the adult community; to have a respected place in society. Isn’t this what adults want?

 

Kids want attention; to be loved and cared for; they want to connect with others; they want more time with their families. Isn’t this what adults want?

 

People have been washing clothes for centuries; first pounding the cloth with river stones, then scrubbing with bare knuckles on washboards and finally leaving the job to automatic washing machines. Humans first traveled on foot, later they enlisted the energy of animals and today engines allow us to roar down modern freeways and zoom through the skies in relative comfort and at speeds undreamed of just two or three generations earlier.

 

The Foundation’s Another Way proposal offers a comparable leap forward in communal living. With an upgrade in coordination and communication and the adoption of a handful of simple strategies, the increase in the flow of goodwill and tangible resources already existing in your community will amaze you. Another Way is described in the latter part of this book and in portions of the Appendix. Schools are an integral part of this proposal, and specifically community-based living as defined by the Harry Singer Foundation.

 

The Foundation advocates community-based learning in Chapter Nine, as a catalyst, not a substitute for core subjects. Grammar, such as declensions and tense, punctuation, spelling, sentence structure, all become important when the goal is to communicate something important. Learning to enunciate, make proper introductions, use analogies, to be clear and concise, all takes on urgency when someone must be won over in order to achieve a desired goal. Math is learned naturally when used as a tool to determine how much and what kind of cloth to purchase for flags to decorate Main Street for a community celebration. Numerous calculations are necessary to ascertain the most cost-effective way to place advertisements on city vehicles in order to raise money for school supplies or scholarships. Analyzing tax returns of nonprofits to satisfy the curiosity of potential donors, is an academic discipline which leaves students with a tool they can use throughout their lives. Structuring, administering, analyzing and presenting information derived from polls uses all the skills enumerated above, and as a side-benefit, is useful to the community. Polls are discussed on pages 195-196, 209-211 and 234-235. Problem Solvers, described on page 107, teaches kids to research and think logically and critically, as well as present and defend their conclusions.

 

In his highly recommended 1996 book, To Hasten The Homecoming, author Jordan Braverman included three quotations. The first he attributed to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda.

 

“The ordinary man hates nothing more than two-sidedness, to be called upon to consider this as well as that. The masses think simply and primitively.”

 

In Mein Kempf, Hitler wrote: “The intelligence of the masses is small; their forgetfulness is great. Effective propaganda must be confined to a few issues which can be easily assimilated.”

 

We believe Problem Solvers is the antidote to the Goebbels and Hitler quotes above.

 

“Men by their constitution are naturally divided into two parties. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all power from them into the hands of the higher classes. Secondly, those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depository of the public interests. In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak and write, they will declare themselves.”

Thomas Jefferson

 

We urge you to consider students as an integral part of “the people” referred to in the Jefferson quotation above. 

 

Please, give our young people the challenges they seek.

 

Margaret Bohannon-Kaplan

Director and Co-Founder, The Harry Singer Foundation

 

Carmel, California  

 Year 2000