Consequence free?

In my early childhood, at least, I was raised according to the "that'll learn ya" school of parenting. Touch a hot stove --> get burned --> "That'll learn ya not to touch hot stoves". This accomplished a couple of things. One, it made me extremely sensitive to cause-effect relationships. "Consequence" was not a concept that needed explaining in my house. Two, it initiated a loop that eventually made me into something of a bubble boy. I was cursed with a vivid imagination, and it imaginated all sorts of outcomes to the simplest of actions. If, for instance, I should dare to climb a tree, well, than certainly I will fall out of the tree and suffer pain unendurable. This equation was of the 2+2 variety in my mind: axiomatic, unquestionable. The fact the equation would have been valid a great deal of the time, due to my absentminded fogbound dreamy nature, simply reinforced my own perceptions and the perceptions others had of me. I was not a child who tested his limits.
Such tests were forced upon me from time to time. Yet even when I passed them, the dominant emotion I felt was rarely any species of triumph or pride: instead, I usually felt a sort of giddy relief that that nightmare was over. I can tell you right now that even if I had ever climbed a tree and made it back to terra firma intact, I would have never climbed another. Why should I? There are so many safer ways to get a nice view. Tempt fate twice?

There are all sorts of things I've never done in my life because my resident risk analyst deems them either dangerous, or simply not worth it. Incidentally, I've been drunk all of once, and the first order effect of drunkenness, for me, was to take that risk analyst, gag and bind him, and shut him away up in some corner of my brain where I couldn't even hear his screams. I found myself in a situation I wouldn't have ever considered were I sober, and since then I've treated alcohol like old nitroglycerin.

There remained lessons to be learned, of course. One comes to mind from fifth grade. My teacher that year was Mr. Sackville--probably the best teacher of my elementary school career, not least because he wasn't afraid to put me in my place.
I don't remember what the project was, but I dilly-dallied about it. The Monday deadline came and went, and Mr. Sackville threatened me with a zero if I didn't turn the thing in. My mother freaked. I still remember her French-Canadian accent, which only came out when she was angry: "If something is due on a certain due-DATE, you will hand it in on that due-DATE." Despite her anger, it was all I could do not to laugh. Hey, Mom, you got the emPHAsis on the wrong syllAble, there...
Thus chastised, I set to work with a will. It was a large project and it took me three nights to finish it. Paging through the completed project Thursday morning before placing it on Mr. Sackville's desk, I admired my writing--some of the best stuff I'd ever done, in my not so humble opinion. That'll show him, I thought to myself. A-plus for sure.
It wasn't until the next Monday that I got my project back. The teacher had written words of high praise on the cover sheet and there was a nice big circled "96%". Beneath that, in smaller handwriting, was another line: "-15% x 4 days late = 36%."

I cried.

Now, Mr. Sackville saw to it that my intransigence didn't jeopardize my final grade that year. But that's not the point. I didn't know that until I got that final grade. And believe you me, I never turned another assignment in so much as a minute late...not even in university, after I had fallen out of love with the classroom.

I said all that as preamble. What you see up there is an anachronism. Sometimes I feel like the last of a breed.

Did you know that in Ontario classrooms, tardiness in turning in assignments is not to be penalized? This goes hand in hand with the prevailing educational attitude that no student must ever fail, at anything, lest he consider himself a failure. Give a child a mark of, say, 30% and more than likely the principal will raise it to a pass.
Today's Toronto Star has a long article discussing this phenomenon. In it, one educator says that the onus is now on the teacher to teach rather than the pupil to learn. "The teacher used to say, 'Look, I taught it, you just didn't learn it. My job is done: you try again'...now we know that if it didn't work the first time, more of the same isn't going to work." There is no such thing as too much help, says the article.
Bull. There is so. When you don't enforce deadlines--which are an unavoidable fact of life outside of school--who exactly does that help? When you give a failing student a passing grade, who does that help? It sure doesn't help the student, who is assumed to understand certain concepts by virtue of that passing grade.
But according to research done at Queen's University, students who fail more than one grade nine course are more likely to drop out of school.
So what? I know several high school dropouts. A few of them have gone on to attain multiple diplomas, degrees, and designations. Others haven't, but have instead become happy, well-adjusted (and very well paid) tradespeople. There is nothing wrong with dropping out of school so long as there are alternatives available. And should the student choose not to accept any of those alternatives? Then there ought to be consequences to that choice, too.

I'm very much convinced that the overwhelming sense of entitlement many of today's youth have can be laid at the feet of educators afraid to educate them in the realities of life (sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug) and parents who are deathly afraid their little ones might not succeed at every last thing they try.

I've always wondered at the typically teenage dismissal of consequences. What causes a fifteen-year-old to steal a car and drive into a taxicab at an estimated 160 km/hr, killing two girls (who, ironically enough, took a cab because they felt the transit system wasn't safe) not to mention himself? Did that outcome not even occur to him? Why do so many teens think that drugs which have been proven potentially lethal won't affect them? Kids have always had these sort of attitudes. It's only recently that adults seem to have bought into this themselves, in their absolute refusal to set consequences for their children's actions. The above incident was called an "accident" in print. God, I hate that word. Most traffic "accidents" aren't. The very word denies the near-inevitable consequence of driving irresponsibly.

It's everywhere. Those kids I wrote about last post, who stole about $3500 worth of cigarettes? Both of them have been in trouble with the law before. One of them has been my pet project over the last several years. I kind of knew that without my efforts he'd wind up in a life of crime. Turns out that's going to happen despite my best efforts--which leaves me profoundly disappointed. Because now it falls to the justice system to straighten him out, and we all know how well that works. "Stop! Or I'll say 'stop' again!"

Our whole Canadian society is built on abdication of responsibility and dismissal of consequences. Whenever anything even remotely disturbing happens, you can count on a Canadian to announce the government should do something. In the aftermath of the "accident" alluded to above, for instance, there were immediate calls for a review of police chases, on the grounds that the police were chasing the car at at the time. Never mind that they were well back, travelling considerably slower than the young criminal. Never mind that, I say, it has to be someone else's fault because it can never be our own.

When there are no meaningful consequences to one's actions, there is no deterrent to wrong action and no reason to assume responsibility for right action.

Consider the environment. Not all that long ago, pollution of most kinds was perfectly acceptable, even a badge of progress. And why wouldn't it be? Belch a huge amount of crap into the atmosphere and the wind would blow it all away as if it never existed. A few people downwind would get sick and die. At first, nobody thought to connect this with the air they were breathing, so polluting was still okay. Then it was discovered that air pollution could kill you--and air pollution was still okay so long as it only killed other people. (Don't think for a second that people don't actually rationalize like this...) Now we're quite probably on the cusp of seeing wider, deeper and more unpleasant consequences of our environmental attitudes...and there are STILL people out there dismissing it all out of hand.
And what really scares me is that we forgot to teach the people we've entrusted with fixing our mistakes in this arena about consequences. We also forgot to teach them about personal responsibility.
Oh, global responsibility they get. The world has a responsibility to crown them, adore them, coddle them. Don't do any of that to their satisfaction and you're 'dissing' them...which in certain circumstances can get you killed. In their world, respect is assumed, not earned. In fact, if this goes on it's a good bet the word 'earn' will drop right out of the language.

I wasn't raised perfectly--who was? But I thank my parents, all of them, for giving me a sense of consequence and responsibility. It kept me out of trees, sure, but it also kept me honest.