Most of you have heard that "Bigger Is Better", but I am here to tell you that "Bigger Is Not Better" when it comes with raising children. I don't think that I have to tell you that kids today are much different than kids historically, and that difference is not better. It has happened on our watch and I am here to tell you what I think is the root cause. Like most things, when you stumble onto the correct answer, it is not very complicated. Here goes.
As I see it, there are two basic elements that impact the development of our children. The first is their parents and the second is other children. I have blogged on the impact of parents on their children and the importance of time the parents spend with their children. What parents do in that time is important, but not as important as just the number of hours. I think that we can all agree that the number of hours parents spend with their kids has been going down for some time. There are all kinds of reasons for this that I am not going to go into here. Just focus on the number of hours kids today spend with their parents compared to human history. I contend that we now spend fewer hours with our kids today than in all of human history and it has had an impact on how our kids turn out. Look at the groups within our society who spend the most time with their kids and look at the difference in how their kids turn out. Look at Asians, Jews, Mormons and Rural compared to other urban groups and tell me what you think of their children? Urban is "bigger" and worse.
There has been a trend for sometime to close or consolidate small schools all over the USA. Most people feel that "Bigger Is Better". They see offering more different classes as a big plus, but do not see any down side. It is a human trend to only focus on what is "Better" about something and not what is "Bad". I give you Obamacare as proof of this point. Here is just one way that bigger schools are bad and having smaller class size does not cancel out the bad aspect. Think about this mathematically. Let's say that 1% of the kids are a bad influence within the school and if you kid is associated with this bad kid, it will rub off on your kid. If your kid goes to a small school with only 50 kids, the chances of going to a school that has a bad kid in it is only 50-50. That means half of all kids who go to school will not encounter a bad kid. I see this like a infectious disease where there are a few carriers who can infect the whole population. To minimize the possibility of infection we isolate the disease carrier, we don't allow them to circulate in large groups of people. I think it is the same with our schools. We see this in clothing trends and what is happening during spring break on the beaches. It only takes a few bad apples to infect our schools and colleges and you know it.
What we need to do is to consider both the good aspects of changes and the bad aspects. We did not do this with Obamacare and we have not done it with the changes that we have made in our schools. I have blogged on why I fell that Head Start is a bad idea because it reduces the time the kid spends with their parents and increases the time that the kid spends with other children. What ever people felt we got from Head Start, it was canceled out by the bad aspects. Why is that people feel that untested changes are better than the proven things that got the human race to this point? It is better to do nothing than to do the wrong thing. Remember that!
