Parent Manifesto: School Year Success

When Dinner is Missing?
May 27, 2005


“All great change in America begins at the dinner table,” Ronald Reagan said.

The great American past time of having dinner at the table, small talk, and home cooked food may well be a picture as to why our children today do not excel in academics like they did fifty years ago.

Standardized tests are pouring in each year during the last week of May measuring our children’s performances. It’s not a pretty sight. We rank last nearly last in educating our children across the globe amongst industrialized nations. Our children wear the caps and gowns, walk the stage, and enter life less prepared than ever before. Why can’t our children spell, read, write, think or do the arithmetic that fifty years ago was child’s play? Plato, Kipling, Shakespeare, and the like have been traded in for MTV, Ludicrous, and Fifty Cents.

Now it would be easy for us to blame our teachers, educational system, or lack of funds for the sub-par performances we see. But other nations with far less money have fared far better in educating their children. Why? I’ve experienced the difficulties of being a parent and of teaching in the classroom. The insights I lay out right now.

Our teachers know that the easiest way to lose their jobs is to report a failing grade even if a child earned that grade. If the kid fails, that teacher’s job is on the line. Teachers go about giving fake grades to failing students who didn’t do their work. And walah!!! We have a kid that passes, but he leaves school ignorant.

Today there are lots of kids that deserve nothing less than a swift kick in the rear end. But there are lots parents that need a swift kick in the rear end because they create a latch-key, broken-home environment that destroys the discipline and nurture required to train quality kids. And, of course, we expect our children to perform in school as their homes disintegrate?

These same parents have the audacity to gleefully look on with pride as caps and gowns are worn. The charade continues year after year. Their children are passed on and it feels great.

Only later will these parents lament the haunting tragedy of their failed parenting skills. The one thing they could have done to change the outcome? Just have normal dinner and normal talk at the dinner table with their children.

Parents for sure will blame the system, the lack of funding, the poor teachers, the idiot politicians, and anyone who can be their scapegoat. But one day they will have to look in the mirror. When they do, the truth will stare them in the face.

From the womb, our parents held the shelter, clothing, and food to train us into greatness. And it was their duty to discipline and nurture us until we became disciplined and educated.

When our infant babe becomes a toddler brat, it’s too easy for us to score it up as the “terrible two’s”. And when our toddler becomes a bratty adolescent, it’s too easy to call it a phase of life. And when the cap and gown are put on our child’s head as a young adult, and they can’t read, write, or reason, its too easy to blame the schools. And then we wonder how our precious child became such a brat and then a barbarian in life?

Of course, it’s too simple to boil the success of our children’s education down to one thing in life. But parents who didn’t do dinner at the table with their children are the same parents who hoped that teachers would do the parenting job- instill respect, knowledge, and inspiration into their own children who they chose not to train. Their kid was disrespectful at home. Parents were afraid or unwilling to go to war at home with that child. So they shipped him off to school hoping PH.D’s counselors and teachers armed with gobs of money and new techniques could fix their problem-child which they created. Lo and behold! Eighteen years later the parents could see the nightmare they created firsthand, an untrained, undisciplined child for life.

But think back with me for a moment. Do you remember the old-fashioned approach to school? Our parents would sit us at the dinner table for dinner. They would say grace, eat dinner, and converse with us all the while requiring a respectful countenance and attitude from us. How difficult was it for our parents to make sure that we did our homework well? If we were untrustworthy, our parents broke our bottoms and our wills to teach us to submissive to authority.

Maybe- just maybe- it’s possible that America’s solution to its educational nightmare is the use of the family dinner table again?