16 posts tagged “children”

Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.
- Simone Weil, French philosopher, mystic, activist (1909-1943)

I have never met a person who, as a child, wanted to grow up to be a criminal, a drug addict, a gulper of prescribed drugs, a divorcée, a workaholic, a gambling addict, an alcoholic or a wife beater. Nor have I ever heard or read of one.

Yet somehow so many of us grow into these roles in life.

Are we a society of losers?

A recovered alcoholic, a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, considers himself a lifelong addict. Does that mean we should consider him a lifelong loser and treat him as a social pariah, as human detritus?

If not, then how should we think of and treat such people? How, indeed, should we think of and treat those who still "suffer" daily with their affliction? Is it even possible to have our governments provide sufficient assistance to help a significant number of them recover? Many people believe it's not possible.

The subject of helping people to recover from their life problems is so enormous that most of us prefer to not think about it. "It would just cost us more taxes." Of course those people don't realize how much of their taxes already go into dealing with the social problems these people create, including the cost of health insurance and maintaining prisons and rehab facilities for them. Some estimate that figure as high as half our taxes today.

We don't want to face up to the fact that society has failed them. Especially because we have no clue about how we could have failed them. Fair enough. Let's worry about what we can fix.

Now return to my first sentence. We, as parents, as teachers, as relatives and neighbours, grow our own children from scratch. They learn what we teach them.

They learn what we teach them. They learn what we teach them. So let's teach them what they need before they need it. Before they break.

Too many of us believe that children should be kept in innocence for as long as possible. Such people are wrong and dangerous to society. The whole purpose of childhood is to learn how to cope with the rigors of adulthood. Not to turn childhood innocence into adult ignorance. A child that doesn't learn as early as possible about the pitfalls as problems of adults is doomed to fall victim to them and not have any defences at the ready.

We have long established traditions for teaching children what they need to know. One is called schools. The other is called parents. If that sounds patronizing, remember that these are the primary sources of education for children, all children. In a Canadian study of teens a few years ago, 89 percent of them claimed that most of what they learned about life came directly from their parents.

In general, schools are not allowed to teach what kids need so that they can cope with the rigors of the adult world they are growing into. Schools are directed, by curriculum and policy, to teach what kids will need to be employable, to be good employees. However, schools suffer from the lack of need satisfaction in the teens they teach through discipline problems. Students who can cope with their problems suffer from loss of classroom time when the troubled kids act out.

Most young parents know little or nothing more than what they learned about parenting from their own parents. Which is grossly insufficient. Which dooms their children to develop the kinds of problems mentioned at the start of this article.

New parents whose goal is to be better parents than their own parents were to them are lucky. They know they need to do something different. Unfortunately, they don't know what to do. They know what they want to be different for their kids, but not necessarily how to achieve it. They have no easily accessible source for that information.

Western societies are extremely lucky that they don't have more social problems than they do. They must be doing something right. After all, western societies have few problems with terrorism, war and other forms of rampant violence found in other parts of the world, parts that claim that parents do know what they should be teaching their children. Maybe not.

No matter where in the world you look, social problems abound.

Does that mean that social problems are unavoidable? No. It means that, in general, people in all parts of the world have no clear idea what to teach their children to help them cope with life in the 21st century.

Sadly, the last time our ancestors did have a good idea about what to teach their children to help them to cope with life, they all lived in tribes. In tribes, the social norm is that every adult bears some responsibility for teaching every child. As little changed from one year to the next, from one decade to the next, knowing what to teach children was adopted as social policy for the tribe. Everyone taught children the same things. Every child got the same message.

We don't do that today. If anything, parents go out of their way to make sure their kids don't grow up like other kids. That's a social norm. Everyone should be different, we believe.

Yet everyone is the same in many ways. We all have the same needs, for example, with few exceptions.

Schools address the needs of employers. Parents address the needs of their children so long as they know what those needs are. However, so many of the needs of children are unknown mysteries to many parents. Most parents learn parenting "on the job."

Many parents don't teach their children about drugs for fear that the kids will "experiment" with drugs. By the time the parents decide to teach the kids about drugs, the kids have already learned about drugs on the street, in the schoolyard, in the parks, virtually everywhere they go. Some kids already take drugs by the time their parents decide it's time to teach them about drugs.

How's that for timing, for knowing what kids need and when?

Why would a child, an adolescent, an adult need to turn to drugs? Simone Weil said it's an attempt to fly from emptiness. What's empty?

Better to say that human needs have gone unfulfilled. The need for fulfillment of needs is what is empty.

Does that sound like psychobabble? That's what many people would say, people who don't know what children need at all, let alone when they should learn stuff that will fulfill their needs. Ignorant people often have strong opinions against evidence that they are ignorant.

It's true that children are not small adults and should not be treated that way. If they were, we would have to punish them for offences they didn't know were offences. For misdeeds they did because they didn't have the words to explain to their parents and teachers what they needed. For bad stuff they did out of frustration because they needed something they couldn't talk about, but adults didn't know either so they ignored the needs of the children, thinking they were just misbehaving. Yet that is what most punishment of children is about.

A child needs to know how to deal with every social situation he experiences. We know that for adults, so we provide ways to teach them social skills, sort of. Few children receive any significant amount of instruction about social skills. They learn the hard way, by making mistakes. Or by watching what happens when other kids make mistakes.

But that is teaching what not to do in social situations, not what to do proactively, before the information is needed. We need to teach social skills to children, to address their social development when they need it most. They need the skills before they need to put the skills into practice. In teaching skills to children, especially social and emotional skills, timing is critical.

We also need to address their emotional development. Huh? Why do so many adults experience heartbreak when a relationship with a mate who is incompatible with them breaks up? Why do more than half the couples who marry get divorced later? That number should be even greater except that many couples today skip the wedding part and simply live together until they separate later because one of them "failed" the other or they "grew apart."

Understanding emotional skills and knowledge is part of what we need to get along well with others. As a social species, we need to have social interactions with others. In most activities people do--either personal or work related--they need to interact with others.

Socially and emotionally well adapted and developed children and adolescents become socially and emotionally well adapted and developed adults. Moreover, socially and emotionally successful adults are not only well liked and appreciated, they do a great deal to help others in their families, their communities and their countries. They gain great public respect because they do things they seem to understand--almost intuitively--are right. Nobel Peace Prize winners, for an example.

Teaching to the social and emotional needs of children and adolescents is not hard. We simply have not put into place the mechanisms for doing it. The needs themselves are not secrets, they're public information. Unfortunately, most of that information is contained in psychologists who specialize in fixing broken people rather than in teaching everyone before they break. And in sociologists who manipulate us by advertising, religion and politics because we don't want to listen to what they know otherwise.

While we long for innocence, what we get is ignorance. There is nothing pretty or beneficial about ignorance.

We have schools, but we use them almost exclusively to train children to be successful employees, not successful adults. The change would be easy and cheap, but someone has to make the first move in every community.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow socially and emotionally well developed and balanced children, not just intellectually well developed employees.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

ADHD: You or Someone You Love Could Have It and Not Know It

My sister had Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) all her life and took it to her grave. I might have had it, but a strange trick of fate at birth caused me to have its opposite. A nephew had all the indicators for ADHD when he was a baby, but his mother sidetracked him from it and he may grow to be a genius as a result.

Before going further, we must establish a few ground rules about discussing ADHD. First, nothing about the human brain is well understood. Nothing about it can be diagnosed and cured or changed easily. Nobody is an expert on the human brain and no one should be believed because he or she claims to have such expertise. We should listen to all points of view before making decisions. This article makes no claims to perfection, it seeks to present a different point of view about a seemingly intractable problem.

However, if we look at ADHD from a different point of view, we may find that it's not the problem that is intractable but our approach that doesn't allow us to see the problem for what it really is.

Nothing about the human brain is cast in stone in terms of being inevitable or unchangeable. Medical hypotheses about the brain have almost always turned out to be wrong. They changed, they evolved, but they were wrong at first. Even now, after extensive research having been conducted for several decades, no one can say anything about the human brain with absolute certainty.

It's easier to prove the existence of God and the non-existence of good science than it is to make definitive and irrefutable statements about the human brain. I have done both--at least to my own satisfaction--yet the brain continues to mystify me and the "expert" statements about it stagger my imagination. Some, I am convinced are just plain wrong.

How, then, do I dare to write an article about one of the great brain mysteries of our time, ADHD? Because when we look at the situation from a non-conventional perspective--one we should be using but don't--ADHD is not a brain problem but a problem of social inadequacy. And, if I may be so candid, social ignorance.

ADHD may indeed be shown to be different from other brain conditions in the sense that those who suffer from it may have brain structure that differs slightly from that of those who don't have ADHD. And ADHD may be shown to have family connections. But it may begin with an inadequate start at intellectual development of a child, not with a physiological difference. In adequate intellectual develop and opportunities for young children may very well run in families without a genetic connection.

Parents who do not know or understand the intellectual needs of a very young child, who may not therefore address the child's early intellectual development, may pass these inadequate parenting skills along to their own children. Most young parents learn most of what they know about parenting from their experiences with their own parents. "I lived through it, so I can do it myself."

Named for its symptoms rather than its discoverer (Alzheimer, Hodgkin) or its genetic markers (H5N1, H1N1), ADHD is a collection of behaviours by which its sufferers are identified. Wikipedia describes ADHD as a "neurobehavioral developmental disorder," which is psychobabble for what it further describes as "persistent pattern of inattention or hyperactivity—impulsivity that is more frequently displayed and more severe than is typically observed in individuals at a comparable level of development." More psychobabble.

What does it mean?

A child who is punished for demonstrating socially inappropriate behaviour in a social setting may become outraged at the thought of being punished for something he believes is not his fault. When a child is "out of control," it should be taken as a sign that the parent has no idea what the child needs rather than that the child is "just plain bad." Punishing an out of control child is like punishing a slave for his master's failures. Abolishing slavery didn't make abuse go away and punishing either parent or child will not end the problem. Especially when neither parent nor child understands what the problem is.

Most parents teach their children to behave in social settings. Training children about how to behave in public so that they do not stand out as abnormal is part of what every parent tries to accomplish with their children. It's called socialization. Parents and teachers of children "with" ADHD usually fail. As so many adults fail in these efforts, child development specialists name the child as having an affliction, with a name, because blaming so many parents and teachers for failing to teach their children would bring wrath upon the specialists.

Social scientists and practitioners know that to blame a parent for something the parent knew nothing about, including knowing nothing about how to cope with a situation they didn't understand in the first place, is a dangerous road.

As is the case so often with "unacceptable" human behaviours (that is, socially unacceptable), children with ADHD come to be labelled as problem children, children with behavioural problems, even "bad seeds," kids who have some strange, poorly understood and badly managed illness. It's easier to blame kids because they can't fight back or defend themselves as parents can and do.

Though ADHD has three subtypes, primarily too impulsive, primarily lacking in ability to give attention to situations in their environment, or a combination, most kids with ADHD are identified as fussy, fidgety and flighty. The quick-fix for adults is to claim the kids have a problem, give the problem a name, then recommend drug therapy. Ever since amphetamines lost their panache as a drug of choice for recreational use (known as speed) in the 1960s, they have gained new life within the medical community with names such as Ritalin (methylphenidate).

Ritalin and other medications prescribed by pediatricians calm kids. They make the kids more "normal," meaning they dull the brain so much the behaviours of the children make them less distinguishable from others of their peers who do not have a problem with exhibiting socially unacceptable behaviour. In the case of ADHD kids, drugs accomplish what social training by parents and grandparents does with most children, make them behave in public or in a social situation.

This is where my proposal differs from the most commonly used treatments for ADHD. Rather than using drugs or other therapies in an attempt to make ADHD kids more "normal," I propose that we raise the level and style of education to match their needs. ADHD children "misbehave" because they find themselves like caged animals in their intellectual development. Give them what they require in their own peculiar intellectual development stream and they will act more like "normal" kids.

Children develop in four main ways: intellectually, physically, socially and emotionally (psychologically). Put a few kids together and give them a little space and they will devise games that have a physical component and usually a social component (in their interaction). They develop emotionally or psychologically by making their way through problems, conflicts and hurts, often with the help of adults.

Most kids will incorporate some sort of intellectual component in their play. With simple games such as hide and seek, it's figuring out how to reach "home" without being discovered in their chosen hiding place. With tag, it's how to stay away from the person who is "it" and how to tag someone else when it's their own turn to be "it." That's problem solving, an important intellectual skill. Some children require more than the usual amount of intellectual stimulation.

What might someone you recognize as a genius have been like as a child? Say, Albert Einstein, as an example. Could Einstein possibly have been a normal kid at the age of four, unrecognizable from others his own age? His brain could not possibly have developed rapidly when he reached university age such that he moved to Switzerland to suddenly understand relativity and special relativity. He had to have been different as a young child as well. He must have behaved differently from other kids, as pretty well all kids who grow to be outstanding adults did.

On one occasion I remember reading a statement that Einstein believed each child is born with genius, but we train it out of most of them within their first few years of life. Sorry, I have not been able to find the actual wording of the statement, or even to confirm that Einstein made it. When you think about it, that is not the kind of statement of truth we might want to popularize because it would destroy much of what we have come to believe is good parenting and good educating. We don't want to believe we intentionally or knowingly make kids dumb. In general, western thought believes that children are born dumb (not just without knowledge) and parents and teachers smarten them up as they grow and mature.

Einstein's brain was different from the brains of most people. Larger? No, it was actually a bit smaller than the average, at 2.9 pounds. However, his brain, as examined after his death (it was removed from his body a few hours after his ultimate breath) was structured differently. I submit that Einstein's brain developed differently from the brains of most people according to the stimulus he received as a child and adolescent, not due to accidents of nature. Today we know of brain plasticity, of the ability of people to retrain their brains at any age, even in old age, of the brain's ability to restructure itself at any time if the stimulus is right.

A brain, if stimulated with new and novel thoughts and habits, will grow new neural connections, even in non-conventional parts of the brain. People blind from birth, for example, have the optical parts of their brains taken over with uses and thinking involving the other senses. A blind person may not be able to hear better than a sighted person, but he may be able to process more incoming sound information than the average sighted person. The brain of an older person can change shape with new and repeated intellectual activity just as much as that of a teenager, though the teen's brain usually changes shape faster. That's brain plasticity.

The stimulus for intellectual development was right for Albert Einstein as a child. He would not be labelled as a child with ADHD today because his intellectual needs in early childhood were met. It's behaviour, not physiology, that causes kids to be labelled as having ADHD. The brain may change shape and create new neural networks based on repeated experiences and habits of a child whose intellectual development is impeded, thus creating a child "with" ADHD.

If this is true, then we should be able to change conditions for fussy children so they will be intellectually fulfilled, so they won't need to be fussy. So they can be as intellectually blessed earlier in life as some grow to be as adults.

The intellectual needs of some children in their early years are not met sufficiently. What could a child do about that? The kid can't express his need because he has not developed the intellectual capacity to understand it. Human kids even have trouble expressing their need for touch from their parents, a critically important component of their emotional development, so it's no surprise they couldn't express their need for more intellectual stimulation.

So they fuss. And they fidget. And sometimes they fight. They can't follow the painfully slow teaching style in their classroom, so they quickly become distracted. If there is nothing to interest them intellectually nearby, they devise ways to involve others. They misbehave. At home, they have the same environment day after day, which they come to think of as boring, so they act out. They scream, they pound, they send us signals we misinterpret. We think they should just "be good." Like we adults are.

What would you do if your brain were imprisoned, such as if you became a quadriplegic who couldn't speak? Some people say they would rather die than to live in a body that would not allow them to speak, to write, to communicate, even to move. A child doesn't consider dying because he doesn't even have a clear understanding about what living is yet. He just feels frustrated and anxious. So he acts the way he feels. That is very uncomfortable and anxious.

Fussing, fighting and acting out at least get him attention, which may not be as satisfying as good intellectual stimulation but it's something different, a change from boring.

We in the 21st century still believe that babies are born stupid and only learn to be smarter as they approach adulthood. The same way they develop physically. That way of thinking is wrong. In fact, it's backwards.

In the first six years of life, a child's brain acts like an enormous sponge--even a vacuum cleaner--soaking up everything, absolutely everything it can. Good stuff, bad stuff, everything, because it can't distinguish good from bad, useful from useless. For the most part, a child's intellectual development in their first six years is left up to young parents who have extremely little knowledge about what a child needs and how it develops. Babies don't get a chance to choose their parents. A young child's brain may not have much experience or knowledge, but it's supercharged for intellectual learning experiences.

Why did my sister, who grew up in a similar family environment as I did, develop ADHD? Half a century ago, a child growing up in a relatively unstimulating environment needed more, but had no way to get it. In our family there were no books, no reading to them by a parent, no television (at least of the kind that would be intellectually stimulating for a child), not even access to radio programs that were not geared to adult interests. My sister had such constant needs for intellectual stimulation that were never met that her brain automatically jumped from one focus to another seeking fulfillment. She didn't "apply herself" people said, her teachers repeated on report cards.

The closest she got in her 54 years of life to intellectual fulfillment was when she acted in several musical plays in senior elementary school. She was very good, quite talented, but she received no encouragement, no praise, no support from home. She never grasped how to move to the next stage with what she had learned. No one taught her. As she got older, she accepted an addiction as a substitute, as an emotional surrogate to intellectual excitement, in her case smoking cigarettes. Eventually it killed her, as it did our father and mother. Maybe it wasn't the addiction that was genetic, but the common condition of lacking intellectual stimulation at the right times.

Why did I, who grew up in the same environment--in fact with absolutely no intellectual stimulation for my first six years--not develop ADHD? For reasons still unclear, my brain had a problem processing information, right from birth. Maybe it was a lack of oxygen from blood not reaching my brain for the short period of time it took me to be born breech. (Some claim I have been ass-backwards ever since.) Maybe I inherited a condition whereby my brain functioned much slower than those of other babies. To this day I think and write slowly. I know the condition existed in my father's family.

My brain worked so slowly as a child that I had time to invent, to create, to use my imagination. With never a toy, a child or even a parent to play with, at the age of three I created an imaginary pet. As the only animals I knew were those I saw on the rare occasions I was taken out of our apartment over a store in a lonely farming community--in my case the animals I saw were cattle--I adopted an imaginary cow. The earliest memory I have of my father making a pronouncement about me was when he whispered to my mother that he thought I must be retarded because I had an imaginary pet. What else did my brain have to do but to imagine? He didn't know and didn't realize that it was a problem he should have addressed. A problem I addressed as best I could. I managed to invent a friend and intellectual stimulation.

How about my nephew, son of my wife's sister, the kid who should have developed ADHD but didn't? I remember watching (and listening to) this kid scream at the top of his lungs at the age of 10 months. He was learning to walk. Every time he stood up for a few seconds, he would lose his balance as he let go of a chair and fall down. He hated that. Most babies just keep at it until they master the skills of standing unsupported and walking. My nephew screamed because he was frustrated with himself. He knew he could learn how to walk, but the secret of balance eluded him. He had something important to learn, but he couldn't do it. He despised the fact that he was being held back by his own uncoordinated body.

I told his mother that he was just angry with himself because he couldn't master what he wanted to do, what everyone he knew could do, walk. She knew he was extraordinarily eager to learn. She and her husband fed the intellectual needs of their son admirably. Today, with full support and guidance from home whenever he needs it, the lad gets school awards, wins at sports, succeeds at everything he attempts. He knows he needs intellectual fulfillment and he knows where to find it. Fortunately, he attends a public elementary school that is extraordinary in many ways, one that feeds the intellectual, social and emotional needs of its young charges far beyond what other schools offer. Far beyond what the curriculum asks. Far beyond what most schools would dare or be allowed to do.

Christopher doesn't have ADHD because he got what he needed, both at home and at school. Some day he may find a cure for cancer or develop the mysterious Theory of Everything that Einstein sought all his adult life. Chris is a genius because nobody prevented him from being one. He doesn't even know it yet because no one has told him. What he knows is that life is filled with potential.

Nobody in his life thought that he should conform, to be average, to be like other kids, and insisted on it. The people closest to him thought he should be who he could be. They may have wanted him to be quieter, but rather than punish him for being boisterous or aggressive, they fed his need for new knowledge and skills.

He learned at a blistering pace and he will continue to do so because he knows he can. He can learn as much and as fast as he wants, on any subject of his choosing.

This is not the time for blame, to point the finger at those who have prevented so many other kids from becoming geniuses, from becoming the best they could be. This is the time to change our ways so we no longer dumb-down most kids so they can become obedient employees and consumers as adults.

We have the opportunity to make the 21st century better than any before it. It won't hurt anyone and it should benefit everyone. We just need to do some things differently. It won't be hard. One thing we can do is to provide better stimulation for the intellectual development of young children. That's actually easy because most adults know these things anyway, they just don't know they should be teaching them to their children. We also need to teach new parents (or pre-parents) what they should know about child development and needs.

Let's not wait until Chris is old enough and wise enough to make a difference in the world himself. Let's get started now. ADHD is the label we give to kids with more extreme behaviours of unsatisfaction. The less extreme ones we simply call bratty.

As if young children want to be that way. They don't. They really don't.

Writing this article has already made a difference for me. It has always mystified me why my wife had trouble in high school, sometimes has great difficulty following written directions, often can't follow spoken directions requiring more than one separate action, forgets many things I wish she could remember but has a memory like a steel trap for other things and can learn well with certain teaching methods but fails badly with others. In grade school she was smart. In high school she was made to feel dumb, as if she had hit her intellectual "wall."

I now understand that my wife has an undiagnosed form of Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder that is sufficiently mild that it stayed beneath the radar of educators and employers throughout her school and working life. Now that she has become aware of it, she can learn how to cope with and make compensations for her ADHD. For me, my wife's unusual behaviour in some situations now makes sense. I can adjust to what I can understand.

Those who lose a foot in a childhood accident learn to conduct their lives differently from most of us because they know they are missing a foot. Those who have ADHD could cope better if they had the necessary direction and skills. Parents who understand ADHD can provide opportunities for intellectual development of their children so they will never become "bad kids."

We can each adjust to the strange behaviour of those we encounter if we understand why they act the way they do. Otherwise they may be punished for acting different or strange. I have not conducted a study, nor have I been able to find research to support or deny this proposal, but I suspect prisoners and adults under medical care for mental or emotional problems would be found to be overrepresentated with ADHD in comparison with the general population.

This is not a scientific hypothesis, but merely an observation. Might our modern insistence upon instant gratification, instant rewards, the frenetic struggle through the "rat race," our desire to find drugs to quick-fix our health after a self-destructive lifestyle harmed it, our seeking of thrills through risky behaviours and addictive indulgences and our habit of finding someone to blame for everything that we don't like be symptoms of culture-wide ADHD on an unimaginably massive scale?

We now have a place to begin, to prevent the proliferation of ADHD in the general population by addressing the intellectual needs of young children and to help those with ADHD and those they come in contact with regularly to understand and to cope with what seems to be unusual, erratic, irresponsible or careless behaviour.

We know where to begin. Let's begin now. Talk it up.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to understand how children develop and when to satisfy their needs, to encourage those streams of development.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
- Lazarus Long, fictional character in Robert A Heinlein novels

"Neurotic" in this case may be taken to mean "emotionally excessive to the point of being harmful."

Insecurity breeds jealousy. The two are not irrevocably linked. Insecurity can also lead to bullying, to lack of an ability to commit to a relationship, to various emotional problems other than neuroses, to addictions, to violence and rage, to bad relationships and to divorce.

Consider how prevalent these are in our society.

They are so common that social scientists refer to them as social problems, meaning that so many people have these problems that the numbers alone create further problems in churches and clubs, in communities, in the workplace, in legislative assemblies of government, in countries, even at the United Nations.

People learn to feel secure during their maturation, as they grow from children, through adolescence, into adulthood and beyond. They key word in that last sentence is "learn." People learn to feel secure. It doesn't come as a matter of course. People learn insecurity as well.

If security or lack of it is learned, who teaches it? We all help in the process of teaching insecurity. Insecurity is another word for fear. People learn insecurity in their families, as children, in school (not intentionally in the classroom), in the playground, in various groups and unhealthy friendships. They learn it from television and newspapers that encourage us to fear each other, on the street, in offices, in elevators, in our homes. They learn it from clerks in stores who ignore them while helping other customers who came in later.

Where do people learn security? That which should be learned is usually taught by someone, isn't it?

No one teaches people how to be secure. No one teaches them that fear is not just harmful, but unnecessary. In the United States, the recently retired president, self-titled "the war president," taught the necessity of believing in a War On Terror (with what results?) and he personally controlled the status of alerts (Amber Alert, Red Alert).

Learning to avoid fear and how to feel secure can be taught. It's a matter of understanding certain facts and mastering some skills. If it can be taught and if it's so important and so damaging to us personally and to our communities and our countries, we should be teaching it.

The information needed and the skills to be learned are available. They are neither hidden nor secret. They simply are not taught.

Are you afraid of anything? Do you feel insecure? Lots of people do, but it's not a necessary consequence of modern society as ultra-conservatives would have us believe.We fear and we feel insecure because we have not learned how to avoid these harmful emotions.

Someone has something to gain by making us feel afraid and insecure in such massive numbers. Of that you may be certain. I won't point fingers because it will not take much thinking on your part to figure out who is responsible for your fear and insecurity.

The economy is bad, are you afraid to lose your job? Unless you die within the next two years, you will survive the recession and get another job. Plan now what you would do and how you would go about it if you were to lose your job. If you don't make a plan, maybe you have something to worry about. If you do, you won't need to worry because you will know exactly what you will do.

If your spouse died or unexpectedly announced his/her desire for a divorce, what would you do? With a plan, these events would bring unhappiness. But they would not necessarily destroy your life. Having a plan of what you would do in case of tragedy is not a self fulfilling prophesy. It's simply being ready.

There are two ways to avoid insecurity and fear. You learned them by reading this article.

It would be wise if this kind of information and these skills were taught to everyone. It could be taught in schools, if we wanted it.

It would cost almost nothing to prepare teachers to teach social and emotional skills. Just give each teacher a book about it and the authority to teach it.

Imagine a world without fear.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow secure and self confident children into adults who won't contribute to the social problems we endure today and who will lead emotionally and socially healthy lives.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

By the age of six the average child will have completed the basic American
education. ... From television, the child will have learned how to pick a
lock, commit a fairly elaborate bank holdup, prevent wetness all day long,
get the laundry twice as white, and kill people with a variety of
sophisticated armaments.
- Russell Baker, columnist and author (b.1925)

Some will read that quote and think it ironic. Others will think it sarcastic. Some will consider it pessimistic.

Yet what the quote missed is a child's main source for life information: parents. The quote is not wrong, just inadequate to convey the message.

While Baker had the age right ("by the age of six") he missed something extremely important, critically important about what a child learns in his first five years. In his first five years of life, a child learns what life is about.

You may think that age five or younger is too young to understand what life is about. Especially what the extremes, the best and worst of life, are about. While that is generally true, a young child gains his sense of the values that he will carry through his life from his parents. The life values of parents tend to be passed along to children, in so many varied ways that they can't be enumerated.

Let's say a young child is with her father in a store. The child doesn't pay attention to what the father buys or speaks about with the clerk. Back in the car, she overhears father saying to mother that the clerk gave him back five dollars too much and that he didn't return that money. That brief experience might leave a mark for a lifetime.

Children learn by example, as most of us know. Many parents don't know how important their role modelling is. A young child whose parents use drugs is highly likely to use drugs or alcohol when he grows up. Kids need to learn what life is about and we tend to not teach them until they are older, "old enough to understand." It doesn't work like that. They learn about life by taking markers from their parents, sample experiences they generalize into life lessons.

The little girl whose father kept the five dollars will generalize the experience to accept that it's all right to steal from someone, especially if the person doesn't know about it. A general belief that dishonesty is socially acceptable may not happen with a single incident. The child has no idea that the clerk will have to make up the money from her pay when she cashes out at the end of her shift. Nor might the child care. The kid is interested in what the parent does because the whole purpose of parenting is to teach actively and to be role models passively and the primary objective of a child is to learn about life from her parents..

For most children, their parents are their life for the first two years. How the parents act is how they come to believe that life is. At the time of life when their brains act like sponges to find examples to help them understand what life is about--their main purpose in life in their first few years--what their parents do is treated as a model for what they should do. They want to be adults, as all children do. They accept the values of their parents because they are desperate to learn what values adults have.

For various reasons, a child will sometimes understand that what a parent has done is wrong. Neglect or abuse of the child, for example, might make the child determined to be just the opposite with his own children when he grows up. However, history shows that a majority of children who were neglected or abused become parents who neglect or abuse their own kids. The acorn doesn't fall far from the oak.

Ironically, bad behaviour by a parent may be picked up more readily than good behaviour. The reason is that parents behave well and properly most of the time, whereas bad behaviour is so different from the norm and so rare that a child will pick up on it. The child, wanting to fill in the gaps in his understanding of life values he seldom has opportunities to learn, will see some action or hear some words by a parent and generalize from them. One tiny example of bad behaviour (believed to be tiny by the parent) becomes a life lesson to be utilized later by the child.

If you are the parent or grandparent of a young child, everything you do may be scrutinized by the child and generalized as an example of a life value or lesson. The admonition "do what I say not what I do" doesn't work with kids. They take their first examples more from behaviour of parents, less what the parents say.

If you are the parent or grandparent of a young child, you are a living example to that child of what life is. Lessons learned later may change that, but most times the later lessons do not stick the way role model lessons from parents stick.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, grandparents and teachers who want to know what a child needs and at what time he or she needs it. It teaches people how to treat parenting responsibilities with a professional attitude.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.
- Thomas Szasz, author, professor of psychiatry (1920- )

I can imagine Dr. Szasz reading this quote again with his tongue stuck so far into his cheek that his cheek goes red, chuckling at his wit until he nearly falls off his chair. I would if I were in his shoes.

Let's examine it more carefully. At first blush it seems to say that modern industrial societies (those whose corporations control social norms, usually with the blessing of their respective governments) want to keep people in a childlike state of mind for as long as possible. Then when they realize that they are no longer kids (around age 40-45 in many cases), they have a brief period of adult behaviour and thinking before their bodies ease them into old age.

In the cottage area where I live, people flock from the Toronto region on weekends where they promptly stock up on the marijuana supply they will need, then fuel up their all-terrain vehicles, personal watercraft and chain saws so they can act like the wild teenagers most never were. These people are mostly men, all with at least some white in their hair, what's left of it.

Their great fear (perhaps loathing would be a better word) is growing old. In their attempts to recapture their youth, most completely miss playing out the mature, responsible adult stage, the one that most of us would consider the age of people who would control the governments of their country and operate businesses and industries that keep people employed and the economy moving.

To ensure that they are not considered "age inappropriate" to their children and teenage kids, they supply the young generation with the same toys (downsized for the younger ones) that they use themselves. Thus the kids don't care if their dads act like teenagers because they have the same adult toys as their parents.

Can these (formerly called) middle age men provide good role models for their children? By not taking responsibility for the welfare of their own lives (take that where you will), they provide no good example for their children to follow. An example, yes, not a good one. If anything, what they eat and drink and otherwise consume (drugs, for example) silently but effectively teaches the kids that the need for taking responsibility for the safe and fulfilling conduct of their lives is not necessary.

Obesity is rampant in this generation, as it is in the younger ones, because they eat mostly prepared foods (bolstered by chemical preservatives, loaded with fat, salt and sugars). They spend almost all of their time with their knees bent into a sitting position. Standing is limited, walking is rare, genuine exercise is not in evidence. Generally speaking, if it burns gasoline or produces alcohol, it's good.

Meanwhile, these aging children take advantage of the tolerance our bodies have for abuse and misuse. They do this through their "adult" years, until the body can't take any more and breaks down. Heart attack, cancer, osteoporosis, the usual effects that visit a body that can't take the wildness of teenage life for decades in a row.

Now they turn to prescription drugs to get them past pain, high blood pressure and cholesterol, brittle joints and atrophied muscles. With more and more people living to the century mark these days and most living into their 80s and 90s, that makes for a very long period of old age.

Are they ready for it? Sure, they have their pensions, insurance plans and investments in place so that they can pay for whatever therapies they need, for decade upon decade. One insurance company touts a "Freedom 55" plan, likely for those who won't be healthy enough to work until a more reasonable age for retirement.

What happens to that period of mature adulthood in between childhood and old age, the one that Dr. Szasz said societies are trying to shrink? Look at how often CEOs of large corporations are in civila court, in prison or in debt and look at the people we have running our countries to see that we seem to have no mature adults (or not enough) to run either our corporations or our governments. Look at how many people follow the misadventures of Hollywood tabloid types, apparently loving the fact that they don't get into as much trouble as Paris Hilton any other of the tabloid stars.

The "serious" adults compare themselves to wealthy people who manage to make themselves public figures without any qualifications other than the fact that they are rich and they can commit outrageous deeds. ("You're fired!")

I have no idea how wild and careless Dr. Szasz may have been in his younger years. I do know that now he is a wise observer of life.

Might he want to be president of his country, the USA? No. He's not that dumb. Beside, he has devoted his life to healing, not to killing.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to raise children who will be well balanced adults who can take the responsibilities we need them to take to guide their country and the younger generations.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Your life today is a result of your thinking yesterday. Your life tomorrow will be determined by what you think today.
- John C. Maxwell (Think on These Things, Beacon Hill Press, 1979), American leadership coach (b.1947 )

Don't think you are alone in believing that life is mysterious, that reality is impossible to understand. Anyone who doesn't think that has allowed his brain to settle with what he has been told to believe and to understand.

As you read this sentence, there are nearly seven billion versions of reality among us humans. What's more, by the time you finish reading this article, many of those realities will have changed. Some people will think differently, thus they perceive the reality of that moment differently than they did before.

Can you remember what you thought about the world ten years ago? It's not the same as it is now, is it? In fact, it wouldn't have been the same for you five years ago, one year ago, even a few days ago. Everything you experience alters your sense of what is real.

If you pay attention to (believe) what the media tell you, you will believe that the world is rapidly becoming a more terrible, even horrifying, place. It isn't, based on a huge survey of factors around the planet, but it serves the needs of the media for us to experience some fear about the way of the world, enough that we will tune in to their next broadcast or read their next newspaper or magazine.

If you believe those who criticize you--many do, even if you are not aware of it--then you will see yourself as a clearly inferior being among a much more superior group of fellow humans. They want you to feel that way. If you do, then they have changed your reality. If you do not believe them and act contrary to what they think of you, eventually you will change their reality by giving them a different impression about you.

Even the belief you have about the reality of the world--your world--this moment will be different from someone close to you, such as your spouse. What's more, your spouse's (friend's, mate's, mother's, sister's) sense of reality where it concerns you will differ significantly from your own sense of reality about yourself.

I am reminded of the chipmunks I see outside my window where I live. Chipmunks (known properly as the eastern chipmunk) are solitary squirrels that live in burrows they dig in the ground. They fight with every other chipmunk they meet, usually over food or burrow space, throughout the year (except when they are sleeping during winter). But when mating time comes, they are great romancers and lovers. Once the deed is done, with as many mates as they can find, they return to their solitary existence. When the females have tended to their young, they send them off to fend for themselves, as most rodents do, so they can be alone again.

Being more sociable creatures, we don't try to live alone for most of our lives except to mate. Yet mating is one of the few things we do that we all agree about. Many of us try to avoid procreating during the process, but we still want to have sex because it's fun, pleasurable, satisfying and most of us get a good feeling by helping our partners to enjoy themselves and to feel good.

Once the sex is over, we become relative strangers who cohabit, friends and roommates who live together for their mutual benefit. Until it's time to have sex again.

How can two people ever stay married under circumstances like that? Actually, it's not that hard. But the condition is that we must always consider and work toward the best interests of our partner (or immediate family). Sometimes (often) that means putting their best interests ahead of our own. When that doesn't happen--when one person's own best interests take precedence for themselves most of the time--a relationship is little more than a way to pass time between episodes of sex. Eventually, the relationship will fail.

For some people in a failing relationship, their reality is that their marriage is good and healthy, until the other person passes them the word that it isn't. We may call it betrayal or cheating, but it's simply a matter of two people having realities that are too different from each other's.

A good relationship is not a matter of compromise, as we are taught. Compromise is part of it, but only as a consequence of putting the best interests of the other person first. Compromise comes after, not first. Compromise only comes first in business relationships.

How can we put the best interests of our significant other first if we aren't sure what those best interests are? If you think that your other half's best interests are the same as yours most or all of the time, then you likely don't know what the other person's best interests are.

It has wisely been said that a good relationship is not a matter of staring lovingly into each other's eyes, but of looking outward in the same direction and seeing similar realities.

Just a little something for you to think about.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of solutions to social problems that most people and governments consider realities of modern life, but that aren't. They can't see the solutions because they don't look in the right directions. The solutions are easy and cheap, but hard to find it we aren't looking for them in the right way.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

When you blame others, you give up your power to change. - Douglas Noel Adams, English author (1952-2001)

No one likes to blame themselves for anything. It's not easy to accept fault, then lie down nicely and wait for the consequences to assault.

That's not what Adams is suggesting we should do. He's recommending that we change ourselves to account for the new learning we gained by making the mistake, by committing the crime or the sin, by simply being a fallible human like everyone else.

Change is what growth is about. Change in our lives is more important today than ever before in history.

It used to be, in past centuries and millennia, that the older people were the wiser ones. In the past, the sum of human knowledge changed very little over a lifetime, so the longer one lived, the more one knew. That applied to human experience--personal or vicarious--as well as to information. That is, an old and wise person could speak to the wisdom of a younger person taking a particular action or making a specific decision because he or she would know that the way proposed did not work in the past when others had tried it.

Today the sum of human knowledge doubles every century. It's totally impossible to keep up with it. Older people are more inclined to fall behind with their grasp of new technologies and ways of thinking. They tend to be behind the mainstream, not ahead of it. Most old people are not wise in the traditional sense of the word. They are likely backward. So the younger generations tend to ignore their advice because they don't have the wisdom that older people of past generations were able to accumulate.

Old people today have less value to the functioning of their society and their culture today than ever before in history. The reason is that younger generations need different things from the older generation than the younger generations of the past needed. And the older ones have not changed to fulfill those new needs. Of course there are exceptions, as there are with any generalization.

That disconnect can change. But only when people accept that they must learn and continue to change throughout their lifetime.

Every change is not necessarily right. Some are wrong. Wrong in every conceivable way except that they give more power to one or more individuals. See the history of Hitler or today's Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe for confirmation. That requires older people who may have the time and the improved level of wisdom relating to change to speak up and gather people to work toward reversing or eliminating the results of the power mongers who made the wrong decisions.

Would removing Mugabe today result in the same consequences as removing Saddam Hussein did in Iraq? Answering that question well requires much greater cognitive functioning and knowledge retention than life decisions did in the past.

A few years ago we blamed Saddam for the state of health of Iraq. So the US and its allies removed him. That resulted in a war that has lasted for several years. The change that was needed was not simply removal of a dictator, which opened up animosities that captors of Saddam could not imagine. As it happened, Saddam (with his sons) was the one individual who was preventing a civil war in Iraq. Removing him removed the obstacle to civil war.

No one wants to remove Kim Jong Il, of North Korea, because even he was able to change when those who opposed him chose to work with him rather than against him. North Koreans will benefit as a result of changed approaches to apparently intractable problems. Not only has North Korea been removed from the notorious Axis of Evil list (only Iran remains on the list), but the people of North Korea may look forward to some day being able to eat a full meal. That's a big change. It resulted from a big change in approach by governments interested in the problem with the dictator.

Blaming doesn't work. It creates dead ends. And too often dead people.

There are no dead ends, in reality, only people who can't change their ways of thinking enough to see other possible alternatives. As Mr. Spock said in the old Star Trek series many times, "There are always alternatives." Seeing alternatives requires changes in thinking.

Bill AllinTurning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who will be able to learn and change throughout their lives because they have the right foundation to build on from early childhood.Learn more at http://billallin.com

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
- Alfred North Whitehead, mathematician and philosopher (1861-1947)

Sometimes it's hard to tell if knowledge is dead and buried or if it's alive and well, toiling in laboratories, libraries and offices all over the world.

Knowledge may be summed up as facts we can use. Trivia that has value only on quiz shows and in party games wouldn't be considered knowledge because you can't actually do anything with it. A nonfiction book sitting on a shelf is not knowledge, in itself, because without a person to do something with it, it has no lasting value.

The sum of human knowledge doubles about every 15 years now. In the days of the ancient Greeks, who were known for their wisdom and knowledge, the sum of human knowledge varied little from one year to the next. So as a person got older, he or she could learn a greater portion of the available knowledge, thus gaining wisdom in the process.

Today, people who know a great deal are considered freaks, geeks, specialists or people who should be avoided because they may be dangerous. Dangerous? Adults who know very little tend to be suspicious of, if not actually fear, others who know lots.

Why? Humans are still in our infancy in terms of social development, even if we are well into our midlife technologically. We still function, as societies, much the way our prehistoric ancestors did when they were part of a tribe. Though we have grown beyond the optimum size of a tribe in most communities and cultures, our social system has not advanced with our population. We still think in tribal ways, to some extent.

People who are knowledgeable on a variety of subjects tend to be feared as if they were part of a visiting tribe. We all understand physical strength, agility and ability with weapons. We don't understand what a person with a huge library of information between his ears could do. Likely nothing, but we aren't certain. Could he be dangerous and we wouldn't even know it?

Wisdom today has much less to do with absorbing information we are able to use and more to do with the ability to see beyond the problems of the moment to solutions that are not evident to most people. It's being able to find answers while others are still trying to figure out the problem.

Wisdom and knowledge today may be more rare among educated people than in the ancient past (slaves and peasants were always kept ignorant and illiterate) because too many of us believe we know what we are doing when in fact we haven't a clue. Too many of us believe we can buy our way out of any problem we can't manage ourselves and we're shocked when we can't.

Personal relationships show excellent examples of this. While there are many reasons why relationships fail, one is that many people have never asked what the other person in the relationship wanted from them. They assume that if they are together, they must be providing what the other wants. They buy their way through a divorce because they don't understand each other. Never tried. Didn't know they should.

While I can't believe Whitehead's assertion that knowledge will die because so many people are not aware of how little knowledge they have and how little ability they have to find the answers and solutions they require, this deficit is nonetheless huge and is having an unpleasant impact on many societies.

Not knowing something we need to know is one thing, especially if we know how to find what we need. Not realizing how clueless we are about so many things is dangerous because these people often don't abide by the rules of society. This includes such things as not following speed limits on the roads, taking drugs that we have no idea how they will react with our particular metabolism and wasting fuel in our cars while we watch the prices soar.

Bring to someone's attention that they are not following one of these rules of society or that they should be doing something differently because the way they are doing it might cause them grief and they react with hubris and arrogance. How dare we! Those who try to help clueless others are treated as if they were muggers.

There's nothing shameful about not knowing something. What is shameful is to deny it, to cover it up and to not take the trouble to find out.

There's nothing pretty about ignorance. It's not funny either. Strange that it's so popular.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to understand what kids need to know beyond what's in their textbooks and what they learn on the streets.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still; it is we who move in infinite space.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, German poet (1875-1926)

This quote struck me because it turns backwards our thinking about the future.

The way we think of the future, most of us believe that it must bounce around as if trying to avoid us and detection. To many of us, the future is unknown, a mystery that will unfold in some fashion in ways we can't imagine at this time.

Not so. Rilke says it's not that way at all.

We are the ones who bounce around, not knowing where we are going.

Our governments seldom have long term plans for the future. As they are elected for relatively short terms, they focus on the duration of their terms, plus a couple of years more. Most give little thought to what they want for their country 25 or 50 years in the future.

They can't set policies to prepare for a future 50 years hence because they don't think about it. They only set policies they hope will get them elected next time.

Businesses, especially large ones, set long term objectives. They want to think their way into the future to be prepared for what they will face then. However, their long term plans can turn on a dime when their financial fortunes hit rough patches. In effect, they plan for the long term future, but act in their own best interests in the immediate future. Profit today, not prospects tomorrow, are what counts for them.

As individuals, most of us go through our lives as if we don't know what to expect of tomorrow, let alone what our lives might be like in ten or 20 years time. Planning might come in the form of retirement investments.

As of this writing, I recently passed my 65th birthday. I have reached the age when traditionally, in western countries, people retire. Then, going by historical records, I could be expected to die within the next decade. But it's highly unlikely that will happen.

I could easily live for another 30 or 40 years, as my ancestors lived well past the age when their own peers were dying off. I eat healthy, try to exercise enough. I make long term plans because I expect to be able to fulfill them.

Should a person of 65 years have plans for what they might be doing at age 90 or 95? To a younger person, that might seem silly. But unless my peers and I make plans for our future, we may find ourselves in wheelchairs, sitting in hallways of nursing homes for our final two decades of life. That's not my idea of Golden Years.

The future begins tomorrow. The future 25 or 50 years from now will depend entirely on what you and I and others around us plan tomorrow. We will meet the future knowing what it's like because we will have planned it. If we plan it.

My wife and I will move to a different home in a different Canadian province within the next two months. Everything will be new to us, except our citizenship. One of the first tasks we plan for our new property will be to plant trees where we want them.

We will plant spindly young trees no taller than ourselves. We plan to sit in their shade for years after they have reached their full height.

Will we do little more than to sit in the shade on a summer's day? Not at all. Chances are we will plan how to take the world by storm with our new ideas on those future days. As usual, those ideas will be rejected by the majority of people when posed, then be adopted heartily by the same people a few years later when they realize they are better than what they have.

We make our own future by building it, day by day, thought by thought, one daringly new action after another.

The future is nothing to be frightened about. We will build it ourselves, by our actions and sometimes by our inaction.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach their children how to prepare for the future, how to cope with it and to build it to their own satisfaction instead of just surviving it.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

The internet and technology associated with it have opened access to quantities of information unparalleled in human history. No emperor of Rome, monarch of the British Empire or ruler of any other empire has ever been able to acquire information the way anyone with a computer can today.

A friend wants to buy a garden tractor. He is able to research many different brands, compare quality and durability within brands of each manufacturer and among the various brands available on the market. Having selected a few for further research, he accesses several blogs and forums to learn about the experiences of users of each and gets warning about what to avoid. Then, trailer behind his van, he can pick up the best buy he has made by playing each seller against the others.

Not long ago I was contacted by a college student from Australia as a source for material she was researching on a topic on which I have expertise. Others, strangers every one and representing six different continents, have contacted me for information and advice about problems they have experienced. To them, I am accessible due to the internet.

However, this unprecedented access to information by millions of people comes at a cost. That cost is time, as a researcher must wade through mountains of information that is more advertising and propaganda than fact, and that takes time. Google can only point to sources, not to the most factual and succinct sources.

Children use the internet to learn about all sorts of topics. The media warn us about the dangers of pornography and adult web sites for kids. And they caution parents to monitor the activity of their children on social sites like Facebook.

But the media can't help children or parents to distinguish between factual information and political propaganda, religious come-ons, sites that outright lie about the products they sell, warranties on products they sell that aren't worth the paper they could be (but aren't) printed on, or "research" that could better be described as personal hobby than oriented to scientific method.

In short, the internet is the greatest source of trash information in human history.

Yet children and adults read this stuff. If it's well written, readers tend to become believers. Form, rather than factual substance, gives it street cred.

As television viewership declines, reading of material on web sites increases dramatically. This contributes to what retired Canadian educator Jim World calls intellectual obesity. Kids and adults can have heads crammed full of misinformation, trivia that may be attractive but serves them no good purpose (think the style and content of supermarket tabloids) and opinions-turned-beliefs on topics about which they have very limited verifiable facts.

In general, schools don't teach how to distinguish between facts, lies and propaganda, whether on the internet or on television. A small part of one course I took years ago focussed on political spin, editorialized news sources and propaganda. It may have been the best time I ever spent in school. Most people never get that experience, so they become prey for the wolves of the internet. Internet wolves know their sociology.

Humans being subject to human nature, the more they know, the more they want to tell others. Rumour and unsubstantiated fact has always been a part of human dialogue. But it could usually be distinguished as rumour and ignored or treated accordingly.

Today we have kids and adults who believe the most outrageous things because they read it on the internet. In North America, over half of all adults use the internet as their primary source for news and information. With a few rare exceptions, most of it is not subjected to scrutiny the way newspaper and television news reports are.

If US President George W. Bush could use newspapers, radio and television to spread lies about weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist in Iraq, then use the lies to start a war, what could happen when the unfiltered internet is used to brainwash people in every country of the world about the lies or misinformation its sources want to spread?

Don't call it information diarrhea if the term offends you. But let's not pretend that the internet is a source of verifiable facts. It's not. Most web sites are supported by companies or organizations with something (product or idea) to sell or individuals who want their ill-considered and often poorly formulated thoughts to be recorded for posterity.

Do we need more laws to protect us? No. The present plethora of unenforced and unenforceable laws on the books now prove that method doesn't work. More laws just make the bad guys get smarter to avert and avoid them.

The only way to protect people from misinformation and religious or political propaganda on a global scale is to teach children how to identify fact from fiction, truth from propaganda, sham from gem. That means changing part of the curriculum in high schools.

The other day I discussed with a friend the twice in my life that I have used skills I learned from two years of trigonometry in high school. I struggle today to comprehend how the average person could use calculus in their lives when they can't tell truth from lie, don't know how to think for themselves and believe everything that is carefully presented as if fact by a politician.

Being able to tell fact and truth from what is not is an essential life skill. If it's not taught in schools, most people will not learn it. They will be potential victims waiting to be victimized. This has always been true, but never more important than in this 21st century.

This world does not need any more victims or people who are too stupid to distinguish between truth and lies. We need to teach every child.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to make their children savvy about the ways of the world that could make them victims if they can't protect themselves.
Learn more at http://billallin.com