Why are our children failing in basic reading & writing skills?
May 6, 2008 – 1:19 pmA recent study in the United Kingdom shows that more and more of our children are leaving school without even the basic reading and writing skills. This is a very important issue at the moment and more studies are needed to find out how and why this situation has happened and what can be done to reverse it.
Can certain individuals or organisations be blamed for this? In my own opinion it all comes down to the following.
1: The Government: 2: The Schools 3: The Parents 4: Lifestyle Choices:
I believe that all four or the above play a major role and I will explain why I think this below.
The government has a responsibility to provide each and every school with the necessary funding, so are they providing schools with adequate funding? Is it now becoming easier for a teacher to get qualified so that the government can say that they are providing the numbers to fill all teaching posts?
With the funding provided to the schools being spent in the right places and on the right things? Are the teaching staff qualified enough for the post? Are teachers becoming more and more disallusioned with poor working conditions and poor salary? Are teachers hands tied when it comes to classroom discipline?
I don’t think that we can blame the parents in most cases, obviously there are parents around that do not give a damn whether or not their child leaves school with an education or not but the majority of them do. Years ago when we had the “traditional family”, dad went out to work and mum stayed home to look after house and kids and people generally had more time for their children, ate meals together, bedtime stories and so on. Today is a totally different matter with quite a lot of families having to have both mum & dad going out to work just to survive and thus not being able to give their children the time that we used to be able to do a few years ago.
Lastly we have “Lifestyle Choices”, how can this affect a child’s education? Well, we now live in the “computer age” where the majority of children now have access to all sorts of wonderful “gadgets”, play stations, computer games, ipods, mobile phones etc. Whatever happened to the old traditional books & bedtime stories? In my opinion Lifestyle Issues play a major part in our children’s education, there are just not enough children today that pick up a book and go off for an hour or so to read, sad but true.
Can this worrying trend be reversed? Nobody knows but only time will tell and ultimately it must be down to every parent in the land to want better for their children and make the effort to spend more time with them and encourage them read more especially in their early years.
Tags: Books
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