Where is the village?

There is an African proverb that states "It takes a village to raise a child." I believe that wholeheartedly, however I am wondering where is the village?

In recent weeks in the Chicagoland area, there have been a lot of news reports of children killing one another. Some of these kids are beaten, stabbed or shot. I am not sure what has so many children full of hate. I know part of the reason is children are having children. There are many people who don't like to admit this, but this is the case. It is a shame that many people in the Black community no longer find shame when a girl is a teenager, pregnant and unmarried. Those people over 30 will remember a time when the pregnant girl would be sent down South and when she returned she was no longer pregnant and there was no baby in sight. That was when most of the community found this to be a travesty. Today, it seems as if it is the opposite. I have students who don't see anything wrong with having a baby at a young age. I don't really understand what happened in the Black community to cause this shift.

I digress. The issue here is about the violence taking place in the inner city. What can be done to reduce the number of children being killed? I have a few ideas and some of them may seem extreme or radical, but they may actually work.

1. The black community needs to take it back! There was a time when the Black community had everything we needed in our backyard. Today, that is not the case. We have allowed other ethnicities to come into our communities and set up shop and offer us inferior products and services. I've purposed in my mind a few years ago to try and support as many Black businesses as possible. If they are not meeting my expectations, I offer them feedback and give them a chance to correct it. If they still are unable to produce, I let them know I am not going to return to their establishment and the reason(s) why. It is up to them if they listen. I know there are some people who say they don't have time for that, but if you don't let people know what's wrong, they may believe they are doing right. If there were more Black owned business in the Black community, maybe some fo the kids would have positive role models who look like them and they wouldn't have to engage in illegal activities to earn money.

2. Blacks need to stop trying to run from each other. When so many Blacks "make it", they abandon their old neighborhoods for more affluent ones. A good number of these areas don't want Blacks in them anyway. I know people have a choice to live wherever they want. I agree that you should live where you will be happy. My point is, a lot of successful Blacks never come back to their old communities to give back to the community. When they do, they do it once a year. Kids need to see positive role models on a regular basis, not on a yearly basis.

3. Stop expecting others to do for you what you are not willing to do for yourself. This is a major issue for the Black community. So many Blacks look for celebrities to do what they aren't willing to do for themselves. When Oprah opened her school in Africa, so many people were upset that she didn't do something in the United States. She said when she asked the kids in the United States what did they want, so many of them named electronic devices. When she went to Africa, the kids wanted to get a good education. What a lot of people fail to realize is businesses are less likely to set up in communities in distress when the residents don't take interest in them.

4. Eliminate or reduce government assistance for people who continue to have children and have never worked. I know this may seem a bit extreme, but why should tax dollars be spent taking care of children whose parents refuse to work? It is not fair to those who work and want to have children and can't afford to do so. If government assistance was reduced for each additional child a person had, I bet a lot of people wouldn't keep having them. Or what if it was contingent upon a child's attendance and performance in school? I wonder how many kids would really strive to do well. My point here is, there has to be some type of concrete plan in place to deter this type of behavior. it is a sad day when some of my students don't see anything wrong with turning 18 and getting on welfare. A good number of them are looking forward to doing so. If I don't have anything to aspire to, I'll continue to do what my parents and family has done.

Children learn from example. if they don't have any positive examples to show them differently, they will do what they know. Now I understand that you can't reach all the kids, but you can make an effort to reach one. We know that there are some parents who will never get it together, but if we work with the children of these parents, there may be hope.

It doesn't make sense.

I was speaking with a fellow educator the other day and we were talking about educators who have somehow lost their passion (maybe never had it) for teaching. One of the things we were discussing is how so many teachers have become very mediocre in their 'profession' (if you want to call it that). I don't understand why people continue to do a half-assed job. Why don't they go elsewhere and do that? Oh wait, if you do that in many corporate jobs, you'd be fired before you were hired good.

It saddens me when I see or hear about educators that don't teach (or at least pretend to teach). The kids talk about them and often times they don't realize how that educator is saying they are stupid or dumb by not attempting to teach them. Most of the kids don't care, they just want to get a good grade and pass the class. What many of them fail to realize is the proof is in the pudding. How can you be number one in your class, in honors or AP classes, and when you take the ACT test, you score just the same as all the other students.

I don't get it. It doesn't make any sense. Either the teachers aren't really teaching these kids on that level, or the kids aren't applying themselves. I don't know. My friend and I were discussing this because she just got an AP class on her schedule because the former teacher wasn't really teaching the kids at an AP level. The former teacher got mad that this change took place.

What is really going on in America that people who are trusted to educate no longer seem to care. It seems like the focus is on passing kids and getting them to graduate. It doesn't really matter if they learn anything. I am always baffled how a country that is supposed to be so great, is lagging as it relates to education. Maybe if more money was spent to improve education and educate parents, there wouldn't be a need for so many prisons. Oops, then so many companies would lose a lot of money. That's another issue, another blog entry.

If America really wants to see improvement, we need to wake up. There are so many other countries surpassing us by and we don't seem to mind.