rights...right

i think,no wait, i believe tt kids should be taught with the cane.

because no pain, no gain.

i'm totally irritated with parents, who think that their children should be informed of their "rights" in school. including "rights" to lodge a complain against a teacher if the teacher hits him/her.

so we end up having kids threatening teachers that they will "complain all the way to MOE" if the teachers punish them. if you find the tone of the kid familiar, look to the source. that's most probably what the parent sounded like when they taught them this line like it's a demon protection charm.

children with this new-found "rights" abuse it, because the only association they can see with punishment is that e teacher is an ass who should burn in hell. they don't see that punishment of the child comes from the teacher's anxiousness to want the child to do well, the teacher's anger from his/her unheeded advice given to the child. and if u think punishment by scolding, standing inside/outside works, think again.

parents have slowly come to see education as a service. we pay for the service. thus, we are right to demand that u teach our child academically & morally since education is the service u are providing. we are always right. yet, what they don't see is that this service is different from the commercial services you get, like the the manicures you get at the nail salon, or the hair cut u get at the hairdresser's.

in fact the concept of education being a "commercial activity" is so screwed up now a days that teachers are being treated like super-nannies, to teach a child academically like a tuition teacher, to resolve petty disputes among kids after school hours like a nanny, to be educate a child morally when parents are teaching the totally opposite at home i.e, parent asking the child to blatantly skip school because national day/sports day is not important.

education is not what u get in school. education means learning. and learning is beyond classrooms. u learn frm ppl around u, ppl u interact with in ur daily life, which means ur parents which are supposed to spend the most time with u. yet now kids are so deprived of all this love, that they come to sch, deprived, seeking to get all e attention they can from any adult, doing ridiculous things like declaring they have stomachache every 5 mins. parents cannot stand e fact that their child can be wrong. their child is perfect. *because the time they interact with their child is so little that sometimes, what they see everyday is just their child slping after they return home from work.* their child doesn't fight with friends. their child is e reincarnation of an angel.

maybe that's what education has produced, a generation of parents totally obsessed with how good or perfect they are. * rmb e times we wrote our own testimonial full of praise for our own damn achievements? * a generation of parents obsessed with the tag line, the customer is always right. a generation of parents who are so educated that they think they know every damn thing that they feel e teacher is wrong so if anything, THEY should correct the teachers, the teachers cannot correct their child.

sure, teachers have been in headlines for all e wrong reasons like molesting, demoralizing children, humiliating children by using lipstick to draw on them. but there're alot of teachers, many many more out there, working their hearts out for the kids. we joke about them in the staff room, discuss abt the craziest methods to torture them, but it all boils down to e love for e kids, e frustration at their inability to do what they think is best for them because most parents are just not seeing education in the right light.

if there's anything i learnt, it's what e vp said, whatever respect that the world has for teachers, we had better work hard to keep that respect, because there's really not much of it left.

it's so hard to stay true...