One of the most significant challenges parents handle now is how to encourage their children to become people with values and morals that we embrace as parts of a community.
I am a Latina woman, I grew in Colombia in South America, and when I was in elementary, civic education was a mandatory class. In that class, we followed respect and good manners from the Carreño book, a famous Venezuelan author. “Hola a todos!” I am Claudia Izquierdo, and today I want to speak about respect in education, and I want to talk about that, because I am working in a school, and I wish to encourage all these phenomenal kids with this and more values.
I think the most effective way to create respect in education is by considering teaching a "respect" class in schools.
Every day I share 2 or 3 classrooms with different teachers in different grades. In each class, we have on average, 20 kids.
Teachers speak and explain different subjects in class, and what I can see and perceive is that the kids are in another world.
What is respect in education?
Respect is a way of treating or thinking about something or someone.
We show respect for others when we have good manners, like being polite, say hello, offer to help, focus what others said, smile, pay a compliment, use please and thank you, additionally when we listen to others.
Sometimes I think teachers don't want students to respect them; they want students to fear them. If you're going to try and gain someone to do something that this person is neither interested nor intellectually educated to do, you need to try different ways to open their attention; you need to fascinate them using diverse techniques!
All this process is a cycle, if the students hear and put attention to the teacher, they will understand the topics, they will have fewer questions in the future, better grades, better scores for the teacher, for school, and everyone in the family will be happy!
Why we need respect in education?
Education is the training to develop the intellectual, moral, and emotional capacity of people following the culture and rules of coexistence of the society to which they belong.
Richard Stanley (1966) discusses the educational significance of respect in the article "Ethics and Education," he said that students need be introduced with the normative standards of respect, and respect their points of view, and initiate them into the social practices. I agree with his point of view. We need to respect the kids, but we need to care about their behavior because these students are setting and creating guidance for their future.
Children need to be in the school environment at an early age, because of different reasons; parents need work is the principal cause. These kids will share at the age of 2 or early with other kids that came from different families with different cultures and behaviors. If the kids can have the same proper behavior and manners path to practice with a specific class that focuses on respect and manners, that will be the ideal circumstance.
According to different studies carried by Mr. Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist and Mr. Lawrence Kohlberg, an American psychologist who developed the theory of stages of moral, humans born without any concept of ethics and we acquired those morals during life.
But according to Mr. Paul Bloom, an American-Canadian psychologist, who does research and explores how children understand the physical and social world, he argues that humans born hardwired with a sense of morality.
His work proposes that certain moral foundations are not acquired through learning; we were born with some elements of morality, and other factors take time to emerge because they require a capacity for reasoning.
Paul Barnwell, who is a teacher and writer in Louisville, KY. wrote thw article "Student's broken Moral compasses"
In this article, He asked a simple question to junior students - "Your boyfriend or girlfriend has committed a felony, during which other people were badly harmed. Should you or should you not turn him or her into the police? The class aswered that loyalty comes first—
He concluded that for US schools is more critical to prepare the students academically; that teaching them, that character, morality, and ethics are necessary for becoming productive and successful citizens.
How can we develop respect in education?
We can develop respect in education, by encouraging character education in the students. We need to implement and transfer these characteristics through the school, because our kids live there for 8 hours deily! We need to be sure the schools define the student character model that involves Social and Emotional Learning.
These characteristics like kindness, fairness, respect, self-control, conflict resolution, good manners, positive words, leadership, personal grooming, responsibility, giving back, honesty, courage, optimism, self-discipline are already in the character education program. Still, we need to make of this character education a class like math or reading, where the student feels the compromise in that class and learn.
Students should take this class every day. In 22 states, this program is mandatory in their schools. In 21 states, this program is not mandatory, and if they do, the program is because they have funds for that. And 7 states, don't provide this program.
I think this program needs to be mandatory in all states, and develop it in different environments, instructive, academic, using real human situations, making students feel this class as an example of the real world.
—Abigail Adams said:
Great learning and superior abilities, will be of little value and small estimation, anless virtue, honor, truth, and integrity are added to them.”