Education and Responsibility

Re “Clear the Path to College,” Valley Edition Editorials, April 25.

Those families who entered the United States in the Ellis Island days from the shtetls and villages of Europe knew that education was the key to a better future for their children. The families worked long hours and pushed their children (or, at least one) to do well and to get to college. No special counselors, no special programs--the families did it! Even when I came to this country in 1962 and entered the sixth grade, I knew my “job” was education.

Why is it that these days, all we can think of is creating new programs designed for such narrow purposes that they promote divisiveness and do little to achieve their stated objectives? Each new program further segregates a class of students from the general school population, promotes negative stereotypes and curtails personal growth and achievement. If the families knew enough to come to this country for the opportunities (not handouts) it affords, it is likewise up to the families to provide the basic guidance and motivation. It is not effective in the long run for each institution or agency to try to remedy all of society’s ills--it all begins in the home.

The me-generation parents have abdicated their job of parenting and looked to the schools to pick up the slack for too long. Yet when the schools try to perform the functions to which they wrongfully have been relegated, parents back up their disrespectful (lawbreaking), spoiled, arrogant children instead of backing up the school. The fact that mothers aren’t there at 3 p.m. to greet their children with milk and cookies after school is nonsense. Long before women’s lib, mothers worked outside the home and children were on their own, but they generally found constructive ways to spend their afternoons, usually with homework and chores, sometimes jobs. There was no TV, no cell phones, no pagers, no Internet to distract them from their life’s work--school.

Don’t waste money on another program. There is so much money in the school system--if it only were spent in the classrooms rather than in the boardroom.

STEPHANY YABLOW, Sherman Oaks