How Character Education and Avoiding the “Microwave Mentality” Can Change the World

Part of my daily ritual is to always check Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits. This morning I saw an article titled, “Faith in Humanity: How to Bring People Closer, and Restore Kindness” and wanted to chime in with my thoughts.

Thank you Leo for bringing this topic to light as it’s something that I’ve been wanting to discuss. Leo shares,

“I’m not sure if things on this front have gotten worse in recent years, but if it has, I suspect the change isn’t in people, it’s in the loss of a sense of community. It’s that we don’t come together enough, and are separated from each other in many ways.”

He says that anonymity and a more divided community (less religious, TV & media, car society) have contributed to a less civilized, ruder society.

I want to add to Leo’s list with two things from my own perspective:

1. Microwave Mentality: I believe that we have become this instaneous world where everything we want, we want it now. We have 24 hour supermarkets, we have drive-in churches (so you get in and out) where you don’t even have to get out of your car to attend church, we have the Internet where it’s always open and with a few clicks have anything and everything delivered to our doorsteps. I think this “Microwave Mentality” has caused us to come to expect that everything will be readily, easily and instantly available. The problem, naturally, comes when things aren’t readily or instantly available. See a related topic where I talked about “Keeping Up with the Joneses” and “Affluenza.”

This type of “Microwave Mentality” blinds us into thinking that if you want it, you can have it. There’s a funny story about a person who prayed to God asking for patience, “Lord, give me patience, but I want it now!”

2. Character Education: As someone who has worked with (K-12) and who still works with students (college-level), I’ve seen more and more students who have not learned basic social skills and courtesies. We no longer teach character education (trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, citizenship) in either our homes or our schools (some school districts are teaching and implementing it) but yet we expect children to graduate and enter the workforce and act like adults. There are more and more broken families (evidenced by the staggering statistics that over 50% of American marriages end up in divorce) and more families where both parents have to work. The result is that we end up with latch key kids.

According to the U.S. census, one third of all school age children in the United States are, for some part of the week, latch key kids; that is, they go home to an empty house or apartment…The Census Bureau found that 15% were home alone before school, 76% after school and 9% at night. Presumably, the 9% have parents who work night shifts. Source: Latch Key Children - NYU Child Study Center

I think once children are taught character education (trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, citizenship) and once we (adults & children) change our way of thinking from that of the “Microwave Mentality” then and only then will we begin to see a shift towards a kinder, gentler, more civilized society.

Update [12.28.2007] - I received an email from Tom Henderson at OpenEducation.Net, a site dedicated to tracking the changes occurring in education today. He’s asked me to share this link, Increasing Student Achievements by Focusing on Social Skills, with our readers. The article argues that the American school system has relied heavily on psychology (study of the human mind) to train new teachers, when it should instead broaden its scope to include fields like sociology (study of groups of people) or anthropology (study of human societies & cultures). Good stuff.