The Good Parent
by Lawrence Kelemen
When asked about the greatest challenge he faces today, the principal of one of the largest Jewish high schools in the United States related to me this complaint:
Parents spend thousands of dollars year in tuition to send their children to our school where, along with calculus and chemistry, we are expected to teach some semblance of ethics. Then, on Sunday, the parents take their child to an amusement park and lie about his age in order to save five dollars on the admission fee. To save five bucks they destroy $15,000 education.
Our best day school and high school principals have included separate ethics courses in their school curricula. handful of these educational experts have gone even further, weaving an ethics perspective into every aspect of their schools' educational program. All of these curricular and extra-curricular programs constitute heroic attempts to provide our children with the highest quality Jewish education. It is hard to imagine what more the brave pioneers of these programs can do to improve our children' character.
Our tradition tells us that we parents and teachers can be powerful role models. The rabbis of the Talmud long ago explained, for example, that child speaks in the marketplace the way he heard his parents speaking at home. 1 Psychologists also remind us that the model we parents present influences even our youngest children.
For the rest of this article continue on to this link:
http://www.simpletoremember.com/vita...ingReality.htm
10-01-2006
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