Letters | How schools could help raise better parents
Readers discuss the importance of teaching pupils about child development, and the police shooting of an armed man in Hong Kong
To proactively avoid invasive state removal of children in cases of dysfunctional family situations, we should be willing to try unconventional preventive measures. We should teach our high school students the science of how a child’s mind develops and therefore its susceptibility to flawed or dysfunctional daily environments, notably in family life.
Rather than being about instilling values, such a child-development science curriculum should be about understanding and not just information memorisation. It can offer an alternative to the dysfunction that seems to be increasingly prevalent.
Unfortunately, when I asked a provincial teachers’ union official whether there was any such curriculum being taught, he immediately replied there was not. When I asked the reason for its absence and whether it may be because the subject matter is too controversial, he replied with a simple “yes”.
This strongly suggests there are philosophical, and thus political, obstacles to teaching students even such crucial life skills as healthy parenting through understanding child development.
