German teachers: Pupils do not know how to listen, hold pens, or use bathroom | Hacker News Reader

German teachers: Pupils do not know how to listen, hold pens, or use bathroom

brusselssignal.eu

4 pointsobscurette3 comments

It's a hard, and potentially inflammatory, conversation, about parents who likely shouldn't have been parents, and how Germany is going to handle migrant parents interested at parenting at level needed for their children to succeed.

> Ackermann said she wants to hold parents accountable as well. She decried what she said was the fact that a rising number of parents spend more time with their mobile phones than with their children.

> Tichys Einblick magazine reported today that columnist and former middle school teacher Josef Kraus wrote in response to the GEW letter: “There are parents who do not want to raise their children out of convenience or due to difficult circumstances.

> “They entrust the upbringing of their children to day care centres and schools. Or they simply do not care,” he wrote.

> “This is especially true for many parents with a migrant background who do not consider it important for their children to acquire a solid command of the German language.”

It's not just about parents, it's about our (western) society as a whole. While Germany has a bigger problems because of massive immigration, all this sound familiar for all teachers from Eastern-Europe to the US. We stopped treating people as being accountable for their own actions. This is true for parents, children etc. It's OK to have every possible excuse – "I'm immigrant, single mother, immature, don't have an education etc" not to take any responsibility and people take advantage of it. This is the idea that you just have to treat people well and it fixes all sorts issues in society failing.

I somewhat agree, with the caveat being when your citizens do it, you're stuck with the poor behavior because they have rights to be on the soil. You get another chance to do better when their kids become adults (and either choose to be childfree [1], or become parents, but hopefully engaged and active in the effort). When immigrants do it, you have options, because depending on your residency model, you can ask them to leave if they are not adhering to your systems designed to lead to desired outcomes. You can treat people well and they still don't perform to expectations. Broadly speaking, you don't want an endless obligation of having to provide material amounts of support and services (which comes out of the pocket of taxpayer citizens) to people who don't give AF, but we should be accepting of inevitable drag when people did try and still fail (such is life). It's a poor outcome for everyone involved imho, but accountability is very important in the context of child rearing.

[1] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf

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