BY SHIN TERADA
Today, juvenile crimes against adults have increased. Some days ago, there was a big commotion in the mass media about a boy who killed his teacher with a knife at a junior high school in Tochigi Prefecture. In thinking of juvenile delinquency, we must reconsider the relationship between grown-ups and children.
Recently, the phrase, ﾒParent-Child friend relationshipﾓ came into being. And children feel that they themselves are something like grown-ups, and the boundary between grown-ups and children is in a borderless state. As a result, respect for parents has been decreasing and parents canﾕt control their children, causing big problems between them.
One effect of this parent-child-as-friends relationship is that grown-ups tend to respect too much the childﾕs idea as an established opinion. However, according to the reports from the media about juvenile delinquency, children complain about entrance exams and their parents. Among the opinions about the proliferating juvenile delinquency are those having sympathy for the killer. I feel very sorry for grown-ups who treat those complaints as established opinions. Is it right to make much of the opinions of junior high school students who havenﾕt matured completely? How should the opinions of grown-ups who have social responsibility be treated?
By regarding their children as grown-ups or responding to their opinions and demands excessively it is easy to avoid forcing their thoughts on children and to regulate them. When parents scold their child for doing something bad, they should make him or her understand their idea even when they use the last resort of physical punishment.
Teenagers not having been disciplined by parents or without having seen parents being really mad in early childhood, can not be handled by parents. They behave impolitely toward their parent and, in the worst case, they even get violent at home and the like. When they can not control their child it is useless for the parents to try to solve problems by listening to their childrenﾕs opinions. And in such cases parents need much more direct means to make them mind fully. It may end in tragedy as in the case where a parent ended the life of his son with a metal baseball bat. Grown-ups, including parents, can not understand childrenﾕs thoughts, and children can not understand what grown-ups think either. What grown-ups have to do then is stimulate normal development of children by showing leadership, because they have lived longer than their children and have more experience.
Children raised by parents who accept every demand and show little leadership, learn not to show grown-ups respect or fear.
It is reported in the media that school violence is increasing. Teachers have been losing respect and their authority over students. The reason the respect or authority of the teacher is decreasing is because of the collapse of the triangular power-balance relationship among teachers, children and parents. One example is in cases where teachers reprimand their students for something, but, when the child tells his parents that he is innocent, the parents ignore the childﾕs guilt and complain about teachers. The teachers must apologize to the parents for the matter under pressure. This indicates that the structure in which parents supported teachers concerning students in the past has collapsed. Now it seems that parents and students are against teachers.
Not only parents control the teacherﾕs educational activities is, but also the media. They argue for freedom and human rights too much and always find fault with schoolﾕs responses to problems. In the case of the Tochigi Prefecture incident, if the teacher had inflicted corporal punishment on the student and taken the knife away from him, I think the media would have criticized what the teacher had done as corporal punishment and a serious infringement on human rights since the teacher would have robbed the student of a private possession. The media ignore the teacherﾕs most important mission; that the teacher must face their students.
We have to realize that school education can not be realized without support by the local community and, in the broadest sense, public opinion. Criticizing schools for taking no measures is nonsense without the awareness of this principle. As you know, the media is discussing whether or not schools should inspect studentﾕs private possessions. The school guiding students without listening to public opinion can be only criticized by the media. First, teachers must face society as well as students. A school system which is criticized and has no supporters has no choice but to apologize to society. For the students who know the present situation in school education through the media, the present teachers are not the fearsome teachers they used to be; teachers of dignity have to be given social authority in order to reform this present condition.
Proliferating juvenile delinquency results from the fact that the difference between grown-ups and children in society is disappearing as the dignity of grown-ups decreases. To surmount this problem, grown-ups must start to distinguish between grown-ups who have passed through many social difficulties from children who are immature. And grown-ups should think of raising children as human beings. To raise a child as a human beings, grown-ups should be a model for children and must make them human beings by leadership with confident resolution. It is impossible for grown-ups without leadership to have authority. We must take the social background into consideration when we discuss juvenile crimes. However, the most important thing is that we should reconsider what a normal relationship between grown-ups and children is once more, and we must change this relationship accordingly.
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