The great thing about education, especially younger children, is that you never know what’s going to come out of their mouths.  It’s a little more predictable with the older kids usually, but today I encountered some comments I had never heard before.

The lesson was a typical yearly one – getting ready for Heritage School.  Each year, the 4th grade goes to a one room schoolhouse and re-enacts what it was like to be a kid in the late 1800s as part of their Nebraska social studies.  Part of the preparation for that is to teach them songs that kids would have sung during that time period.  So we’re singing Sweet Betsy from Pike, which describes the trials of a couple going west during the California gold rush.

First of all, some of the kids start to grump about Heritage School.  What do you mean we have to go back to the 1800s?  What if I don’t want to wear a dress?  I’ve never worn a dress and I’m not going to now.  We have to stay ALL DAY?  Will we still have recess?  If I’m absent, do I have to go?  What if my parents say I don’t have to go?  If I can’t take peanut butter and jelly for lunch, I’m not going.  Well, okaaaaaay….

So back to the song.  We sing through it and I explain that a covered wagon trip out west could take as long as 9 months.  “Nine months?!?  Why didn’t they just take a train?” Well, the transcontinental railroad was built between 1863 and 1869. “Well, why didn’t they just wait?”

This last question completely stopped me.  Wait for what?  “Wait for things to get better.  Wait for things to get built”.   I hesitated, still not sure what this child was asking.  Why would they want to wait?  “So things would be easier“.  Well, how would they know it was going to be easier?  “Well, if they just wait, it will get better”.   There was no comprehension on their part that nobody knew in 1849 that a transcontinental railroad was going to be built. How could you wait on something you didn’t know was going to happen?

What an interesting point of view.  After they left, I kept pondering the discussion we had during class.  First of all, there was a lack of any sense of adventure, to experience something completely different from what they do now.  Going backward in time would bring about too many difficulties, too many uncomfortable changes, none of which they were willing to try.  But where did the idea that just waiting for things to get better would make things easier?

And then I started thinking about technology.  How many times have you heard somebody say, let’s wait for the next version of such and such because it will be better?  Waiting for the next device to make things easier which apparently makes things better.  People always say work smarter, not harder, but does that mean we should never have to work hard?  Unfortunately, it seems that more and more kids are looking for ways to make things easier rather than have to work for what they get.  And while it would be NICE if life were always easy, it is a concern for me that if we always allow kids the easy way out or only show them the easy way to do things, that when life gets hard, they won’t  be able to handle it.

I’m already hearing stories of college students and even new teachers freaking out because things happen they can’t handle so they just shut down.  They have no strategies, no bag of tricks to work through hard times.  As parents and teachers, we seem to want to wrap kids up in a cocoon to protect them from all the hard times, the hurt, the struggles.  And what we’re getting are kids who look for the easy way, and if they can’t get the easy way, they don’t want to have anything to do with it.  This is a scary thing, both for them and for our society.

I’ll be the first to tell you that I’m thrilled that I don’t have to use an outhouse like I did at my grandmother’s house, but if I HAD to do it, I could handle it.  I have it pretty cushy now, but I’ve survived preemie babies, financial problems, deaths in the family among other things and have come out stronger in the end.  Hardship can make us stronger, but if we don’t allow children to experience some hardship early, both physically and emotionally, life can be pretty cruel later on.

So, where do we go from here?  As adults, we all want to make a wonderful life for children.  But the kindest thing we can do for them is to expose them to a little work and hardship early so that they become healthy adults who can handle the inevitable hardships that life is going to throw at them.  Even if it means wearing a dress and not having peanut butter.