Kant's Lectures on Pedagogy

          Reading Kant’s Lectures on Pedagogy forced me to revisit lots of the themes we’ve been discussing so far: the purpose of education, the stages of mental and moral development, the relationship between teachers and parents, the relationship between students and society and so on.  Because Kant believed that the purpose of education was to give humans a way to morally perfect themselves, it made perfect sense that the parts of the lectures that were compiled had the most to do with morality, and how to educate children to become morally sounds members of society. According to Kant, that meant recognizing that children are children, and that there is such a thing as developmentally appropriate pedagogy, which we also learned from Rousseau.  But from Kant we also get the sense, as we did from Locke, that there are some things that tutors or parents must do early on to ensure that their children don’t become spoiled or shameful.  If they do, they won’t become adults who care about the well being of humanity, which defeats the purpose of education to Kant.  One passage forced me to question how we’re dealing with this issue today,

“Children must be taught only those things that are suitable to their age.  Some parents are pleased when their children can talk in a precocious manner at an early age…It is just as insufferable when a child already wants to keep up with the latest fashions…But children become vain when one chatters to them quite early about how beautiful they are…Finery is not suitable to children…But the parents must also attach no value to these things, not look at themselves in the mirror, for here as everywhere example is all-powerful and reinforces or destroys good teaching” (Kant).

We see this a lot with youth today. They are thrust into what we may consider adult activity and consumption patterns for a multitude of reasons: parents and family members give kids material things to compensate for whatever is lacking at home, youth are able to live a large part of their lives outside of their parents’ supervision because of the time spent in “virtual reality” or just outside of the home, parents want to be their children’s “friends” because they think it will keep kids emotionally close to them so they allow behavior that they would otherwise deem inappropriate, parents think that kids’ who take on  adult qualities are more mature or “smarter” so they encourage it, kids feel that they have to take on adult traits at a young age because they are caregivers and/or responsible family members really early on, etc. I’m wondering, what’s the school’s role in all of this?  Are teachers and administrators responsible for addressing these kinds of behavior as they see it in their students? Or is it solely the responsibility of the family?