Flashback: School Posts Blunt Note on Responsibility to Parents Dropping Off Forgotten Lunches
Editor’s Note: Our readers enjoyed this story when it originally ran. We’re reposting it here for your enjoyment.
The Catholic High Schools for Boys in Little Rock, Arkansas, deserves a raucous round of applause, because its educators clearly know the meaning of personal responsibility and achievement.
What makes me believe this?
Namely, the sign educators at the school posted for parents attempting to drop off any items that their son may have forgotten to take with him that morning.
“If you are dropping off your son’s forgotten lunch, books, homework, equipment, etc., please TURN AROUND and exit the building,” the sign read.
“Your son will learn to problem-solve in your absence.”
Take a look:
Posted in 2016 on Facebook, the sign would go on to receive over 70,000 likes and 121,000 shares from people who appreciated the educators’ impressive wisdom (among others, we can only assume).
“This is all about teaching young men (high schoolers are not children) to become responsible adult men and spouses and fathers through allowing ‘soft failures,'” wrote parent Margaret Barsocchi Willis.
Principal Steve Straessle told The Washington Post that it’s all part of the school’s mission.
“The policy is one of the many policies that we have, hoping to help build self-reliance and self-advocacy in our kids,” Straessle said.
“We just want a boy to figure out what comes next when Mom or Dad are not there to guide them. … We’ve been amazed that a school teaching self-reliance and personal responsibility seems like a novel idea.”
We all make mistakes, but unless we learn from them, the likelihood of us repeating them remains pretty high.
Likewise, young boys and girls must learn the hard way that mistakes like forgetting lunch or homework at home lead to tangible consequences.
But by experiencing these sometimes painful consequences, the young men at the Catholic High Schools for Boys will be that much more inspired to ensure that they never make the same mistake again.
Moreover, forgetting lunch or homework at home is a relatively minor mistake with hardly troubling repercussions.
Forgetting to turn off the stove or pick up a son or daughter from school, on the other hand, is much more costly — which is why training young boys early to avoid mistakes by thinking ahead is worthy of praise.
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