Culture and Religion
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This collection of topics, a brief view of life, could be used to teach an adolescent the basics about life.
Adult
Adults will always be around other adults for many reasons.
Many will get married, where each will commit to spending their life devoted to one another. There are other animals that do the same, where the male and female remain together until they die.
Many couples create a family, the father and mother with one or more children. In this case, the couple shares their love with their children, taking care of them until they mature into adults to eventually move away on their own. A family is sometimes more than just the father, mother and children; other relatives become involved. The parents of the couple, or the grandparents of the children, can also help with raising the children.
The extended family can also become involved, where the sisters and brothers of the couple, or the aunts and uncles of the children, and the children of those aunts and uncles, or the cousins of the children, will also contribute depending on the relative ages of the cousins and the distance between the various adults.
Families will settle in a neighborhood (or a small community) with other families. The children will usually attend a nearby school, with other children. The school provides rooms for learning while the children are taught be teachers trained for this effort at helping children become responsible adults. While one teacher could do a good job of teaching one child, part of becoming an adult is learning how to interact correctly with other adults so the school also provides a way for learning those social skills.
Adults take on a career after completing their education. Each person's childhood and education help identify a person's natural abilities to define an appropriate career, to take advantage of those abilities or learned skills. Each person's job will usually require working with other adults, where each has compatible skill sets so when working together the team can be successful that would have been more difficult if attempted alone.
The neighborhood also allows adults to maintain friendships with those outside of their family. Just as children in a school will get along better with some better than others, the same happens with adults. The friendships that last the longest are usually due to each having respect for the other, where everyone is different but recognizing and accepting those differences is critical in maintaining a close relationship (just as between a mother and father in a family). Childhood friendships do not always continue as adults because as careers take shape, marriages and families develop, moves to another city occur, too many differences can arise making it difficult to be as close as before.
Many children will encounter a bully during their years in school. A bully is a person who threatens harm if his or her wishes are not followed. This is wrong behavior because people succeed when working together, not when working against each other and it is wrong to get obedience through threats or violence. A bully has learned behavior inappropriate for an adult. Children should find protection from a bully through the adults in the school who can take necessary action against the bully.
Unfortunately this bullying behavior can also be found in adults. People who steal, murder, or blackmail are usually tracked down by the police so they can be put in jail, to take them away from harming others and to hopefully teach them not to behave that way again when they get out.
Children might also encounter cliques, where one group of children separates themselves from the others, such as when they have a common interest, like a group of athletes. Cliques can be either good or bad, where a good clique helps those in a common situation learn from each other, like a team of baseball players, while a bad clique sets up a social wall where those inside the clique do not treat fairly those outside the clique. An extreme example of a bad clique is a youth gang, where the members behave badly as a group.
Unfortunately this clique behavior can also be found in adults. If one group of adults can convince themselves they are better than another group of adults and that other group can be blamed for any problem, then the first group can take advantage of the situation, perhaps with money, better jobs, or other benefits.
This divisive behavior will found throughout history, where one group will be identified by the color of their skin, their country of origin, or their religion and after that distinction is emphasized within the community this isolated group will be shunned or treated badly by others.
People succeed when working together. The opposite to that, where only one person or a small group of people attempts to succeed above the rest who are degraded, is a behavior known as 'divide and conquer' where splitting the opposition makes it harder for those to work together allowing those claiming the split to grab the benefits. As an adult this bad behavior will be seen in many different ways. Adults like to be with other adults and it can be comforting to be with adults more like yourself, so this 'divide and conquer' technique can be very effective when splitting those unlike yourself from those like yourself. Prejudice is a continuing problem even though it can be so easily recognized.
If children were taught to recognize prejudice from an early age perhaps they would be less likely to fall into its trap. Our social nature is very important.
References: on Wikipedia
created - December 2011
last change - 12/17/2011
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