Quote:
Originally Posted by willynilly
Wow, so scaring a few kids each year is worse than the possibility of losing the occasional kid. Glad everyone has their priorities straight. This is a good idea. My cousin was killed many years ago by a drunk driver. Hit from behind while walking down the road and apparently thrown 20 feet. He wasn't a good kid, and probably would have spent a fair amount of time in jail later in life, but he at least deserved a shot.
And I guess it's ok to show kids car wrecks and hospital and accident pictures of real accidents because it "did not happen to anyone you know". Maybe the old ways aren't working well and we need to try something new.
|
I don't mean to devalue anyone's experience, or suggest that lives aren't worth saving. But I do think that "trying to save lives" is not a cover-all excuse for any kind of behavior. Of course we should try to educate kids about drunk driving, and of course we should do our best to save lives. But how we live, how we treat people, is, in my opinion, often as important as preserving life.
I refuse to believe that there is no better way we can come up with to impress upon kids the importance of the lesson "don't drink and drive" than this cruel and manipulative little exercise.
This is not a question of trying to shield kids from personal experience. It's a question of being honest with them, especially in situations where the deception in question is particularly heartless.
The argument that we should emotionally abuse a lot of kids in order to potentially save the lives of a few is a classic "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" argument. And that argument is a fallacy: we can't always break situations down to "the many" and "the few." Quite often, we have to remember that "the many" and "the few" are abstractions. Individuals are not abstractions: they are actual personalities, actual beings, with feelings of their own.