One thing we know about Hyde is that the school's grasp of the concept of character is terribly shallow. They are skilled at trotting out the nice-sounding terminology and make it sound like they're authorities on character. But, beneath the thin Hyde rhetoric is a bunch of simple minded thought-control machines.
I've met very few Hyde staff who are truly independent thinkers. Most spin out the Hyde jargon like they're rehearsing for a play. The behavior of lots of Hyde staff belies the school's lofty claims about character education.
It would seem to me that one of the most important things you can teach your child would be an appreciation of and the capacity for critical thinking. It is, quite frankly, a most necessary survival skill no matter what you end up doing for a living.
Teenagers are, by definition, going through a stage of development where this skill is naturally exercised by leaps and bounds. It would behoove a parent to not only encourage this questioning, but also help their kid to hone this skill in a discriminatory fashion. That is, how to pick apart a scenario and dissect it logically.
There is also the feature of "gut instincts," how to recognize them and that they should be listened to.
Both of these fine modes of common sense survival, generally accepted and respected for thousands of generations of parents and kids, that is, eons of the evolving social networks of society, are summarily tossed out the window at Hyde in favor of a so-called character education. Which is, by the way, neither "character-oriented" nor "education-adequate" in the final analysis.
What gives... that people still get suckered like this?
