Resolving Differences at School
Re “Reading, Writing and Managing Conflicts,” Valley Perspective, April 22.
As a professional mediator, I highly support [Armine G. Hacopian’s] notion of teaching “effective communication, conflict management and anger prevention skills” in our nation’s schools. I hope she will be able to use her position in the educational community of Glendale to create and implement a pilot project in that community’s schools. At the same time, I decry her need to use a split between conflict resolution and conflict management to make her point. It’s this very kind of academic arguing that leads to fighting. The devastating aftermaths of unresolved conflicts--from violent abuse in our families to the systematic destruction of one nation over another--are around us everywhere. Let’s not start another over this subject, too.
There is room for various points of view in the resolution of our differences. Whether you call it resolution or management, if we are to become a more empathetic society, we need to create a pathway on which all citizens can learn how to live together in peace. I support Hacopian’s goal. I hope she finds a less combative way of presenting it.
BARRY SIMON
Studio City
I agree completely with the opinions of the writer, a specialist in the area of cross-cultural issues, that teaching our children about conflict management and anger prevention skills in school, as opposed to at home only, is the way to go. I would go one step further: Teach such control techniques the same way you teach the core subjects, such as English, history or math. Moreover, this should be a graduation requirement. This may be a pipe dream; however, who has put forth a better proposal that might someday eliminate the crimes committed in our schools all over the country?
DRO AMIRIAN
Studio City
Hacopian’s [article] epitomizes the preference for fad over substance in public education. Against the backdrop of her stunning observation that “students must have practice in managing and controlling their emotions,” she proposes a semester-long graduation requirement in behavior modification theory, replete with “textbooks, teacher guides and grades based on student performance.”
Below the empyrean realm of her Cal State lecture hall, Hacopian might discover in the real world that public schools already waste two semesters--”adolescent skills” (7th grade) and “health and guidance” (9th grade)--on amorphous, happy-talk courses designed to convert teachers into nannies and students into Pavlovian robots. The true beneficiaries of Hacopian’s proposals would be those who have contributed most to the academic chaos of the last 20 years: the half-baked sociologists, greedy textbook publishers and academically useless “cross-culture communication consultants’ who peddle junk-science at the expense of students and taxpayers.
WILLIAM CHITWOOD
La Canada Flintridge
