Now here's something different: my son's school has about 250 kids and NO drug users. Well, at least my son, who is 15 and very much in the know, does not know of one person in his entire school who uses drugs. If there were, that person would be shunned. Peer pressure in an Applied Scholastics school is definitely the opposite of what we had when I was growing up.
We were talking about it recently. My son found it hard to believe that when I was a kid in the 1970's you were thought of as weird if you were NOT smoking pot. It was something that you didn't necessarily want others to know. This is unimaginable to my son! He just can not think with the idea of someone being so non-survival oriented that they would willingly take drugs. I've really thought about this. How did we get this unique and wonderful outlook across the boards at our school? And how is it that my son, a popular and busy teenager, talks to- even LIKES to talk to his mom about drugs, friends, girls, etc.? I must be doing something right. And our school must me doing something very right.
Here are the reasons that I came up with for why we have such a good scene going and they are something anyone could do:
First off, in our school, from a very early age, the kids learn about morals by studying L. Ron Hubbard's moral booklett called "The Way to Happiness". They learn concepts such as " seek to live with the truth", and "honor your parents", "be industrious", etc. And they have to create examples of not only how they would apply that, but how they could also get others to apply the precepts, or lessons found in The Way to Happiness. Each time they graduate to a new grade, they go through The Way to Happiness again from a more mature viewpoint.
I think another contributing factor in our drugless school is the fact that the kids are taught from an early age what exactly each street drug is, and what its effect on the body and mind are. Here is a booklet that my son came home and showed me: (click here). He found it VERY interesting. The whole idea is to educate kids on the TRUE data about drugs before someone else gives them the false data in an attempt to lure them in.
But here is the clincher and what I think is the most important and key factor of our success. All the parents I know use the parenting technology of L.Ron Hubbard found in the book "Child Dianetics". This is something that anyone can learn for themselves and use on a daily basis with their kids. It is so simple and so powerful, that if you studied and applied just a small percentage of the data in this one simple book, it would be extremely difficult to produce a child who did not remain a loving, ethical child, all the way up to adulthood.
