To serve, with love

To serve with love
have been catching up on my reading of the whole week's newspapers. particularly captivated and inspired by the interviews with the 3 President's Teacher Awardees.

There are a number of very good points from the awardees, there is this particular one,
"Education has to be holistic. We can't just focus on academics. We can't always be there for our children, so we need to prepare them for an unpredictable world; we need to give them a moral compass and equip them with life skills to handle life's ups and downs."

true to the core. It is always a fine balance to draw and delineate everything for our kids clearly and in black and white. But this is only just arbitrary definitions which may do more harm than good. It breeds passivism, inertia, short change their minds to think since everything is drawn up for them in absolute clear terms. Whereas in reality, grey areas dominate in which they have to navigate through.

What we need to is really for them to cultivate their minds so that the decisions they make is guided by sound values (moral compass) and not by reasons of conveniences. So, how do we strike a balance between setting warm perimeters and letting go, so that they are given the platforms to become thinking individuals with sound moral values?

Moral knowing, Moral Feeling and Moral Action - Thomas Lickona