wondrous strange
- March 17, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, Parenting, Science, wonder
- 3
The only solid piece of scientific truth about which I feel totally confident is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature… It is this sudden confrontation with the depth and scope of ignorance that represents the most significant contribution of twentieth-century science to the human intellect.
Lewis Thomas
Connor (12) was studying for a science quiz on cells, muttering about eukaryotes and pseudopods and such, like it was the driest of all possible subjects. Life…*yawn*
I was working on a way to liven it up for him when I realized, to my amazement, that I had never shared with him (or with you, as far as I remember) one of my favorite science videos. It’s an award-winning computer animation of the internal workings of a single white blood cell, animated by the good folks at Xvivo:
Connor lit up like a, like a…like a seventh grader who suddenly found his homework interesting.
Well…more interesting, anyway.
_________________________
[N.B. Great book with the same effect: Lewis Thomas, Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher]
EyePlejjaleejins
Yesterday I read through a parenting book called How to Raise an American. The book is full of helpful advice for raising children with an unthinking allegiance to the nation of your choice. This one is pitched at the United States, but the techniques described will work equally well — and have worked equally well — to produce unquestioning loyalty to almost any political entity. Lithuanian, are you? Just change the relevant facts, dates and flags, and this book will help you create a saluting servant of Lithuania, singing the National Hymn with pride:
Lithuania, my homeland, land of heroes!
Let your Sons draw strength from the past.
Let your children follow only the paths of virtue,
working for the good of their native land and for all mankind.
(To foster an even higher degree of rabid Lithumania, leave out the part about ‘all mankind.’ Pfft.)
It goes without saying that the same techniques promoted in this book fostered unthinking allegiance to Germany in the 1930s, China in the 1950s, and probably Genghis Khan in the 1220s, for that matter. These are irrelevant, of course, because we are very, very good and they were all very, very bad.
All the same, I’d prefer my kids forgo unthinking allegiance in favor of thoughtful critical engagement. That way, if our nation ever did do something bad — hypothetically, campers, hypothetically — my kids would be in a position to challenge the bad thing, though all around them salute and sing.
It’s Kohlberg’s sixth and highest level of moral development — to be guided by universal principle, even at a high personal cost, to do what’s right instead of what is popular, patriotic, or otherwise rewarded by those around you.
EyePlejjaleejins
During her after-school snack several weeks ago, Delaney (6) asked, “What does ‘liberty’ mean?”
I realized right away why she would ask about ‘liberty’ and was once again ashamed of myself in comparison to my kids. I don’t think I pondered the meaning of the Pledge of Allegiance until I was well into middle school. When I was her age, I’m certain that I thought “EyePlejjaleejins” was one word that meant something like “Hey, look at the flag.” I certainly didn’t know I was promising undying loyalty to something.
“Liberty means freedom,” I said. “I means being free to do what you want as long as you don’t hurt someone else.”
“Oh, okay.” Pause. “What about ‘justice’?”
“Justice means fairness. If there is justice, it means everybody gets treated in a fair way.”
“Oh! So when we say ‘with liberty and justice for all,’ it means ‘everybody should be free and everybody should be fair.'”
“That’s the idea.”
“Hmm,” she said. “I like that.”
I like it too. A fine, fine idea. I also like the idea that the next time Laney said the Pledge, she had a little more knowledge of just what she was pledging her allegiance to.
There’s an email that circulates quite a bit during the times we are asked to stand united against [INSERT IMPLACABLE ENEMY HERE] — the text of a speech by the comedian Red Skelton in which he recounts the words of an early teacher of his. The teacher had supposedly noticed the students going through the rote recitation of the pledge and decided to explain, word for word, what it meant:
It would have been interesting, even instructive, if Skelton had held up a photo of himself and his class saluting the flag, which for the first 50 years was done like so:
This gesture was replaced with the hand-over-heart, for some reason, in 1942.
Delivered in 1969, Skelton’s piece is a bit saccharine in the old style, of course. And I’ll refrain from answering his rhetorical question at the end, heh. But the idea itself — of wanting kids to understand what they are saying — I’m entirely in favor of that.
Getting kids to understand what the pledge means solves one of the four issues I have with the Pledge of Allegiance. There is the “under God” clause, of course (which the Ninth Circuit court essentially called a constitutional no-brainer before wimping out on procedural grounds) — but that’s the least of my concerns.
Far worse is the fact that it is mandated, either by law, policy, or social pressure. No one of any age should be placed in a situation where a loyalty oath is extracted by force, subtle or otherwise.
Worse than that is something I had never considered before I heard it spelled out by Unitarian Universalist minister (and Parenting Beyond Belief contributor) Kendyl Gibbons several years ago, at the onset of the latest Iraq War, in a brilliant sermon titled “Why I’m Not Saying the Pledge of Allegiance Anymore.” At one point she noted how important integrity is to humanism:
One of the most basic obligations that I learned growing up as a humanist was to guard the integrity of my given word. Who and what I am as a human being is not predicated on the role assigned to me by a supernatural creator; neither am I merely a cog in the pre-ordained workings of some cosmic machine. Rather, I am what I say I am; I am the loyalties I give, the promises I keep, the values I affirm, the covenants by which I undertake to live. To give my loyalties carelessly, to bespeak commitments casually, is to throw away the integrity that defines me, that helps me to live in wholeness and to cherish the unique worth and dignity of myself as a person….We had better mean what we solemnly, publicly say and sign.
And then, the central issue — that the pledge is to a flag, when in fact it should be to principles, to values. One hopes that the flag stands for these things, but it’s too easy for prcinples to slip and slide behind a symbol. A swastika symbolized universal harmony in ancient Buddhist and Hindu iconography, then something quite different in Germany of the 1930s and 40s. Better to pledge allegiance to universal harmony than to the drifting swastika.
The same is true of a flag — any flag. Here’s Kendyl again:
I will not give my allegiance to a flag; it is too flimsy a thing, in good times or in bad; if it is even a symbol for the values I most cherish, that is only because of the sacrifices that others have made in its name. I will not commit the idolatry of mistaking the flag for the nation, or the nation for the ideals. Yet I must find an abiding place for my loyalty, lest it evaporate into the mist of disincarnate values, powerless to give any shape to the real lives that we live in the real world. Therefore my allegiance is to my country as an expression of its ideals.
To the extent that the republic for which our flag stands is faithful to the premises of its founding and to the practices that have evolved over two centuries to safeguard our freedoms and equal justice, it has my loyalty, my devotion, even my pride. But to the extent that it is a finite and imperfect expression of the ideals to which my allegiance is ultimately given, to the extent that it falls into deceit and self-deception, into arrogance and coercion and violence, into self-serving secrecy and double standards of justice, to that extent my loyalty must take the form of protest, and my devotion must be expressed in dissent.
It remains to this day one of the most eloquent and powerful speeches I have ever heard. And it continues to motivate me to raise children who pledge their allegiance conditionally rather than blindly. That will make their eventual allegiances all the more meaningful.
The complete text of Kendyl’s talk is here.
yakety yak
- March 04, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In death, My kids, Parenting, reviews, schools, values
- 5
By the time our children are of school age, we take their talk for granted. We have turned all our attention to their reading and writing, not realizing that talk is still the motor that drives their intellectual development.
–from Raising Lifelong Learners by Lucy Calkins
One of my favorite things about dadding this family is the five-way dinner conversation. Becca and I recently realized how rare it is that the five of us are NOT together for dinner — maybe half a dozen times a year, if that. I don’t think having dinner together is the magic bullet so many soc-sci pundits currently make it out to be — more likely a co-variable for some other good things — but it is, without a doubt, the best possible opportunity to talk. And boy do we.
As Lucy Calkins points out in her fabulous, simple, sensible book Raising Lifelong Learners,
Just sitting at the table to share a family dinner in no way guarantees shared conversation. Frequently the rule, unspoken or not, is that adults talk only to each other. Children are expected to carry on their own separate conversation or to just be quiet. It makes all the difference in the world if children and parents expect that conversations will be shared. This means that when I talk with my husband about my work at Teachers College, one of my sons will invariably interrupt with questions. “What do you mean the cost of benefits is going up? What are benefits?”
This happens in our family all the time, but it wasn’t until Calkins drew my attention to it that it registered as something special. Our family conversations are completely integrated, which gives the kids access to topics they’d otherwise never intersect. It surely helps them see themselves as more actively connected to the world around them. Sure, Becca and I have our private conversations, but we either remove ourselves from the throng or just raise a finger at the first question and say, “This is Mom and Dad’s time.” More often, though, they are welcome to listen in, and find themselves privy to many topics that adults might often think would be uninteresting to them.
So I love our dinner talk. You never know where it’ll start or go. One of the five of us will throw a topic in the air like a jump ball and all the rest leap at it. It’s fantastic. I just adore it. I’ve written before about breaking down walls between domains of knowledge for kids — like our family’s “open shelf policy” — and our dinner table is a good example. No separate adult and kid conversations. Everybody’s in, age 6 to 45.
In The Read-Aloud Handbook, Jim Trelease notes that the average American adult spends 6 hours a week shopping and 30 hours a week (!) watching television, but one-on-one conversation in homes between parents and their school-age kids averages less than ten minutes per parent per day.
Calkins points to oral language as the foundation of all literacy, and conversation in the home as the best possible catalyst for its development. Don’t look to school to develop it — as researcher Gordon Wells learned, kids engage in even less conversation with an adult in a given school day than at home, and what interactions there are tend to be narrow and scripted. Most of the time, teachers (for understandable reasons) are trying to get kids to STOP talking.
Last night it started with reggae. I decided we really need some around the house. Erin asked what it sounds like, and I did a few bars of Marley’s “Three Little Birds.” That led to Bob Marley, then to the Rastafari movement and the whole extremely weird Haile Selassie connection, which, if you don’t know about it, enjoy. Connor mentioned dreadlocks, then asked if Marley was still alive.
“No,” I said. “He died when he was 36.”
“What from?”
“Cancer,” I said, “sort of.” He really died of religion, but why go there.
“How can you sort of die of cancer!”
“Well…” Oh fine. “A cancer developed in his toe. He could have had the toe amputated and been fine. But Rastafarians believe you should never cut a part of your body away, or you give up eternal life. So he refused the surgery, and the cancer spread to his brain and liver and killed him.”
We chewed on that in silence for awhile, then Becca said something about an article she read yesterday about steroids in sports.
“That’s the drug that made that wrestler-guy kill his family, isn’t it?” Connor asked.
“Oh. Chris Benoit,” I said. Turns out it wasn’t actually steroids, though they thought that at first. Severely brain-damaged from years of concussions, Benoit killed his wife and son and hanged himself, not 40 miles from here. Becca explained that his head injuries from wrestling had made his brain stop working right, which made him do this terrible thing.
Now some might reasonably flinch at cancer, amputation, performance-enhancing drugs, murder, and suicide as dinnertime chat for children. It’s just as often puppies and butterflies, I promise. But on this particular night, we wandered into some unusually dark spaces. My kids will ride any conversational wave that comes along, and I think their worldview and points of reference will be all the more rich and diverse for it.
So where were we? Oh yeah — Chris Benoit going crazy and killing his family.
Suddenly, six-year-old Delaney’s eyes widened, and she burst out, “HEY! That’s just like that hero!!”
“What?” I said. “What hero?”
“The hero! In the myth! Hercules! The one who killed his wife and children because the goddess put madness in his mind.”
For ten full seconds I had no idea what she was talking about. Then I remembered: About a month ago, we read a strange episode in the life of Hercules, one I always forget about. Juno, queen of the gods and wife of Jupiter, always hated Hercules, the offspring of one of Jupiter’s affairs. So she placed a temporary madness in the mind of Hercules, during which he killed his family. He was horrified and spent the rest of his life in search of repentance.
I showered her with my amazement. She had made a connection between a Roman myth and current events — not the first time she’s made that sort of link.
I can’t wait to see what’s for supper tonight.
the days keep coming
Once again I’m humbled by a child. And this one’s not even mine.
One of the questions I get most often is how on Earth we can help our children to be “OK” with death. Or words to that effect. Like so many oft-repeated questions, it’s not quite the right one. It implies that I’m “OK” with death, for one thing, and I am NOT. It also implies that, when it comes to consideration of death, kids are in a more delicate position than adults.
Pfft!
An adult comforting a child about death is like a terminal cancer patient trying to make the guy next to him in the waiting room feel better about his restless legs syndrome. Prior to age eight, and often long afterwards, kids do not have a firm concept of the finality of death. And there’s the golden opportunity: get them pondering death while it’s a fuzzy shape on the horizon, before they really, truly get the purpose and inevitability of that swinging scythe.
But the traditional approach has been to shield kids from it during the very stage in which they could do some of their best and least fearful grappling. Then, once they’re old enough to grasp it more fully, they are blindsided by their first major encounter. Granny-in-a-box, perhaps. For me it was age thirteen, and my dad in the casket at 45 — the age I turned this morning, in fact.
Heh. I’m OK.
PBB contributor Kendyl Gibbons recommends emphasizing the continuity of life as one of her five affirmations in the face of death. The realization that life itself continues after the death of one person can be both comforting and something of a revelation for kids.
Like most such revelations, we don’t often have to feed it to them. A wondering child will find his or her way to it. Regular MoL visitor Jim Lemire dropped me a reminder that the youngest kids are capable of grappling with death in a subtle and profound way. Here’s Jim’s son Jack, three-and-a-half, discovering the continuity of life all by himself:
You know, days do keep coming even after you die. We know people who have died and the days still keep coming. So after we die, the days will keep coming.
Don’t look to adults for anything half that profound.
___________________
(Thanks to Jack’s mom Linda B. for the original post!)
Discovering Diversity: guest column by Roberta Nelson
DISCOVERING DIVERSITY
Guest column by Rev. Dr. Roberta Nelson
_________________________________
Today when we welcome a child into the world, we know that it is a welcome into a constantly changing and challenging place. Our roles will include being parent, mentor, and guide. Our children, young people, and we ourselves cannot be sheltered from the many changes world presents. If we are not to stifle our children’s curiosity and questioning on this magnificent journey, we will need to be learning along with them.
Today the school system that my children attended includes a diverse Asian, African American, and Hispanic population. Within five years the white population will constitute a minority. In addition, there are new issues of class, gender, and politics
We cannot hide. This stunning diversity opens doors of understanding to religious rituals, language, foods, celebrations, clothing, and ceremonies. Being a companion and guide requires an open mind and heart. It invites us to let go of fears, misunderstandings, and prejudice. We need to acknowledge our own past learnings and experiences and to invite open conversation within the family about where we learned or experienced them and what has helped us to change. This way of being is not esoteric or removed. It is lived in the every day as we open ourselves to new understandings.
There are many doors to open:
1. One of my family’s most memorable experiences was serving as a host family for a student from India while he attended university. In many communities there are opportunities to host high school students from other countries. Our young people could partake of similar experiences.
2. One of our daughters served in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, West Africa. She continues to share her experiences with groups and individuals of all ages. There are returning volunteers in most communities.
3. I know of local schools where the whole school spends the year exploring one country through stories, music, art, food, and information. Some of the best resources are people in the community who have traveled or lived abroad. Families that travel can plan trips that provide a wide variety of discovery. For seniors, Elder Hostel is a valuable source of opportunities, some for children and their grandparents.
4. Some of the richest and least expensive sources include your local library, PBS station, and local colleges or universities.
5. The Yellow Pages can be a good resource for locating religious institutions in the area that we could otherwise overlook.
6. Today, there is a wide array of stories for children of all ages that can open doors of understanding.
7. Some museums specialize in particular cultures and groups, e.g., the National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of African Art are both part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.
Perhaps the hardest for some people to explore are the opportunities in our own workplace, schools, neighbors, play groups, and sports. The first step is often hardest. More than one overture may be necessary before a shared experience takes place.
It is crucial for nonreligious parents to include exposure to religious diversity. As I wrote in Parenting Beyond Belief,
[I]n order to understand current world events, coworkers, neighbors, and friends, we need to be religiously literate. Parents especially need to help their children to be aware of the great diversity of faiths and cultures….Choosing not to affiliate or join a religious community does not shield a parent from [religious] questions—you will still need to be able to answer some or all of them.…Regardless of whether we call ourselves religious, we are our children’s first and primary educators….If you do not provide the answers, someone else will—and you may be distressed by the answers they provide.
If you wish to visit a church, temple, mosque, or synagogue, be sure to make arrangements in advance to explain that your children will be with you and why you are interested in coming. Be sure to have a family discussion when you return.
The challenge of our time is well summed up in words often attributed to Søren Kierkegaard, “To venture causes anxiety, not to venture is to lose oneself.”
__________________________
THE REV. ROBERTA M. NELSON, DD is Emeritus Minister of Religious Education at the Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church in Bethesda, Maryland. She is coauthor of the curricula Parents as Resident Theologians, Parents as Social Justice Educators, and Parents as Spiritual Guides. She authored the essay “On Being Religiously Literate” in Parenting Beyond Belief. This column also appears in the February 20 issue of Humanist Network News.
wild thing
IN DEFENSE OF CHILDHOOD
Protecting Kids’ Inner Wildness
by Chris Mercogliano
ONE
Note the author’s hair and shirt:
TWO
Read the subtitle of his book.
THREE
Recall high school English:
Children reverting to their natural murderousness
in Golding’s LORD of the FLIES
FOUR
Recoil in horror.
FIVE
Send your kids to military school.
Mercogliano is to John MacArthur and Reb Bradley (of the previous post) as a walk in the woods is to a caning. They could hardly be more starkly opposed. He rightly rejects the notion that children are boiling pots in need of a lid, painting a well-supported picture instead of children as dough in need of yeast and room to expand.
I began reading In Defense of Childhood two weeks ago, only to have it snatched away by Becca, who is devouring it and feeding me selected, pre-chewed bits. The book is essentially a howl of protest against the current regime of one-test-fits-all education and the use of drugs and regimentation to beat what Mercogliano calls the “inner wildness” out of children.
Hes quick to counter what that phrase brings to many minds. He is not advocating chaos. He is, however, advocating a wider definition of what is acceptable and even what is good in our children’s emotional and intellectual explorations. And he backs it all up not with the hunches and personal preferences so many parenting authors use, but with sound research in the social and behavioral sciences. (I’ll post about some recent research shortly.)
One of his most heartfelt pleas is for parents to create some unstructured space and time around our kids — to limit, among other things, the two things that most constrict our kids’ freedom to explore the world and their own minds: electronic screens and organized activities.
Both of those things can be greatly beneficial to kids in reasonable doses, of course. But I agree with Mercogliano that we’ve tended in the direction of overdose in recent years. I have friends who carry their family schedule like a proud cross, noting that their daughter goes straight to piano lessons after school, then straight to swimming, then dinner, homework, and bed, with soccer and gymnastics on the weekend.
One such friend recently called on a Saturday afternoon to ask a favor. “What do you guys have going today?” she asked.
“Just hanging out,” Becca said.
“HA! Oh my gosh, you must be kidding.” She then rattled off the mind-juddering structure for her family’s day, with more than a hint of martyred pride.
Our kids do participate in group activities, and get a lot out of them, but we’re keen on protecting their unstructured, self-guided time as well. A few days ago, with Mercogliano on my mind, I decided to watch how Delaney (6) spent the five hours between getting home from school and bedtime. Here’s a very rough sketch:
2:30
Snack.2:45
Rode her bike.3:30
I went outside to find yellow nylon ropes tied from the mailbox to a tree in the front yard, then up to the porch railing. I have no idea what they were for, but she loves to create worlds in her head and act them out.3:32
Found Delaney on the couch in the basement, reading aloud to her dolls.4:00
Laney played “Purble Place” on the computer.4:30
Laney walked dog around the house on 16-foot leash. Several priceless Ming vases smashed to ruins.5:15
Dinner (Mongolian beef and fried rice). Talked about the circus we saw on Monday and our planned trip to the beach in June. Laney told about a post-President’s Day exercise in her class. Each kid said what s/he would do as President. Laney said she would fix global warming and help ducks get through the ice on lakes to find their food. (Damned liberal! Say no to the duckish welfare state.)6:00
I heard the sound of the Macarena coming from the living room. I didn’t even know we owned a recording of the Macarena. Laney had taped a string across a wide doorway and was doing the limbo to the music. We all joined her. As with all things requiring physical skill, I suck at limbo. Down came the string on my chin, and they laughed at me. So I put it up again and stepped over it. Who’s laughing now??6:30
She played Candyland with Erin and Mom.7:00
She read Oh, The Places You’ll Go! aloud to Mom.7:30
Bedtime. Sang So Happy Together by the Turtles. What an unbeatable song.
The ability of my kids to play creatively and independently has come to pass mostly in spite of me, not because of me. I have many shortcomings as a dad, but Mercogliano and his trusty sidekick, Becca, have finally mostly cured me of one in particular, one that I’ve been fighting for years. When my kids climb a tree, I tend to yell, “Be careful!” When they climb the monkey bars, I tend to stand beneath them like a mother hen. When they start running up the sidewalk toward the park, I almost ALWAYS yell, “Don’t trip!” Stupid! Stupid! I am convinced that I do more harm to their inner wildness, sense of exploration, and personal confidence with all my clucking than any harm a skinned knee could ever do. I was kidding about the Ming vases, but there was a time when I would either (1) follow Laney around, fussing and fretting about damage both actual and possible, or (2) simply ask her not to walk the dog in the house. There was also a time when I would have tsked about tape on the woodwork and taken down her limbo string. Not kidding! I can be a complete idiot.
I’m getting better. She broke nothing, and the tape came off the woodwork just fine. And even when there is a broken glass or spilled juice or skinned knee, I’ve begun to accept it as a very small price to pay for the acres of freedom all around that little casualty. Laney had a great day, in part because it was hers to create and run around in. And because we try our best not to overhover or overschedule, she knows how. As she gets older, she’ll lose some of that freedom to homework and organized activities. But if we can get her hooked on unstructured, self-guided play now, she’s likely to jealously protect whatever free minutes she can to be a wild thing at every age.
____________________________
A post by Judith Warner about the overscheduling issue
The Social Policy Report study to which she refers, which claims the syndrome is a myth
The Over-Scheduled Child by Alvin Rosenfeld, MD
drips under pressure
Christian parenting expert John MacArthur
I have no use for experts. An “ex” is a kind of has-been, and a “spurt” is just a drip under pressure.
That was one of my favorite jokes for several weeks in junior high. Ahh, such sophisticated wordplay, thought my be-pimpled self, something Gene Kelly’s wise-ass Hornbeck might have said in Inherit the Wind, cigarette bouncing at the corner of his smirk.
I’m up to my own smirk in experts right now — mostly parenting experts — as I continue the writing and research for a second book on parenting without religion, tentatively titled Building Satan’s Army, One Lil’ Soldier at a Time. I rarely read something that isn’t useful. Sometimes it’s solid and smart — I promise I’ll give you some excerpts from those eventually — but there are also the howling whoppers, terrifying nonsense from top-selling parenting authors, useful in a kind of don’t-let-this-happen-to-you way. I mentioned Joyce Meyer’s million-selling Battlefield of the Mind a few weeks ago— the one that warns us that reasoning can be harmful or fatal if swallowed:
Satan will look for your child’s weakest area and attack at that point. He will attempt to fill your child with worry, reasoning, fear, depression and discouraging negative thoughts.
I’ve run across some similarly ridiculous advice recently. The theme this time is the inherent depravity of our children. I’ve come to call this “boiling pot parenting” — the notion that, unless sat upon with great force, our kids will tend toward murderous psychopathy of the Lord of the Flies variety, and that our primary job as parents is to clamp the lid on the seething kettle of evil that lurks in our spawn.
You think I’m exaggerating. I can tell by your expression.
Here’s evangelical superauthor (170+ books) and radio minister John MacArthur from Successful Christian Parenting (Thomas Nelson, 1999):
The truth is that our children are already marred by sin from the moment they are conceived. The drive to sin is embedded in their very natures. All that is required for the tragic harvest is that children be allowed to give unrestrained expression to those evil desires.
In other words, children do not go bad because of something their parents do. They are born sinful, and that sinfulness manifests itself because of what their parents do not do.…There’s only one remedy for the child’s inborn depravity: The new birth — [to be ‘born again’].
More in this vein turns up in Reb Bradley’s innocuously-titled Child Training Tips: What I Wish I Knew When My Children Were Young (Foundation for Biblical Research, 2002):
Every baby starts life as a little savage. He is completely selfish and self-centered: he wants what he wants, his bottle, his mother’s attention, his playmate’s toys, his uncle’s watch, or whatever. Deny him these and he seethes with rage and aggressiveness which would be murderous were he not so helpless. He is dirty; he has no morals, no knowledge and no developed skills. This means that all children, not just certain children, but all children are born delinquent. If permitted to continue in their self-centered world of infancy, given free reign to their impulsive actions to satisfy each want, every child would grow up a criminal, a killer, a thief, and a rapist.
I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn that Reb, a “biblical parenting” enthusiast, is also wild about hard and frequent spankings, with paddles and other weapons. I don’t know if his subtitle (“What I Wish I Knew When My Children Were Young”) is meant to imply that his kids have turned out criminals, killers, gypsies, tramps or thieves. I rather doubt it. But if they did, I also doubt that insufficient thrashing was the cause.
Okay. Next time, I promise I’ll bring you some of the good guys — intelligent, insightful folks like Lucy Calkins and Chris Mercogliano. But for now, lemme just register my vote for the unintentional sad comedy of John, Joyce, and Reb:
the best kind of ignorance
Connor (12) came across the word “dogma” in his social studies homework the other day and asked me what it means.
“Hmm, dogma,” I said. “Well, a dogma is a religious belief that a church says must be accepted without question.”
“WHAT?!?!!!”
If I tagged the html correctly on the word above, it’s an inch high and bright red, which is how it came out of his mouth. It made me jump.
“What…what do you mean, What?”
“If you can’t question it,” he said, incredulously, “how can you find out if it’s really true?!”
I was completely taken by surprise. He was literally standing there in slack-jawed disbelief.
My regular readers might be surprised by my surprise. There’s a line I include in all of my talks and many of my articles — something about my children never having heard of unaskable questions. It also occurs in the intro to the “I’m *so* glad you asked” page of the blog, phrased like so:
My hope in creating this page is to capture just a little of the electric thrill I get from being the father of three bighearted and curious kids who’ve never heard of such a thing as an unaskable question.
But when I’ve said my kids have “never heard of such a thing as an unaskable question,” I’ve always meant it a tad…you know…hyperbolically. I meant that they wouldn’t recognize the validity of such an idea. It never occurred to me that my kids — least of all my twelve-year-old — had literally never heard of such a thing as an unaskable question. I mean, come on.
But when I asked him, he assured me that he had never, ever heard someone say a certain question could not even be asked. Ever. My definition of dogma had shattered the best kind of ignorance for my boy. The unaskable question was quite literally a new (and completely asinine) concept to him.
My work is done here.
labels
[continued from the open shelf]
“What does ‘humanist’ mean?” Delaney asked.
I swallowed. You’d think that, given my current work, I’d have sat myself down at some point and worked out guidelines for such inevitable moments:
CONTINGENCY 113.e
Requests for Definitions
iii. Term: “humanist”
Subset 2: Age 5-6
Children in this demographic cohort who make a direct request for the definition of “humanist” and/or any of its etymological class members (e.g. humanism, humanistic) are to be referred to Article 6, section D of the Humanist Manifesto, except in Arkansas and Hawaii.
Lacking such a road map, I simply answered her question. In retrospect, to my surprise, I even answered it correctly.
“A humanist is somebody who thinks that people should all take care of each other, and that even if there is a heaven or a god, we should spend our time making this life and this world better.”
“Awesome!”
I should note that Laney (age 6) uses Awesome! to signify everything from “I find that rather astonishing” to “That’s something I didn’t know before, and now I know it!” The latter meaning was in play here, I think, the word Awesome! signifying a new piece of the world clattering against the bottom of the piggy bank of her receptive mind.
Later that evening, after she’d been read to and sung to and tucked and kissed, I went back to my study to close up for the night. Scattered on and around the recliner she’d been sitting in were The Humanist Anthology, Tristram Shandy, The Kids’ Book of Questions, The World Almanac, The Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, The Simpsons and Philosophy, Cosmos, and Bulfinch’s Mythology. I reloaded the shelves and went to bed.
One week later, during our afterschool snack-chat, Laney informed me excitedly that there are nine different religions in her class.
“Nine, wow! How do you know there are nine?”
“We’re talking about different religions, and Mr. Monroe asked if anybody wanted to say what kind of religion their family believed.”
I was not surprised to hear of some diversity. There are lots of South Asian kids in the class. Compared to the demographic mayonnaise I had pictured North Atlanta to be, I’ve been thrilled with the diversity here. “And there were nine different ones?!”
“Yeah, nine…” She looked at the ceiling and began to rattle them off. “Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Baptiss, Jewish, Chains…” (“Chains” is probably “Jain,” one of the most benign and respectable religious traditions on Earth). She counted on her fingers. “Anyway, I can’t remember all of them.” She suddenly beamed. “And I was the only humanist!”
I paused for a week or so.
I am adamantly opposed to labeling children, or even allowing them to label themselves, with words that imply the informed selection of a complex worldview. Dawkins hits it right on the head when he refers to a long-ago caption on a photo in The Guardian. The photo was of three children in a Nativity play:
They are referred to as “Mandeep, a Sikh child; Aakifah, a Muslim child; and Sarah, a Christian child” — and no one bats an eye. Just imagine if the caption had read “Mandeep, a Monetarist; Aakifah, a Keynesian; and Sarah, a Marxist.” Ridiculous! Yet not one bit less ridiculous than the other.
That incisive analogy is Richard’s greatest contribution to secular parenting. I completely agree, as (I am increasingly convinced) do most nonreligious parents. Once a label is attached, thinking is necessarily colored and shaped by that label. I don’t want my kids to have to think their way out from under a presumptive claim placed on them by one worldview or another. So prior to age twelve, I won’t allow my children to be called “atheists” any more than I’d allow them to be called “Christians”–not even by themselves. (More on the ‘age twelve’ comment in a later post. Remind me when I forget.)
So my first impulse was to give the usual cautionary speech: Now be careful not to stop thinking. There are still too many questions to ask, too much you don’t know. Someday you’ll be able to make up your own mind on this, but it’s not time yet.
I looked at Laney, still beaming proudly through a mouthful of Nilla Wafers. At the time she had learned the meaning of humanist from me, I didn’t know she had said to herself, That’s me. She was obviously delighted to have had something to say when all the other kids were claiming their tribal identities, and clearly had no idea of the dark chain reactions set off in the fundamentalist mind by the word “humanist.”
“So what did Mr. Monroe say?”
“He said that was cool!” And I’m sure he did. He’s a great guy. No evidence of dark chain reactions in him, nor in her classmates.
“And he asked what a humanist believes,” she continues.
“What’d you say?”
“I said a humanist believes the most important thing is to take care of each other and the world.”
If she had called herself a secular humanist, I would have protested. But what is there about believing ‘the most important thing is to take care of each other and the world’ that requires more time and thought and study? Is she impeding her thought process by declaring this — or is this a value, like honesty and empathy, upon which she can build her search for an identity? There are, after all, both religious humanists and secular humanists. Erasmus and Paine, two great heroes of mine, were among the former.
Humanism has no connection to atheism for her. The definition I gave her even included the option of believing in a god and being a humanist. By calling herself a humanist in the broadest terms, she hasn’t bought into complex metaphysics; she’s simply embraced a concept that even a six-year-old can sign on to. And in the process, she introduced her classmates, and her teacher, to a new idea, and associated it with her smiling, eager, proud little face.
So Laney’s done it again — she’s taken my armchair abstractions and turned them inside out, making me realize that not all worldview labels are ridiculous or harmful for kids. Some can even serve as catalysts for the next stage in a child’s process of finding her place in the world. And the next stage, and the next.
photo by Paula Porter
the open shelf
- January 24, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, myths, Parenting
- 23
Something, well…ambiguous…happened the other day. Actually it was ambiguous at first, but it got more biguous as I thought about it. (Step away from the dictionary.) I wasn’t at all sure what to think about it at first. In the end, I decided it was…good. Really good, in fact.
But before I write about that, I have some setup to do. There are at least two stories embedded in this one. I’ll start with the open shelf policy and hope I remember the point in the end.
Years ago, I recall my mother-in-law describing her father’s book-lined study. He was a Baptist minister, by all accounts a very good man. His daughter was awed by the rows upon rows of spines of books along the walls of that room. I could picture it immediately, the walls of books and the little girl.
It got me wondering how my own kids would remember the books in our house. We have just over a thousand of them — as I was painfully reminded when we moved — including many old beauties. While living in the UK in 2004, I visited 63 used bookstores and acquired 93 books (I know the stats only because I was keeping a diary for an article I was writing about the antiquarian bookstores of London).
The first one I found — the first one — was a beautifully rebound volume of David Hume’s History of England, a second edition from 1796, stuck in amongst murder mysteries in the open market under Waterloo Bridge. It was £10, about $18. (Scroll up to the top photo again — it’s on the top shelf near the middle, bright brown leatherette binding with gold lettering, just to the right of the little red Huxleys.) If that doesn’t addict a person to scouring the bookstores of London, nothing will.
I’d love nothing more than to bore you by listing the other 92 I found, but I see your cursor twitching toward the scroll bar. The point is that, largely as a result of this fetish of mine, books are all over the place in our house.
In the 1920s, newly-moneyed members of the American middle class signaled their rise out of the working class in a couple of ways. Step one was putting a piano in the parlor. A wide selection of sheet music with elaborate illustrations on their covers would sit on the music rack. Some of these pianos were even played. Most were not.
(I grew up in California next-door to a retired couple. In their living room was a highly-polished parlor grand piano. I often wondered if anyone played it. My question was answered when I realized the framed pictures that covered the piano were also lined up on the closed cover of the keyboard.)
The other way the climbers of the 20s would signal their newfound class (pronounced “cleeeass”) was by filling their bookshelves with the classics (“cleeeassics”) and keeping their tops well-dusted.
Though there are certainly books in our collection we’ll never get to — life, I’m told, ends — ours do get a workout. One message our kids are getting is that books are not for wallpaper, and not for establishing one’s cleeeass. They are invitations to walk around in someone else’s head. And I wanted to be sure my kids knew that invitation was addressed to them as well. So one day, shortly after my mother-in-law’s story, I was taking a book down from a shelf and saw Connor, then about eight, reading one of his own books nearby.
“Hey Con, come here a sec.” He did. I indicated the books on the bookshelves in our living room and asked whose books they were.
“Yours,” he said. “And Mom’s.”
I told him they were actually for our whole family, and that if he was ever curious about any of them, he could take any book off any shelf anytime he wanted and look at it. I showed him which books were old and showed him how to open those carefully, supporting the spine, never flattening the pages. For a couple of days he played along, then lost interest, which was fine. The idea was the thing: he knew that there was in principle no prohibited knowledge.
I told Erin the same thing when she reached that age, with the same result. But a few months ago, though she was only six, I had a hunch it was Delaney’s turn.
Sure enough, she leapt on it. I’ll come upstairs now and find her in the recliner in my study with a book in her lap, leafing through pages, sounding out words and looking for pictures. A few weeks ago it was Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, and she was gawking at the snake-festooned head of Medusa, dangling from the outstretched grasp of Perseus. “AWESOME!” she said. And it was.
I’ve found her looking through a leatherbound Bible in German from the 1880s, Stephen Jay Gould’s Full House, and an illustrated Decameron. But as often as not, I don’t know what she’s reading. My study is bisected by a freestanding bookcase. When I’m working at my desk, I can’t see the recliner on the other side, though I can often hear her turning pages, saying “Awesome!” under her breath or (most hilariously) reading entire sentences of Vonnegut aloud. But it’s hard to prepare yourself for the really big moments when they come. And they always do.
“Dad?” said the bookcase.
“Yeah sweetie,” I said without looking up from my desk.
“What does ‘humanist’ mean?”