Leave them kids alone
Orphaned boys were perhaps the cheapest Taliban recruits. An incensed Afghan official in one village presented [U.S. military anthropologist] Tracy with a boy who had wandered into the district governor’s compound a month earlier. The boy wore an explosive vest that the Taliban had told him would burst with flowers and candy, but he didn’t know how to make the vest work.
–from “Human Quicksand: For the US Army, a crash course in cultural studies” by Steve Featherstone, Harper’s magazine, Sept 2008
I’ve discovered something about myself recently: I’m sometimes made almost physically ill by the idea of helpless kids at the mercy of stupid adults. Since “stupid” describes all adults some of the time (yes, me) and some adults all of the time, and we all find ourselves primarily at the mercy of adults for our first 18 years, it’s a not uncommon problem.
Sometimes it’s fictional. Take the unbearable scene from the movie Babel in which a series of bad choices by adults leaves two kids alone in the desert with their terrified nanny, who leaves for help, then returns with said help but cannot find them.
The shot of the empty spot of ground where they had been, followed by the nanny’s anguished face, haunted me for weeks.
Then there are thousands of real-world examples, from the ghastly and bizarre (children drowned in their car seats or bathtubs, kept in underground bunkers for 13 years) to the commonplace (children whacked in the head, taught to hate, deprived of education or vaccines) to horrors both ghastly and common in some places. Children told the C-4 in their vest is peppermint would qualify, as would the estimated quarter million “child soldiers” fighting in conflicts worldwide right now.
(I guess I should have warned you at the top that this post was headed into the darkness. I happened on that Harper’s article again last night for the third time, and it got me connecting loose ends—especially this idea of kids at the mercy of adults at their worst. It lightens up a wee bit now.)
What Shall We Tell The Children?
There’s another piece I come back to again and again—a really radical address by Nicholas Humphrey called “What Shall We Tell the Children?”, first delivered as the Oxford Amnesty Lecture in 1997. In it, Humphrey discusses the idea of children’s intellectual rights in a way both provocative and compelling. His thesis centers on the teaching of beliefs:
I want to propose a general test for deciding when and whether the teaching of a belief system to children is morally defensible. As follows. If it is ever the case that teaching this system to children will mean that later in life they come to hold beliefs that, were they in fact to have had access to alternatives, they would most likely not have chosen for themselves, then it is morally wrong of whoever presumes to impose this system. No one has the right to choose badly for anyone else.
It becomes clear, in the fullness of the piece, that Humphrey is referring not just to teaching about a belief system, but indoctrinating a child into it. So how do we determine whether they would have chosen a belief/value/action for themselves? Sometimes it’s easy to know, and sometimes it’s difficult. So when in doubt, don’t impose a belief.
Here’s a dry run—some beliefs, values, and actions I could impose on my children:
Committing murder-suicide with an explosive vest
Being circumcised
Disliking a given racial/ethnic/religious/political group especially much
Liking a given racial/ethnic/religious/political group especially much
The importance of avoiding prejudice
The importance of self-respect
The value of honesty
The value of thinking for one’s self
Believing/disbelieving a given worldview
For each of these, picture your child at age 30, looking back on childhood. If you can easily picture the child saying, “If I had the freedom and ability to make my own choice at that age, I wouldn’t have chosen x,” you’ve probably identified a value that should not be imposed.
Start easy:
“If I had the freedom and ability to make my own choice, I wouldn’t have chosen to commit murder-suicide with an explosive vest.” My confidence is pretty high on this one. For this reason (and others, I suppose), I don’t send my children into governors’ compounds with explosive vests.
“If I had the freedom and ability to make my own choice at that age, I wouldn’t have chosen to be circumcised.” Youch. The number of uncircumcised adults who choose the procedure (somewhere around 1 percent, if I remember correctly) speaks for itself on this one.
Liking or disliking Swedes, Republicans, accountants? I can certainly see my child’s likes and dislikes differing from mine, so I take care to avoid inculcating. But it’s hard to imagine someone actively resenting the fact that their parents taught them not to pre-judge others (“When shall I escape from this damnable tendency toward tolerance?”).
Then it gets even easier. Picture them saying, “Damn them for teaching me self-respect!” or “Curse the day they forced me to think for myself!” I teach my kids self-respect, independent thought, honesty, and a whole raft of values they are almost certain to appreciate rather than bemoan as adults.
Ah, but now we’ve arrived, have we not. How does the inculcation of a given worldview—any given worldview—stand up to this test?
Answer: It’s all too easy to picture an adult wishing that a single worldview had not been forced on him or her as a child. I wish I hadn’t been forced to consider myself a Catholic. I wish I hadn’t been forced to consider myself an atheist.
I’m proposing an even higher standard than Humphrey’s “most likely.” With some probable exceptions, a reasonable doubt is enough for me to refrain from imposing a belief or value on my child.
Humphrey suggests that the protection of our children’s lifelong intellectual rights demands that we not indoctrinate them to any given worldview—that we allow them to experiment with belief, try on different hats, and weigh different influences until they themselves can make an informed choice. And I agree.
Interview with Amanda Metskas
Amanda Metskas — whip-smart and Obama-cool executive director of Camp Quest, contributor to Parenting Beyond Belief and co-author of Raising Freethinkers — was interviewed about Camp Quest last week over on Science-Based Parenting by Skeptic Dad.
In case you don’t know (and haven’t clicked on the big blue button in the sidebar), Camp Quest is the first residential summer camp designed for the children of atheists, freethinkers, humanists, brights, or others who hold a naturalistic (as opposed to supernatural) worldview.
The purpose of Camp Quest is to provide children of freethinking parents a residential summer camp dedicated to improving the human condition through rational inquiry, critical and creative thinking, scientific method, self-respect, ethics, competency, democracy, free speech, and the separation of religion and government.
BONUS: There’s a lovely review of Raising Freethinkers at one of my favorite blogs ever — Motherhood Uncensored. On second thought, don’t go. Once you read Kristen Chase, you’ll never come back to my insipid drivel.
Truly, madly, deeply
I’m surely not the first to point this phenomenon out, but I find self-canceling verbal intensifiers interesting, and I’m running into a lot of them lately.
(Fortunately, the resulting stain is easily removed with lemon juice and 7-Up.)
First was a conversation with a friend about three weeks ago. “We’re all here for a purpose, I truly believe that,” she said. A novice or robot would hear “truly” and think, “Ooo, okay then, this person has strong reasons for confidence in her position.” But once you’ve heard intensifiers used this way several hundred times, you realize that it actually signals the opposite. No one says “I truly believe that” unless they know their belief is founded on nothing but a wish.
Several more “deeplys” and “trulys” popped up in the following days, all used in the same self-canceling way.
Then there was a tragic news story, the 20th anniversary of the disappearance of a local woman. “I truly believe with all my heart that she’s still alive,” said her mother to an offered microphone. My heart broke for her. In her position, I’d surely say and feel the same groundless things. Maybe I’d even intensify them to keep myself from despair.
But if I were an investigator of the crime, and a relative came to me and whispered, “I believe she’s still alive,” I’d say, “What? Have you heard something? Out with it!” But as soon as I heard “truly, with all my heart,” I’d nod and simply offer my sympathies, realizing there was nothing to it.
You’ll often hear “I deeply believe…” followed by a religious conviction. Not so often “I deeply believe” in evolution or the Krebs cycle. But just as I was getting all puffed up on that line of thought, Google — as she so often does, the saucy minx — rocked my confident assumptions like a conjugal trailer on Valentine’s Day. When I Googled the phrase, “I truly believe,” the second site from the top was British journalist Matthew Parris making this reasoned (if mildly patronizing) statement:
As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God.
That’ll show me. It nicely confused my simple pigeonholes, always a good thing. And I have a feeling Parris — a pro-religion atheist who is a former Conservative politician and gay — does quite a bit of that.
I truly, deeply believe that we need more people like him.
Easy ethics and hard
“They shot him…he was running. It was during their exercise period. They said he just broke into a blind raving charge at the fence and started to climb. Right in front of them….We had such a good chance. I told him what I thought, but I couldn’t in truth say that we had more than a good chance. I guess Tom was tired of white men’s chances and preferred to take his own.”
–Atticus Finch on the death of Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird
“Remember in To Kill a Mockingbird when Tom Robinson gets shot?”
It was in the middle of a silent car ride that Connor (13) blurted this out.
“Oh yeah. Worst part of the book.”
“He wasn’t really trying to escape, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well Atticus says he was trying to escape, but there’s no way! They just shot him because they wanted to and made up that story. I know it. But Mrs. Lawson and the whole class said he was shot trying to escape, just like it says.”
“…”
“And I said he wasn’t trying to escape, you’re supposed to read between the lines and figure that out, they shot him seventeen times, but they were all just saying, ‘No, no, no, he was escaping, that’s what it says, that’s what it says.’ I HATE that.”
“Hate what?”
“When you’re right but every other person says you’re wrong! Because then you basically ARE wrong.”
“…”
Now before anybody gets all hifalutin’ about being the Lone Voice of Truth or starts quoting Kipling to my boy, at least tell me you know what he means. If you’ve got your self-confidence polished up so shiny bright that you can confidently stand your ground against unanimous jeers without a flicker of self-doubt, without feeling even for a moment what it means to be rendered “basically wrong” by the judgment of the many—know that I hold you in the highest respect, and think you a freak.
It’s easy to picture ourselves in retrospect matching the courage of Galileo or Giordano Bruno, or Fulton and his steamboat, or Hershey and his chocolate bar. I can manage these fantasies, but only in retrospect. I am Bruno taking the nail through the tongue while KNOWING I’ll one day be vindicated. Being the Lone Voice of Truth is one helluva lot harder without that perspective.
So we talked about Kohlberg.
No, it’s not a tasty hybrid of kohlrabi and iceberg. Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg laid out a useful set of “stages” of moral development. Connor’s question isn’t exactly a moral issue, but the willingness to speak up about what you believe is right or true definitely is.
The six stages:
Level 1 (Pre-Conventional)
Stage 1. Avoiding pain
Stage 2. Seeking reward
Level 2 (Conventional)
Stage 3. Social conformity
Stage 4. Rule following
Level 3 (Post-Conventional)
Stage 5. Social contract (understand that rules are human creations and can be changed)
Stage 6. Universal ethical principles (standing on principle regardless of consequences)
Early childhood is usually limited to the pre-conventional. If you want your kids to spin their wheels in the lower levels, base your parenting solely on punishment and rewards. Later, most kids become obsessed to some degree with the next two, and would yes very damn well jump off a cliff if their friends did, or slavishly follow rules because they are rules, depending on age and stage. And plenty of adults never get beyond this conventional, conformist morality.
It’s the tug of Stage 3 that Connor was talking about—the fact that it can feel like the loud majority defines right and wrong just by dint of its loud majorityness. So we had a quick chat about Kohlberg’s stages of moral development.
Don’t laugh—kids can do this.
“Yeah, I know what you mean about feeling wrong when everybody else disagrees,” I said. “It’s a stage three thing.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Something I remember from psych class—six different levels of moral development. For little kids, being good is all about rewards and punishments. Then you want to please other people, that’s stage three, or follow rules, that’s stage four.”
“My school is OBSESSED with rules,” he said.
He’s right, they are. “Yep. And that’s okay as far as it goes. But what you want to do is push yourself higher than that.”
“Like what?”
“Like standing up for what you think is right even when everyone around you thinks you’re crazy. That’s the top level. Gandhi. Galileo. Jesus. Darwin. Atticus. Connor McGowan. People like that.”
Wry smile.
It’s not that we leave the lower stages behind as we move up. Everybody still responds to punishment and reward and social pressure, even as we show bursts of high-level morality. But it’s worth talking to our kids about the difference between the easy rule-following moralities so many are so fond of, and the higher, harder levels that all of our moral heroes, if you think about it, seem to occupy.
Love, sex, and death (in rapid succession)
ERIN, 11: “Hey guess what we were learning about in Health today.”
(Erin loves Health. She is fascinated by the human body. She wants to be a doctor.)
MOM: What?
ERIN, smiling: S-E-X.
MOM: Oh yeah? And what were you learning about it?
ERIN: We learned that when you have sex you can get horrible diseases like AIDS and die.
[Dad buries face in hands, quietly weeps for the species.]
ERIN: What, Daddy?
DAD: The first thing they taught you about sex is that it can kill you? Holy shit.
ERIN: Oooooo, the S-word! Well it’s true, isn’t it?
DAD: (*Sigh*) Yes, it’s true. If you are careless, you can get a horrible disease and die. Did you know you can also die if you eat carelessly?
ERIN: Yeah.
DAD: And if you drive carelessly?
(Erin wants to drive more than anything in the universe. I often let her reach over from the front passenger seat and control the wheel in empty parking lots and in our subdivision. The high points of her current life.)
ERIN: Well yeah, if you’re careless and don’t use your brain.
DAD: But what if the first time you heard about eating, we just said, “Oh, eating? That could kill you.”
ERIN: Dad. When I started eating, I was like an hour old, and it was just booby milk. (Giggle.)
DAD: Fine, driving then. What if the first time we talked about driving, we just said, “Oh, driving? You can die doing that.”
ERIN: That would be annoying.
So we talked about sex. It was not the first time, but the first since it became associated with the Grim Reaper. We talked about the fact that it is a good thing — the most important part of being a living thing, in a way, because without it we wouldn’t exist.
We talked about the fact that sex is something our bodies enjoy, and that evolution made sure of that, and why. And yes, that it’s something for later, and that there can be serious consequences if you let your body shut your brain off.
Mostly I was just sad. Not for my kids, since it wasn’t the first time they’d heard about sex, but for the millions of others who have to wade through fearful bullshit about shame and sin and death before they discover that sex, like a dozen other human joys, is a wonderful, natural, and good part of being fully human — one to be handled with care, to be sure, but first and foremost good.
The religious diversity tango
Concerned about a church/state issue in your school? Do what you can to avoid looking like this:
(Special fun @ 0:52-1:04.)
Although his reasons are poorly expressed (and thought out), public schools teaching about minority religions to the exclusion of the culturally dominant one does raise interesting questions.
Go ahead, discuss. I’m going to the teachers’ lounge for a smoke.
_____________________
Interesting note: This public charter school encourages active parent comment on the curriculum and classroom materials. From their “Philosophy” page:
River Springs strives to uphold parent rights and choice in education. Through choice of curriculum, teachers, and program options, parents can monitor materials that affect their children’s attitudes, values and beliefs.