Teach Your Children Well
This essay was written as a required assignment for parents in my son’s high school Honors English class. The assignment was to write a letter, poem or essay about your thoughts as a parent and/or your goals for your child. A reflection upon their upcoming graduation. I hope I get an “A.”
__________
It really seems quiet amazing that my youngest child, perhaps my most precocious offspring, is preparing to graduate from high school and move onward to the next phase of life. The last of three, all well on their way to their adult endeavors. This realization is just cause for reflection, reflection on all three of their lives. On the plans, hopes and dreams we had for each, and how they’ve progressed to date.
How’d we do as parents, and why did we encourage certain paths and not others. Were these good choices, and how have things worked out?
No, I’m not going to bore you or make you suffer through a personal replay of their lives or some drawn-out pontification on parenting. Who has time for that? What I will share are our ideas on education and why we, as parents, didn’t embrace a “status quo” path of development for our children. And furthermore, why I believe we need a radically different approach to education, especially in light of current events and what I believe to be a very uncertain future for not only our children, but for all life on earth.
Most children don’t simply “move on” to various phases in life. My experience suggests they’re prodded and cajoled, herded along like farm stock along the pressure packed conveyor belt of life. From compulsory elementary and secondary education to higher education, in the hope they’ll become gainfully employed subservient minions, tax paying consuming sycophants waving the flag. Red, white and blue Bible believing capitalists marching onward. Saving souls and opening markets and passing on the big lie that growth capitalism is our raison d’être.
It’s an assembly line of monoculture, and it’s having devastating effects.
Some of us, however, are (as my friend Hayduke often says) speed bumps in the road to so-called “progress.” We raise our children to question everything, since only through questioning and testing does anything earn its legitimacy. We stand against hierarchy and the notion that institutions should be trusted. We carefully lead our children, providing sufficient information for them to make their own informed decisions about everything from faith to politics.
We lead by example and resist the notion that children are like cattle, little tax write offs that need to be forced into subservient compliance, often with stern discipline and threats. Because everyone knows where the cattle end up. And for children in America, the slaughterhouse is, in my opinion, an unimaginative life of wage slavery working in meaningless jobs for extractive, toxic corporations. Corporations that have hijacked our government and laid waste to the environment.
So, as parents, we’ve encouraged our children to be thinkers. Students of the classics. The liberal arts. To be historians, writers and painters. To embrace music, literature, art and diversity. And perhaps most importantly, to be catalysts for change in a society that’s in desperate straits.
Edward Abbey once said “The idea of wilderness needs no defense; it only needs more defenders.” I’d expand that idea to say that the ideas of equality, egalitarianism, altruism and peace need no defense. They too need only more defenders.
I think that’s been our ultimate goal as parents. To not only insure that our children are happy, healthy and well prepared for the challenges of life, but to be willing to take up any of the multiple causes in need of more defenders.
Activism can of course be accomplished in many ways. Via direct action or protest but also via the law, art, music and writing. How many people have found inspiration in John Lennon’s Imagine? In the poetry and essays of Gary Snyder? Or from a teacher that encouraged his or her students to think deeply and critically about things. To go beyond the basics of simple memorization and understand the deeper meaning in Keats’ Ode to A Nightingale.
It’s more than a sonnet. It’s a worldview that places exceptional value on the natural world and all living things.
As we enter 2008, human civilization is pushing the limits. The toxic and co-dependent relationship between industrial capitalism and militarism is not only unsustainable, it’s threatening nearly every life form on the planet. Perhaps cockroaches, a brilliant example of evolutionary biology, are immune, but almost everything else seems hopelessly caught in the vortex of human excess and destruction. The graduating students of 2008 are entering a scary place. It’s a violent, self-absorbed world facing the triple threat of Peak Oil, global climate change and shrinking aquifers. Peak Oil means much more than oil for cars, by the way. Everything in our society is propped up by oil. Pharmaceuticals, construction materials and most importantly, food. Our burgeoning world population depends on industrialized agriculture for food, which is dependent on a non-renewable resource, fossil fuel. You don’t need a college degree to quickly conclude our entire society is therefore dependent upon a non-renewable resource and frankly, in deep dung.
Technologists falsely believe some new silver bullet will save us, but they’re sadly misinformed. Even a cursory examination of the facts, including some pretty simple energy analysis reveals that nothing can cost effectively and efficiently replace fossil fuel as an energy source. We’ve strained our natural resources, including water, to the limit. It’s sink or swim for humans, meaning, we have to relearn how to live in harmony with the planet or cease to live. It’s really very, very simple.
Education is the only answer, since it’s ignorance that got us in this mess. To successfully turn the tide, if such a thing is even possible at this point, we need thinkers with broad based educations. We need fewer MBA’s and more biologists, anthropologists, geologists and researchers that can apply these skills in activism and toward the construction of a more equitable and sustainable society.
We need poets, novelists, thespians, musicians and artists to make life more palatable while we’re trying to figure everything out.
Want to run a business? Open a bike shop. It will be a good investment once gas tops $7.00 per gallon. Start a food cooperative. Develop point-of-use technologies for energy. Become an organic farmer.
And of course we need teachers that challenge our children to think. To embrace diversity of life and to be catalysts for change. To challenge the status quo and resist the anthropocentric notion that the planet is our personal playground, and that nature is something that must be conquered.
Like the Taoist, we need to learn how to flow with life, not against it. It’s a required, base level of understanding we must possess in order to build a sustainable society.
I hope my children are part of a peaceful revolution. To take a place on the front line and be willing to fight for the voiceless and the downtrodden. To help us craft a sustainable, egalitarian society where the measure of a person is how much they give, not how much they possess.
It’s the only war worth fighting.
We have art so that we shall not die of reality ~ Nietzsche
I vote for an “A” !!!