“ Raising children well requires diligence in inculcating morality and also diligence in overseeing their formal and informal education," Jenna McDonald writes. (Pixabay)
In his recent book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, University of Toronto professor and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson writes that we must not let our children do “anything that makes us dislike them.”
At first consideration, the idea seems harsh and unpalatable to our modern pseudo-civilized sensibilities. But, Peterson says that if a child’s parents find him irritating and do nothing to rectify the behaviours while the child is still young, there will be trouble.
In enabling annoying behaviour, the parents are adding one more source of aggravation and anguish to a world that needs more entitlement like it needs more poverty. One could accurately say that raising a child without firm boundaries is actually a poverty for that child. We should, however, keep the rules few yet firm and simple, Peterson would say.
Raising children well requires diligence in inculcating morality and also diligence in overseeing their formal and informal education. Intellectual laziness is poison and renders a child lazy in nearly every other area, not excluding their spiritual lives. Parents have a crucial role to play in transmitting what they have learned from their parents and elders with love and great attention to detail.
“The stories that children hear from their parents, relatives, and neighbours help them to understand who they are, how they are expected to behave and to respond to the challenges of everyday life,” writes Dr. Frank Furedi, professor emeritus of Sociology at the University of Kent in Canterbury. “Through this intergenerational dialogue, the experience of the past is both tested and revitalized.”
“Socialization through validation, not through tradition and lore, leaves the young without a ground of meaning through which they can make proper sense of their experience,” Furedi writes.
Essentially, without a reference point in education, every subject becomes desirable only if it can compete with Instagram likes on the latest post.
With each tragedy our world suffers, social media becomes obsessed with memorializing or tipping their cyber-hats to the latest Internet-famous celebrity causes.
Any tragic event with significant loss of life instills a nearly religious fervour (but only if it is First-World loss of life); the event itself becomes semi-liturgical in the reverence and honour displayed across social media platforms with the sign of the Cross being the hashtag.
“(Raising awareness) is represented as a value in its own right, and in a morally disoriented world it helps socialize young people to believe that those who possess raised awareness are better people than those with traditional views. But since awareness is a caricature of a virtue, its pursuit merely evades genuine answers to the big questions of our time,” Furedi writes in his article “No Patrimony: Why adulthood depends on the authority of the past” (First Things, February 2018).
“If society is changing so rapidly, then the moral, artistic, and political content of the past is less valuable than the ability to adapt to constantly changing conditions,” Furedi writes. “From this standpoint, the past and its values are not a legacy worth transmitting to young people.”
Could it be that we are not teaching the young but merely “raising their awareness”? We hold them to no higher standards except those collectively scavenged from an increasingly strange, non-digital (and thus irrelevant) past and sorted based on attractiveness. As Tolkien wrote in his epic novel Lord of the Rings “All that is gold does not glitter,” or perhaps a more modern adaptation would read, all that is gold cannot fit into 140 characters.
If there is no marrying principal connecting the fads and movements that sprawl themselves lazily across the invasive social media platforms, we are a people without a destination looking for some semblance of a lesson to learn. We are not unlike animals that live for the next belly rub. We live for likes and for someone to acknowledge how tolerant, well-travelled and sophisticated we are in our taste for social justice causes.
Tweeting condolences and empty platitudes is much like tweeting that we hope Ethiopian children find food. We don’t have to do much but we get to look compassionate and “send our thoughts.” This is the new socially acceptable piety.
Though it is tempting, now is not the time for cynicism. It is the time to strengthen our resolve. If we find ourselves educating children, let us work toward well-defined goals diligently. May we raise thoughtful faithful, responsible citizens who, God-willing, will raise more thoughtful citizens for the edification of many generations to come.
Can education and parenting be reclaimed? Absolutely. With God, anything is possible. “The stone that the builders rejected has become the corner stone. And it is a marvel in our eyes.” It is a marvel that the Church founded the formal educational institutions that now find themselves aimless and in grave disrepair; but, we can certainly ask God to inspire reform. We know that the Church is evergreen in its capacity to produce saints in every political and social climate ... today is no exception. Will the next saints be educational reformers? Please God, let it be so.