It’s happened ever so slowly and without much notice. With each succeeding generation, we have arrived at this moment in time. American society has evolved into a nation of wired but unconnected individuals with fewer shared values.
Values, the common language of any society, are the “ties that bind”. The more we share in common, the better the basis for our sense of belonging, community and knowing collectively what is “right.”
From our nation’s founding, citizen parents, public schools and clergy have worked in concert to impart these core values to our youth. However with the recent decline of religious affiliation among families and baby-boom parents reluctant to parent, the burden of imparting these core values has been deferred to our educators. Teachers have now become the new [ad]ministers of values, teaching these essential concepts to our youth.
In his book, Century’s End, Alan Wolfe observes, “Someone who visited the United States in the first decade after World War II and then came back in the last decade of the twentieth century would have seen two entirely different countries. From the relations between husbands and wives and parents and children . . . the texture of American life bears little resemblance to the way things once existed”(1). How we regard the education of our children changed dramatically in the latter part of the last century as well as the intent of schooling itself.
Our founding fathers created public schools not to impart knowledge but to arm youth against the influences of Satan. As cited by B. Edward McClellan, “The Massachusetts School Act from 1647, also known as The Old Deluder Satan Act, states, It being one chief object of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures ...” (1). So, to best Satan, the early colonists set out to teach their children how to read scripture, think for themselves and know with unwavering resolve what was good and right in the world. In 1647 in the colony of Massachusetts, it was made law that all towns with “fifty households or more to employ teachers to instruct the young so that they could learn to read the Scriptures” (McClellan 1). Primers for children, mounted on thin wooden boards, would teach the alphabet as illustrated lessons from the Bible. In these ways, the colonist youth were introduced to the notion of “right and wrong” and thus schooled in social morality. This was the beginning of the public school system.
This all came about from the parent-leaders within the community who regarded religion and its values as a cornerstone of society in the New World. As Benjamin Franklin stated, “Religion will be a powerful regulator of our actions, give us peace and tranquility within our minds, and render us benevolent, useful and beneficial to others” (Isaacson: 87-88). The Puritans of Massachusetts believed that a person “could achieve good only by severe and unremitting discipline. Hard work was considered a religious duty and emphasis was laid on constant self-examination and self-discipline” (Columbia Encyclopedia).
Perhaps as significant as their high regard for moral precepts, these parents from our early days as an embryonic nation thought for themselves and sought no outside counsel. Contrast that with the parents of the “Gen Xers” caught in a paralysis by analysis and unable to act without consulting the new bible – Dr. Benjamin Spock's The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, originally published in for their parents 1946.
It may be said that the promise of a post-war America was one of unlimited opportunities. The world, now free from global conflict, began to rebuild. Rebuild it did and in such extraordinary ways. The baby boomers watched in amazement as astronauts walked on the moon, delivered there by a vehicle invented with seemingly limitless imagination. The promise fulfilled.
Although their world was overshadowed by such menacing things as the Cold War and the arms race, these children did indeed thrive and soon became parents themselves, creating an “echo boom”.
But their world had become far more complex and bewildering than the world of their parents –the charter members of the Greatest Generation. In stark contrast to their parents and despite the advances in technology, these post-Sputnik parents were uncertain of the future. And, they felt inadequate in raising their offspring in a world as bewildering as the one they inherited. After all, they had grown up watching “Father Knows Best” broadcast in tones of black and white on their TV’s. Jim Anderson, the patriarch of that series, seemed to always know what to do in any given situation. But they were not him and their world seemed to spin much faster and sometimes out of control. Life became complicated and no longer black and white. This is when the Boomers started to defer to the “experts”. As noted by author John P. Diggins, “An important feature of American culture in the years since World War II has been the greater willingness of citizens to rely on experts to tell them how to think, feel, and act” (qtd. In Wolfe, 65).
Dr. Spock’s original book was now in its sixth printing, outselling all other non-fiction titles but the Bible itself. To accommodate his famished readers, he wrote three more guidebooks. Spock’s approach to child rearing was for the parent to use common sense. But in our quest for prosperity and technological advancement, “common” became blurred. Parents sought not only financial security but also comfort from the world they inherited. Moms entered the workplace by necessity rather than choice – all to keep up “with the Jones”. And, latchkey kids became the norm. Parents now entrusted their children to other child development specialists – pedigreed daycare centers.
At the same time, “The number of nonreligionists . . . throughout the 20th century skyrocketed from 3.2 million in 1900, to 697 million in 1970, and on to 918 million in AD 2000” (Paul 1). Adults began to distance themselves from the religious traditions of the parents, in conflict those institutions that condemned contraception in a world now so severely overpopulated that some were compelled to commit fratricide rather than rear a child an undesired gender as it occurred in China. The Gallup Organization’s surveys taken since 1980, consistently place [religious] membership in the mid-high 60% (23) but clearly in slow decline. This is most unfortunate. As Robert Putnam cautions, “Faith communities in which people worship together are arguably the single most important repository of social capital in America” (66).
This unfortunate convergence – parents who defer to experts as they scramble to get ahead and the abandonment of religious traditions within families – has left the true education of our youth at the doorsteps of our public schools and the teachers within. Our sense of community begins when in enter elementary school – thrown together in a much larger unit that that of our families. It is a microcosm of our society, the importance of which has thankfully not escaped educators. As Gary Alan Fine and Jay Mechling propose, “Children are not merely reproductions of our individual selves; they bear our communities' values and meanings. They are the guardians of the twenty-first century” (58).
Character development initiatives, a bill of rights for students, school mission statements and published ethical policies all signal the importance of societal values early in our children’s scholastic lives. Furthermore, as Maxine Dunfee and Claudia Crump’s book, Teaching for Social Values in Social Studies, reminds us of “the importance of values education in the elementary school based on the belief that many personal and societal problems are the results of unresolved value conflicts.” (ERIC)
Nonetheless, some who have been charged with teaching character education to their students feel as Bobby Ann Starnes does that, “One might say that the lessons my siblings and I learned as we drove along the highway listening to my mother's songs of death and sorrow were moral stories not unlike those produced by the character education folks. But I knew my mother. She was a complex person, and her actions, both good and bad, reasonable and strange, taught me about fairness, responsibility, and other virtues. And that's the way we learn such things—not by building our vocabularies or collecting little slips of paper celebrating our willingness to hold a door open” (43).
We have long stayed from the founding father’s path. We no longer trust religious leaders or ourselves and have left the fate of society primarily in the hands of already overburdened teachers. Perhaps we ask too much of them and too little of ourselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment