When it comes to childhood in America, we are facing frightening statistics. We need to return to cultural patterns, now seldom practiced, so more of our children can grow into productive responsible citizens.
Conservatism tends to resist change, to be critical and careful with the new and different. Of course this grates against modern consumer culture where we are conditioned to follow the latest fashion from clothing to raising children. Then there are the reactionary trends to restore old furniture and clothing fashions as well as other efforts to take society back to what we had generations ago. That's what we need for our American childhood. Instead of what we used to wear or sit upon in past decades, let's become fascinated with the disappearing treasure trove of resources for raising children.
Those of us living in our personal second half century remember the way things used to be, especially if we were raised in rural families. We were economic assets far beyond the imagination of families today.
In the late 1940's, my siblings and I learned the responsibility to feed, water and chase the chickens at night that laid the eggs and flavored the Sunday pot-pie after they lost their heads. Much of our work was not fun, such as forking out anaerobic manure from critter sheds after the spring thaw or scraping smelly sheep gut casing for sausage on the butcher block beside the milk house sink.
Fun was unavoidably ingrained into the work. After casings were scraped and washed, I enjoyed helping Grandpa and Uncle Willis run the sausage press. A casing was firmly tied to the spout. Screwing down the pressure pushed the ground sausage out into the casing, forming a long rope coiled by Willis's gentle hands into a tub of salt water.
He helped me hold it carefully to quickly straighten potential kinks, but eventually the resistance was too much for the paper-thin casing, a kink formed and burst, spilling the ground meat. We children, at first shocked with the accident, learned to laugh because the remedy was simple. Grandpa calmly tied it off and had us help scoop up the spilled sausage grindings to dump back into the press. Then he would tie on a new casing and resume running the press until the casing burst again. This continued until all nine of my uncles' and aunts' families had their winter sausage supply coiled in their own tin bucket.
There was plenty of work to be done in order to survive, and while work was difficult with long hours, life had purpose. Our childhood games reflected our life and the tasks of making a living.
Together, young children created imitations of the tasks and strategies for sharing life. We were not to play games against human life, including war games. I remember being punished for playing the popular "Cowboys and Indians," for example, complete with willow bows, stick guns, and falling in the grass dead.
For many years as a young adult I did not appreciate this part of my history. I looked back thankful I had overcome the hard life of my childhood. As a teacher, I didn't have to work so hard physically to make a living. I was grateful to leave the "dumb farmer" image propagated at the time, with a college education as my ticket.
Many children now grow up in an America immersed in stress. No longer an asset, they are now in the way of parents' need to make a living. This factor is ignored as government and private and public policy programs focus on symptoms of children growing into adulthood with pervasive psychological wounds from stress.
Our alarming symptoms are increasing. We have the highest youth incarceration rate in the developed world. Our children have ADD and ADHD at continually increasing levels. Drug and alcohol abuse continue to rise at alarming rates, along with spousal and child abuse.
Premature death by accident, suicide and disease related to substance abuse, childhood and adult obesity, diet and environmental hazards where children live and dismal maternal and child health care delivery, all plague our country. It's the alarming descent of childhood in America at nearly every measure.
Yet we continue to scapegoat these symptoms as if each of them were the core problem. We don't want to look at what has gone wrong with our religious and economic systems. Let's open our eyes to our past, and repel the ideologies that say our Christian faith is defective, or capitalism and democracy are failures. They're not; we have an astounding heritage in our nation's history where our faith and values were experienced in our American childhood.
We children of my parents didn't handle any but a few coins until I made clear my intention to start college. Then I was given the chance to drive Dad's car around selling fruit trees to neighbors. Before that, I remember being entrusted with a nickel that never even reached my pocket, because Dad passed them out to each of us kids when he ground the old 49 Studebaker to a stop by the sign with the curled ice cream tip on the cone. We shyly piled out of the front-opening back seat door and lined up at the window to watch the girl in white twist that tip just right and hand it to each of us kids saying "That'll be five cents please." We didn't miss having little choice with those five pennies. That was before Dairy Queen came up with the chocolate choice. Since soft ice cream had come to town, we learned the blessed experience of spending 5 cents. Our parents and our community knew this: children do not learn to handle money wisely by being entrusted with money.
Our parents did not contrive choices for us. We grew up knowing who we were and where we belonged, because our life did not consist of making money to spend money and living in anxious hope of acquiring more money to spend on more things. Dairy Queen was a ritual, replayed two or three times during that summer it came to town. Then the ritual ended.
The life I shared with my parents, two brothers and three sisters, instead was in our working relationship with the land and its fruit, and sharing those jobs like haying, butchering and processing beeves, pork and poultry we did not sell for family income we never saw, and harvesting cultivated and wild fruit and vegetables, canning and processing to be distributed to each of my Dad's siblings' families according to the number of children.
Seeing the option of college, I was determined to leave the drudgery and smell. I honestly wanted to turn my back on life close to the land. I was tired and embarrassed with the persistent smell of my hands from washing udders every morning before leaving for school. It happened often. I walked into Chemistry class at 8:30 AM. There simply was no lava soap strong enough to take the odor away. More than one girl I wanted to impress would scoot her chair as far away as possible.
Contrast that with now.
Magpies are loud and determined. They fight off competition to do things their way.
I watched a pair building a nest near our barn. The tree was nearly dead, one destined for firewood this summer. I didn't try convincing them they were off base. I can't even approximate their language.
Our nation's crescendo of attacks on families blames parents for the rise focused on two issues. One criticizes our education reforms for focusing on the cheap goal of education for success in our market culture. This criticism is legitimate.
The other criticism focuses on the lack of Christian bias in public education. It is nationally promoted with books, videos and well-funded marketing claiming our public schools are a secular socialist conspiracy to destroy our faith in God, our foundation for marriage and family, and the very essence of our national values. This criticism, while having legitimacy, obscures the real dangers undermining the beliefs and values that built this nation.
Back when public education was founded, American politicians were more interested in being civil. The crisis issue behind our first public schools was rejection of the class warfare in Europe. The citizen-controlled government our founders created said that everyone deserves an "inalienable right" to pursue a living, to succeed in life (except women and slaves, which we have more recently assessed as equally human). They were fed up with the colonial government's elitist private education providing those with inherited wealth the tools to maintain their privilege, and, in the case of the Boston tea party, to tax the poor at the benefit of the hugely wealthy East India Tea Company that ruled the British Crown. So the rich were taxed, and public schooling for all was born.
The effort created an equalizer of opportunity par excellence. For over almost two centuries, until recent decades, our public educators have instilled in our young a social responsibility to maintain a door of access for all. Whether future dirt farmers or CEO's, each was expected to learn to be a productive member of society for the good of all. Public education then recognized that government had an obligation to address the economic disparity our society inherited from England, giving new young citizens an equal right to the economic and educational tools to live as families. For generations, it has been successful.
Recent decades have seen disturbing changes. The last two administration's education secretaries—Obama's and Bush's—have looked with shock at the dismal statistics of rising poverty, a pesky generational poverty culture, and the highest imprisoned population of any so-called "advanced" nation. They see a rising tide of dysfunctional families. They see the drain on our national budget when delinquent youth enter society, bear children, and increase our culture of poverty in America.
But instead of looking carefully at what is happening to our children, they have looked for quick program solutions in the public schools. Bush's "No Child Left Behind," and Obama's "Race to the Top" have ignored the mounting of the greatest threat to our nation's public schools: the loss of civic responsibility for parents with young children. From head start through university graduate programs, personal wealth has become the measure of success. It has taken precedence over what President Kennedy said, with his roots in our heritage, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."
Even magpies carefully choose the best angling forked branches for their nest. But as useful and legitimate as it is to oppose abortion, gay marriage and evolution, these obsessions obscure the loss of civic responsibility training in our education tree. Our national heritage is at stake. We must recover the story of public education itself, and even read about Jesus as written in the Christian Bible, the most important written document of our civilization.
Read the references in the New Testament on money, wealth and taxes. Jesus was clear that personal selfishness inevitably left people out. His ministry, founded by John the Baptist, was based on righting wrongs in his nation (Luke 3. 7-17). The solution was spiritual wisdom to learn motivation beyond selfishness. It was motivation for the "common good" later emphasized by the founder of our capitalist system, Adam Smith (see his book, Wealth of Nations).
Problems with evolution, gay marriage, abortion and other such issues may be real, and a motivation to pull a child out of public school. But these issues are only symptoms of the more dangerous threat to our democratic values in our nation's heritage in our drift toward marketing and personal competition for wealth in our schooling. Even though addressed with noise and politics, such discussion simply divides Christians and squelches useful discussion we should have in society over a fair, just economy, and the right to exist as human beings.
Somehow, the magpies got the message, probably with all our activity planting grass around "their" tree. They left for another tree. We need to remind our national and state education leaders up in their elitist tree that we the people know how our religious heritage, the arts, music, diversity of language and culture, all teach us respect for others and how to be responsible citizens. Let Wall Street experts return to New York with their marketing expertise. We don't need their values imposed on our schools in Big Horn County.
One honest education researcher is Dr. Mike Rose, look him up on line.
The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
Diane Ravitch. 2011.
http://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School-System/dp/0465014917/ref=wl_it_dp_o?ie=UTF8&coliid=I3M5B51HC6A4L4&colid=2UL2N592BVKVD (Author)
They should end talk of the government increasing its power to demand gender bias for civil rights of life partners. They should recognize at least limited legitimacy in Biblical exegesis along with the many American Christians who see God in Creation with or without evolution. They should recognize the legitimacy of those who oppose abortion through means other than government judicial action.
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David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org
