Not having to be good…

THE trouble with socialism, T. S. Eliot said, is that it's an attempt "to design a system so perfect that no one will have to be good." I read this quote ascribed to Eliot, and it resonated with some observations I’ve had on child-rearing. The emphasis has shifted from training children how to behave in a corrupt world to creating an environment where it is nearly impossible for the child to get hurt or confront a hostile barrier. This is a luxury available to an urban middle class family with few children. Children growing up in primitive conditions, or in a rural setting must learn at about the time they learn to walk that many things are off limits. On a farm there are animals (unlike the Disney caricatures) which bite and scratch and kick and may cause serious harm, there are fences, woods, ponds, machinery, wood stoves, all of which are obviously dangerous. And there are many surplus injuries to children growing up in this environment. With each injury reported, especially in a school or public playground setting, there is a trend to another law to make these places more fool-proof.
But the other side of that coin raises the question of whether we might just be fostering more fools. When a parent fully “baby-proofs” the home such that anything the child might desire to do is OK and within limits, there are no opportunities to make mistakes, and fewer opportunities to learn. I recall reading in training of horses it is necessary to allow the horse to make mistakes. That is the only way they learn. I believe that in this principle we humans are not different. The “baby-proofed” home is carried on into an insulated world where they are encouraged to be “hands-on” everything. So many of the old fashioned admonitions, such as, “No, “ “Don’t touch”, “Be quiet”, “Keep off” are assumed to be excessively stifling for growing little minds and bodies. It is a grotesque irony that this obsession with protecting these little ones has come along with a regular indoctrination in every form of selfishness, lust, violence, materialism, pride, and cruelty that can be portrayed via audio-visual devices.

The thought is that children will learn more if allowed to touch, take, manipulate, break, run about, chatter or shout, whatever and whenever they choose. I am not convinced of the evidence of this. We are living in the most successful civilization in human history, provided for us by generations of people who learned self-control through those out-moded restraints and an environment that was seldom safe and insulated beyond infancy. Children, who have not had to learn restraints at home, are presented to teachers who need to expend more energy in keeping some sort of order than in teaching. Far from corporal punishment, which again our benefactors in previous generations had to endure, the child in school today is to be protected from any words which might damage self-esteem, from any assessment of failure, from any allusion to being wrong or bad.

The problem is that the world cannot be like that. It is full of dangers, of people who laugh at us and deride us, of times when our very best efforts bring humiliating failure. And it is full of restraints about where we walk, or drive, or park, or when we talk or what we can say, and things we may or may not touch or have. Ultimately there is, as C.S. Lewis argued, a natural moral law of right and wrong, and an all-seeing God above it, to whom we must eventually give account. It appears to me that it would be much less traumatic and more productive for children to be allowed to learn these lessons in their simplest and least harmful form, in the home, with loving parents to allow enough mistakes from which to learn. -philw