In my last post “An Old Turk” I talked about mt involvement in the politics of the 1960’s and early 70’s. I also spoke about my school’s struggle with a children’s liberation group CAFETY. In this post, I want to examine the rhetoric and ideas behind “child rights”. This rhetoric seems a natural extension of the rhetoric of the civil rights movement and later of the women’s movement. This way of talking has become so pervasive and so natural that we are led to accept premises that we should stop and examine.
Racism and sexism depend on establishing a group based on some external characteristic–gender, skin color, or nose shape, etc. This group is then either demonized or infantilized. The fact that the group is composed of fully functioning human beings is disguised and many laws and social strictures are created “for their own good.” Since the 19th century pseudo-science has been created to justify racism and sexism. The work of the French scientist Arthur de Gobineau is the beginning of a long European and American pseudo-science of race. It is important to note that the rhetoric of racial or gender difference applied equally to adults and children.
The movements of the last half of the 20th Century deconstructed this rhetoric, Both the demonizing and infantilizing of the groups was labeled and deplored. Race and to a lessor extent gender (as opposed to sex) is a social construction and therefore can be changed. Throughout all of this struggle the new sciences of genetics and brain research showed the lack of natural basis for these social divisions.
I first heard of the children’s rights movement in the 1980’s. A colleague at St Cloud State University was active in this area and presented these ideas as a natural extension of the line of thought I presented above–Children are an arbitrarily created social class, we have “infantilized” them and therefore they should have “rights.” He would have given the vote to eight year-olds. I suspect this was just rhetorical exaggeration. It seemed to me at the time that this argument flew in the face of all we knew about human development.
Thirty years later, this objection seems stronger because of the last ten years of brain research. We know that the frontal cortex does not fully develop until a persons early twenties. To argue, as CAFETY does, that 13 year-olds have the right to decide not to live at home, to refuse treatment parents believe necessary, or to refuse to attend private schools the parents choose flies in the face of our best and most humane science. These arguments also strike at the roots of parental responsibility and the state’s obligation to support parents and children
Anyone who has had teen aged children knows the struggle to set limits and boundaries that are appropriate and allow the teen to move toward independence is difficult and personal. Teens can reason well, but cannot fully see consequences, resist peer presasure, or control impulsivity. The state’s interest should be to keep the child safe. None of this is to say that children don’t have rights. That will be the topic of a later post.
For most of my student and professional life I considered myself a young turk–someone who thought of himself as trying to improve and modernize the structure and function of the university. As an undergraduate I had been a member of SDS, although at Washington and Lee University our politics more nearly resembled the left wing of the Young Democrats than those of Tom Hayden. As a young faculty member I was a member of the New University Conference, a group dubbed the SDS’s faculty auxiliary. It was the 60’s and the issues were civil rights and the Vietnam war. The 70’s added gender politics to the list.
As I reached middle age and tenure, I found myself both part of the establishment and a critic of it. Many in my generation of academics found themselves in this predicament. There were several standard responses. One was to pretend one was still young and cultivate a following of politically active students. The conservatism of the 80″s and 90’s made this difficult, but not impossible. A second option was increased careerism–publish and ignore. The third, which is the one I followed, was to involve oneself in university governance and work to make changes from the inside. This choice makes enemies in each of the other two camps.
During this time I was comfortable calling myself a radical, which I defined as one who went to the root of the issue. During my youth, I was proud of the title “radical;” more recently I have been aware of the irony inherent in such a title. However, one consistency I see in my life is a desire to actively influence both individuals and the larger social structure. That desire is one of the reasons I left the university for my current position at the Family Foundation School.
Those readers who have followed the school blogs know that we are in struggle with a group called The Community Alliance for the Ethical Treatment of Youth (CAFETY). I described the group as radical or rather that their agenda represented “a radical take on children’s rights.” Many of my colleagues both co-workers and others in the wider profession have objected to the characterization as radical as being too insulting.
I suppose I should acknowledge that I live in an age where radical gets most often paired with jihadist and not be surprised at this reaction. But I see CAFETY’s agenda striking at the root of the relationship of the family to the state and in that sense it is radical. The irony has not escaped me. I am now the target of the kind of group I would have considered joining when I was twenty-five. My twenty-five year old self would say, “well, you are old and have an ecnomic stake in the outcome. Just what did you expect?” In my next post I will discuss their agenda and my response directly. I wrote this post first so my readers can see where I am coming from and how personally I take these issues.
I just had a birthday. Never mind which one. But I have reached an age when birthdays make me reflect on the past more than project into the future. Ten years ago I resigned a tenured college position to accept my current job as a prep school administrator. I have always said that there are two good motivations for becoming a teacher–love of the subject matter and love of helping others learn. These are obviously not mutually exclusive motives, but for most of my college career the love of subject predominated. The system works that way. One writes and studies and “keeps up with the field.” As a young man, I embraced this ethic wholeheartedly.
Now at the end of my career, I’m on the opposite pole. My job is to help students who have not adapted to school culture to learn or more accurately to figure out how to help their teachers help them. I was away at a conference several weeks ago when I had one of those moments that affirm one’s choices. I was checking my email in the midst of a session. (I know why they call them crackberries) Several teachers had suggested that a student who I’ll call Joseph (Not His Real Name) join our rather elite group of academic tutors.
I had worked closely with Joseph and remembered clearly the student who had entered our school. He did drugs, he didn’t pass courses, and was convinced he couldn’t graduate high school. His first months here he became so depressed we had to send him our for a psychiatric evaluation. He returned a zombie from too many medications. Working with our doctors and psychologists we attacked the depression and reduced the medication. Joseph received the tutoring he now volunteered to give. He was encouraged to attempt difficult work and praised when he succeeded. He also suffered the lack of privileges and the extra study halls that any failing student experiences.
We are a school based on the Twelve Steps. If I asked Joseph what helped him to become a student, he’d say something like, “I learned to pray” or “I have God in my life.” Now the brain research on the effects of prayer, mediation, or other mindful practice isirrefutable. Brains whose persons do these things tend to be quieter and focused. What ever effects the brain of Joseph may have experienced, the mind of Joseph has learned about a new world through the school’s teaching about god as you understand him. In that world he is not the center, he is given permission to succeed and because he has learned to trust in a higher power, he has learned to trust his compatriots.
My reflections on Joseph are my reflections on my gamble I took ten years ago. The process of getting here has been fun and here is a pretty good place.
Last week I spend two days traveling the halls of the Senate Office Buildings. The senate will consider legislation regulating therapuetic boarding schools and other sorts of residential care for troubled teens. The visits were arranged by the National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs (NATSAP). I brought with me two alumni and the mother of one of them.
I wish I could regale you with tales of expensive dinners, taking senators out on yachts, or any of the other excesses we think of when we hear the term “lobbying.” In fact, we sat down with legislative aides and explained our industry to them. They generously gave us between thirty and forty-five minutes to tell our stories and explain what we liked and what we didn’t in the proposed legislation. For the most part they listened carefully and asked intelligent questions. Whatever our opinion of Congress may be, Congressional aides are, for the most part, as polite and intelligent group of people as you’d ever want to meet. As the mother of my alumnus said, “It feels like our government.”
Regardless of our effect on the legislation, I had a successful trip. The angry, troubled teen girl I had known was now a poised, confident young woman. The drug abusing teen who was two years behind in school when I first met him was now a focused college student. The young woman said in several offices, ” the school is where I grew up.” No greater argument for our effectiveness could have been made than the one made by the presence of these three people. The young people are well on their way to becoming purposeful adults. Both mother and son testified to the improvement in their relationship.
As it turns out I had worked closely with both these people when they were at the school. I am not sure I am entitled to any credit for this success, but I take enormous satisfaction in it.
This is only peripherally a religious post, so those looking for the Apostle’s Creed or the Latin Mass can leave now. Depending on how you, the reader, respond to this post, it may have some personal spiritual significance.
When I taught playwriting I used a text by Louis E. Catron. It’s a beginner’s book for those who don’t have a good grasp of dramatic form. It provides lots of advice for the beginning writer. “Write about what you care about, not what know,” is my favorite. Catron has his pupils write a Credo, a list of personal beliefs. He leaves to the student if its style should be epigrammatic or discursive, but asks the student to be thorough and to include many aspects of life not just the moral and religious. My students universally complained when I gave them this assignment; those who did it seriously came to value it. The first year I assigned a Credo, I wrote one myself. Every year I reviewed it and often added to it or crossed ideas out. It remains a way for me to remind me what I think is important.
So I challenge you to write your own Credo in which you deal with what is important to you with “deadly honesty.” It can be as long or as short as you want. Catron reluctantly suggests “eight pages” for the first attempt. He lists a number of benefits for this exercise. Those that apply to writers and non-writers alike are as follows:
Forces deeper thinking about one’s values
Introduces the self to the self
Shows where contradictions may exist
Try this exercise. I think you’ll find it valuable.
When I started this blog I promised to “muse on what wisdom is.” I’m not sure I’ve kept that promise. After that first post, this is the only one with wisdom is the title. I admit to a pretty high level of pomposity but making pronouncements on wisdom when one is clearly not Socrates is beyond me. I have, however, been reading Elkhonon Goldberg’s The Wisdom Pardox which offers some interesting insight about aging, wisdom, and the brain. The paradox of the title is that as we age our memory declines and yet the society attributes to older people the idea of wisdom. We may apply brillant or genius to the young but never wise, even if they are.
Goldberg spends much of his book on the history of brain research, the importance of the pre-frontal cortex, and the example of “late bloomers.” He also devotes chapters to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. His books is a very hopeful one in that it suggests the many ways we can increase and extend our cognitive functioning through out our lives.
He points out that recently scientists have asked what distinguishes the young adult brain from an older one? The answer seems to be that younger brains have a larger right lobe of the pre-frontal cortex and older brains have a larger left lobe. He writes, “ In general when we are confronted with new things or learn new skills our right hemisphere is called into play, but as we master knowledge and technique our left hemisphere becomes more and more involved. It is in the left lobe of the prefrontal cortext that we store patterns and as we get older we have enough patterns, Goldberg calls it “a library.” that we rely on being able to apply patterns to new situations.
Wisdom then is pattern recognition. I, at least, wince a bit when I put it so baldly. But on reflection it makes perfect sense. In a traditional society an intelligent person who lived a long time would have seen and remember most of the patterns of weather, behavior (both human and animal), and society. Such a person could approach a new situation in a wise way. In a world as fast moving as our own patterns may not hold true, but I at least immediately try to place some new like social media into a context of early patterns of social interaction.
Modern neuroscience is making great discoveries about the brain and its relationship to mind. This biological proof of pattern accumulation and recognition hint at we can become wise as we grow old. At least it explains why I have trouble finding my car keys, but haven’t forgotten how to drive.
As a long time academic, conference going has been an important part of my professional life. If one just looks at the scheduled activities–giving and listening to presentations of questionable relevance, then one might look at conferences as a waste of time. It’s the unscheduled events, the chance friendships, the realization that your profession has a national or international presence that make conference going important.
I am not a techie media type, but I enjoyed all the tweets from the “leweb” conference in Paris and even watched a little of one presentation on streaming video. I can’t remember any of the content of what I watched because I didn’t have sufficient context to store the information. I remember that I felt a sense of wonder and a recognition that by twittering and blogging I was participating in a world wide practice.
So here I am in Austin, Texas participating in the NATSAPconvention (National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs). I’ve learned things, I’ve seen old friends and made new ones, but most of all I am cheered by the sight of so many dedicated to helping teens with emotional and addiction problems. Being here seems like being part of the solution. That’s a feeling we all need.
The earliest records I can remember (yes, children I’m old enough to still own vinyl), were a very British recording of “The Wind in the Willows” and my mother’s Burl Ives collection, Wayfaring Stranger.I played it over and over.Then my mother got me hooked on Gilbert and Sullivan.Obnoxious child that I was—precursor, alas, to my adult personality—I regaled my first grade class with “When I was lad” from the HMS Pinafore.
Despite the operettas and the dutiful trips to the youth symphony performances, it was the Burl Ives followed quickly by Richard Dyer Bennett and then the Weavers that stuck with me.My mother loved folk music and played and sang to us often. She was appalled that her eldest son inherited his father’s dysphonia, not that that ever stopped me from singing. (I’m so bad I was asked to leave a church youth choir).
Family trips before the days of minivans and portable DVD players were spent in singing and arguing. The 50 miles to my grandparents would get us through most of our repertoire of hymns and folk songs.My mother supported my sister and younger brother would struggle to hold the tune while the dysphonic, but volume enhanced voices of my father and myself went merrily on blithely unaware of the pain they were inflicting.
One way this post could go would to be to write about our loss of collective family memory, but as I look at my daughter’s family—minivan, DVD player, and all—I know this to be a false direction . She and her husband are creating family memories for my grandchildren and themselves.It is simply too curmudgeonly of me to complain they aren’t the memories created for me.
Rather, I would like to reflect on the unintended consequences of our choices.My mother just wanted us to share her musical tastes and not fight in the car.But my very Republican parents ended up with three children who tend vote Democratic and folk music is partly to blame. If my mother had known the result she might not have exposed me to working songs, songs with laborers as heroes, spirituals, or the laments of poor farmers.I think these shaped my sympathies at a young age and when the folk explosion of the 60’s came, my siblings and I were ready.
Like everyone in my high school I listened to the Kingston Trio.I thought they were too commercial, too phony.I remember the shock of hearing the early Dylan, seeing Odetta in concert and developing my intense lifelong crush on Joan Baez.As these voices began to speak to the politics of the 60’s, my earlier exposure made it easy for me to pick up those causes. “The people” were important to me because I had learned sympathy for their sorrows as expressed in song.
Of course, my politics come from many sources and I am no less a product of my times than is anyone else, but it has always fascinated me that humans are taught things with a clear intention in mind and seem to learn other things. The training my early feelings received through music shaped the way I responded to the issues of my time.At a personal level these seem more important and intense that than the imperatives of class or race.
Thomas Carlyle says, “Work bodies forth the shape of things unseen.” Who knew that learning the “Foggy, Foggy Dew,” or “Drill Ye Terriers Drill,” would lead to sit-ins and protests. Whatever our intentions, those we teach will bring their experience and their feeling to that knowledge and we cannot (should not) control that outcome.
The fool’s words are the cruelest statement in Shakespeare’s cruelest play.As someone who has just reached the age the government defines as “senior citizen” and who is entering the blogosphere for the first time, I suspect that I too am ignoring the fool’s advice.Like most Americans, I prefer possibility to fulfillment, so I’ll continue to ignore this advice.
What will be the themes of this blog?Memory and the search for wisdom in various ways will inform most of the posts here. My first classroom was in the Kgari Schele School in Molepolole , Botswana.Currently I am the Academic Vice President of the Family Foundation School in Hancock NY.In between I’ve taught at four universities. So teaching and learning will be one of my threads.
I’m a father and a grandfather, so family memory, wisdom and learning might appear in this blog.
I’m a scholar of the theatre and compulsive reader, so musing on literature, theater, and our lives will be another thread.I’d like to personalize these musings in ways that are simply unacceptable in academic criticism.If reading isn’t fun and/or enlightening why do it?
The playwrights I like the most Shakespeare, Shaw, Brecht, and Edward Bond (who too few Americans know) all are engaged in politics—so while this will not be a political blog in the usual since of the word the intersections of art, morals, politics and popular culture will be another of my threads.
Mostly though I’d like to muse on what wisdom is, how memory defines us and therefore wisdom itself—I want to bend the personal to the philosophical or at least to the critical. So if you’re interested, stay tuned. Before I started this blog,I promised my self I’d post two or three times a week, so more will be here soon.
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