Natural Born Skeptics

Children are natural born learners. It may not seem that way after they've been in school a few years, but trust me, as Socrates said, "The power to learn is present in everyone' soul." Notice that Socrates located the "soul" as the locus of learning, not the "mind".  How quickly and easily children learn to talk is the universal example of natural learning ability.  If infants and toddlers weren’t naturally curious and attentive, they would never learn the distinction between “Dada” and “doggy”.  All furry things that move, eat and make noises would just be “doggy” – even kitties, hamsters and grandpas. But two year-olds sort out the physical and behavioral distinctions between mommy and daddy, kitty and doggy.  They misname things, but the errors don’t last long. Their ability to discriminate among the sounds of language and the objects and people of their environment allows them to speak the right name to things. 

Not only do they name things, they own them.  The world revolves around them. “I see my big moon,” said my two year-old Sarah.  It wasn’t just a shiny orb in the night sky. It wasn’t earth’s satellite.  It was her moon. Ownership established by her delight and proclamation.

All sorts of things can get in the way of increasing one’s vocabulary and discovering how the world operates.  The obstacles to natural and fast growth of vocabulary tend to be school, parents and grandparents.  Young parents - guard your children’s natural curiosity and desire to learn.  Things get in the way, including you.  You are their protector, but you also are the constant censor of their experiences:  “No . . . Put that down . . . Don’t eat that . . . Stay away from that . . .” Your children are going to challenge your “No’s” and question your reasons and explanations.  Be patient and forgiving.  Toddlers will soon turn into teenagers. For safety reasons, you may have to stand your ground and set limits, but – wait, I didn’t intend this to be a parenting lesson. Back to the children, their ever-growing awareness and curiosity.  Here’s a good story some of you already know:

Sammy the dog gets run over by a car.  I come home one afternoon and 4 year-old Sarah comes running down the driveway.  “Daddy, Daddy, Sammy got dead.”  After some tears and hugs, Sammy gets put in box, wrapped in a baby blanket and buried on the hill in the backyard. After supper, Sarah gets a book and her little red chair and starts out the back door. “Where you going,” Mom asks.  “Out to read to Sammy.”  The book is a picture book titled Bored, Nothing to Do.

Sarah and Sammy

Later in the evening comes the inevitable question, “Mommy, what’s going to happen to Sammy?”  Mommy says that Sammy has gone to live with Jesus.  Sarah’s face droops, “But he’s my dog. I don’t want him to be with Jesus.  He’s my dog.” Whatever Mommy said next was not very comforting to that 4 year-old.  A few days later, Sarah and her best friend dig into the grave, feel under the blanket and confirm that Sammy is, indeed, still in her backyard.  Thank goodness, he’s still her dog.  Not only are children natural born learners, they are natural born skeptics of authority. And that’s a good thing.

There is more to the story of the death of Sarah’s dog. It’s not just about curiosity and authority.  It’s way deeper. Little children may have some spiritual essence, but they certainly are not theological humans.  They, generally, understand the world based on what they can see and touch. They own their world and will not easily give up possession.  Some of us never, not even at the age of 60, give up possession of our world.  Side note: I’ve noticed that some very young children have an innate sense of fairness and concern for others.  For other children, fairness is only whatever is in their best interest.  I’ve seen children take perverse pleasure in hurting animals or people. How our conscience grows and develops is one of life’s profound mysteries, which probably explains why the growth and development of humans belongs to the realm of the spiritual rather than the psychological.

About 28 years ago I wrote about Sarah and the death of her dog in an article for the Macon Telegraph and News. I cannot recall how I ended the article, but it must have involved trying to coach parents about how to explain death and what happens after death. A few days after the article came out I got a six-page letter from a lady that was full of biblical quotes.  She concluded that I needed to reconsider my theology because I was in danger of dying and going to hell.

Twenty eight years later I believe that neither Sarah’s father or mother had much control of her spiritual development.  Not that we didn’t try. But learning about spiritual matters is controlled within our own spirit.  When I review my daughter’s life today, I think things turned out quite well. But learning anything, simple or complex, is controlled within the spirit.  As parents and teachers, we can try to help. We can provide good models, clarity and opportunity.  But it might be easier to get in the way than to help.

Somebody out there is still sure I’m going to hell. That’s their problem.

Virginia Avenue II

On a cool afternoon in March my brother and I stood on the crest of the hill above Virginia Avenue looking down on the little house of our childhood.  The gray wooden siding was faded. Crumbling and rotten wood clung to the edge of the carport. Otherwise, it had not changed. We had walked up the hill from Vale Street, through a lot where new town homes were being constructed, and stood in the Duncan family graveyard about 30 feet from our old backdoor.  The two intact gravestones were still there, along with a collection of other fragments. The internments pre-dated the Civil War.  As a child, I used the old gravestones to mark my place in a longer view of time.

The leaves were off the trees, so we had a good view of the whole neighborhood on the southeast side of Marion.  I pointed out to Joey the north side of the wooded hill where we had built the lean-to shelter that he had burned down. On the south side we had constructed the oil can shed the wind had blown down. We traded other memories of childhood exploits. I was the oldest and most nostalgic. For me, childhood had been about freedom. I walked home from elementary, junior high and high school.  As long as I checked in with Mom, the whole south end of town was my playground.

In the summers, my bicycle gave me access to larger terrain. I pedaled to Grandmother’s house on the mill hill in Clinchfield, mowed the grass, ate dinner and watched Gun Smoke with her. I cruised down Airport Road beyond the north end of town to where my friends lived on the hills above the Catawba River. I labored up and down the twisting 15 miles of country roads to my Grandfather’s house in Montford Cove.

Summer days and nights were mostly unsupervised.  I met friends at the soda fountain in the Dime Store.  We bought peashooters and went to the matinee at the House Theater where we sat through double features and sent peas streaking like shooting stars through the movie light - until we got old enough to realize girls wanted to hold hands. We camped in the woods behind the house or on the summit of Mt. Ida.  We roamed the town after midnight, walked naked along the railroad tracks, broke windows in abandoned buildings, and raced laundry carts around the Laundromat. We smoked cigarettes, told dirty jokes, had peeing and spitting contests and made liberal use of our expanded vocabularies.  We raced bicycles, homemade cogwheel carts, and skateboards.  We built things and destroyed them.  We climbed the rock faces of the old quarry at the base of Mt. Ida.  And survived it all – mostly.  Somehow, we grew up, became more constructive and less destructive, developed better tastes and decision-making skills, learned social tact and moderated our language.  We got jobs, got married and had our own kids.

Our children lived a different childhood – less freedom and more structure.  We feared for our children in a changing world. We believed the world was more dangerous.  Roaming unsupervised exposed children to all the things we could not control.

As I stood on that hill overlooking my childhood I realized the insignificance of the changes to the physical world but the vastness of the changes to the social world.  I felt sad.  But should I?  Was I just being an old man unwilling to consider the possibility that change is good? I don’t think so.  Here is what I have seen of childhood during the past 30 years.

Only kids in the ghetto and the country roam anywhere.  Kids in the suburbs are held captive in afterschool programs.  They either attend soccer practice, karate or music lessons, or they go home and plug into the television or computer. If they get exercise, it’s dancing with the Wii machine.  They are afraid of the dark, of spiders, snakes and other kids.  They are overweight and over-controlled. They might be gifted at school but when they become teen-agers they will be unpracticed at decision-making.  It will take them years to learn by trial and error what I had discovered by thirteen.  Their experiences with woods, streams, hills and streets are zilch.  For the young, all bird songs sound the same.  Stars are just dots of lights in the night sky.  I know am generalizing, that all childhoods are not like this, but there is common pattern to growing up that leads many of my college students to the bewilderment they face today.

A little girl has a 50/50 chance of having a baby before she get married.  If she’s lucky enough to avoid premature motherhood, she might finish college but need another six years to find a career.  And she won’t worry about it much.  She has to find something worthy and she can live at home and continue to eat mom’s cooking.  Her boyfriends will wonder aimlessly through a similar pattern.  They will enjoy college for six to eight years or until they max-out their eligibility to play sports.  If they get a college degree it will probably be in communication studies, psychology or sports and exercise studies, which prepares them for nothing other than the need for another degree.

I know. I am just a curmudgeon who excels in hyperbole.  Maybe I’m the stereotypical guy who thinks he has to be bad before he can be good. The current generation of youth is kinder, more respectful of their parents and more tolerant of people with differences.  But let’s see how they turn out.  They are more patient, but I fear, more clueless. Will they see the future with the sense of urgency that seems necessary?  Has their lack of freedom caused them to miss things that others see and hear?  Will they be imaginative and passionate enough to solve the problems we are leaving them?

Cumpulsory Schooling?

I hate to go against President O’bama and our local superintendent of schools, but I don’t think we need to raise the compulsory school attendance age from 16 to 18. In fact, I’m not sure a compulsory attendance law is a good idea at all.  How’s that for flying in the face of popular common sense? Note my “not sure” stance.  Let’s see if I can convince you and me that requiring students to attend school is not only unnecessary, but in some cases, is cruel and unusual punishment for students and teachers. 

For some students, schooling is an anti-intellectual experience. For some, the problems start at the beginning. They never fit in comfortably with their peers. They discover early that learning in school is difficult.  It’s a source of embarrassment. Parents and teachers fret over their “failures”.  To protect their ego and self-esteem, these unfortunate students employ defense mechanisms: they convince themselves they don’t care; they don’t like reading and math; they either withdraw to avoid calling attention to themselves, or they become aggressive and disruptive. By the end of elementary school, some of these students have become hard-core problems for teachers and other students. The irony for these unfortunate students is there is often nothing inherently wrong with them.  Circumstance has them on a different learning schedule.  If reading instruction had begun at age seven instead of age five, they might have been fine.  If they had been given better instruction or more time to master the basics of adding and subtracting, they might not have been so befuddled by multiplication. But the curriculum is rigid. A child not showing signs of reading by age six is at risk.  If they don’t catch up to their peers by age seven, they will know failure and stress at a young age.  It is an experience that is hard to get over.

On the opposite end of the failure scenario is the boredom scenario experienced by the most able students – the children who absorb information from a multitude of sources and develop reading and mathematic skills in spite of a dreadfully slow pace of instruction. If these quick learners are compliant, they are not a problem for schools in the early years; but as they get older, they use their creativity and energy in ways that give teachers and students real headaches. In many school systems, the intellectually quick students are about as likely to drop out of school as the intellectually slow students.

Now, consider the need for freedom, dignity and self-determination for all human beings. Students wait to go to the bathroom, to get a drink of water and to eat.  They wait to be called on and to be told what to do next.  It is a life governed by the clock and the calendar.  It is a life of constant testing and grading. Students have to show over and over again what they know and can do. The number of times they have to hear about nouns and numbers, fractions and fragments seems to never end. They have to defend themselves against bullies. School can be a social boot camp. And students cannot quit and tell the sergeant to shove it.

School, even at the kindergarten level, is a formal institution.  It has regulations, policies and commitments to keep to taxpayer and politicians.  With end of grade tests, it has a tight schedule for learning from which teachers and students cannot escape. Given the rigidity of formal schooling, children should only go to school when they were ready to learn.  If they were not ready, they will be exposed to failure. If teachers judge students unready or unwilling to learn, they should be sent home.

No adult would tolerate living or working under similar circumstances that many students face. But we will require our (or other people’s) children and teenagers to do what we would not do, even when the evidence suggests it is not in their best interest. I suppose we do this because we think there are no other options. We cannot have gangs of young ruffians roaming the city streets.  We think we must continue to hope that schools will solve the social problems that other agencies of society have been unable to solve.  While we wait, the kids keep going to school. 

I invite your responses to this.  We are all teachers and we are obligated to nurture our children and guide our teenagers toward adulthood.  You surely have ideas and stories to contribute to this discussion.