Who’s Really Raising Our Kids?

    Who’s Really Raising Our Kids?

                                                                    Published in Marietta Daily Journal May 29, 2016

            We all know that the political season is red hot and that the public’s interest in the presidential election has never been higher.  But most of us still have kids or grandkids who need attention as well.

             I don’t mean the frothing “You’re so special” and “You’re the smartest generation ever” type of attention.  That type has produced the sense of entitlement that marks so many current teens and young adults.  No, I’m referring to a type of attention that is sadly and dangerously waning, to a state of affairs in which parents have pretty much turned their kids over to non-parental “mentors.”  It’s a condition that raises the question: who are the chief influencers of our children and youth?

            Since August of 1966 my line of work has placed me with people whose age has ranged essentially from 14 to 21.  What a way to find out what your community and nation are like!  What a way, for sure, to keep a grip on the pulse of the times. Teachers are necessarily students of youth culture.  They are incidentally learners of how fares the home. Teachers don’t learn from asking, but from overhearing and, as non-scientific and non-empirical as it sounds, from sensing.

            Even though the overhearing and the sensing can take its toll (because you hurt for the students who can’t get their minds off their fussing and fighting parents), being in a room with 25 or 30 young people is still a joy of all joys.  Recall “Welcome Back, Kotter” to get the idea.

            Not every teacher has similar experiences and not every class produces joy.  Some can produce hair-pulling or paralysis of analysis that comes from doubting if you even know how to teach.  Despite such introspective moments or days, I’m fortunate that I can still say teaching high school and college “kids” is beyond rewarding.  My debt to class clowns is deep.  My respect for introverts is keen.  My love for teenagers of the last half century, come this August, is immeasurable.

            It is that love that now makes me sad.  Sad that parents are no longer the primary influencers of their children.  Sad that neither are grandparents, or Uncle Joe, or even caring school teachers, though teachers rank high as influencers.

            Today the chief influencers of children and teens are other children and teens, plus an entertainment culture that has gone crazy.  What is peer pressure if it isn’t peer influence?  Because of peer influence, our children desire to be like each other.  Pursuing non-conformity, they conform to one another.

            Even the most responsible of parents today are often perplexed. With faltering confidence, and following the culture as their children do, they no longer view their parental role as a natural one obtained mostly from human instinct.  That role must be learned from “parenting” classes.  Parents of an earlier generation – before 1960 let us say – find the perplexity of today’s parents perplexing.  They didn’t need classes or manuals.  They just did it.  Neither did they consider their job as parents a “role.”  It was a stewardship, a responsibility that came as naturally as making a living.

            If you are 50 or older, the culture you grew up in was basically passed down from generation to generation.  Your parents played the primary role in transmitting cultural values such as traditions, beliefs, stories, and even music and dress.  For the last half century or so, however, culture has been transmitted to our youth and young adults by entertainment icons. I began to see this social reality intensify in the mid 70s.

            Social scientists have dubbed this type of transmission as horizontal, as opposed to society’s earlier type which was vertical.  Horizontal transmission of culture is the result of laissez faire parenting, of turning children over to the “mentors” of television, schools, and even youth ministers at church.  For a half century I have watched as parents more and more have succumbed to youth culture and its values, granting their role to others.    

            Parents must now fight the culture to raise their children well.  But fight they had better.  Call this self-serving, but I have three children who are proving with their own children that parents can successfully fight the instant gratification and narcissism of modern culture and transmit the things they value, even if the culture doesn’t.

            If they can do it, other parents can as well. The right thing to do is to jealously make sure we matter more to our kids than do their peers.  A half century has taught me that our youth are wishing and hurting for just that.

Roger Hines

5/25/16

We Gotta Read More, Ya’ll

                                            We Gotta Read More, Ya’ll

                                                   Published in Marietta Daily Journal May 22, 2016

You know how the saying goes: “Southerners can’t read, but they sure can write.”  Well, we can and do read, though not many of us care to write.  Those who do write have done a fair to middling job of representing the rest of us.

            Don’t apply that last sentence to every Southern writer.  We are certainly not all white trash as Georgia’s Erskine Caldwell portrayed us, nor are we all angry, moody blacks as Richard Wright indicated.  We are, though, a people with an identity still different from other sections of the country.

            So you don’t think so?  Then get outside – way outside – of 285.  I mean, Atlanta is a great place, but Atlanta ain’t the South.  It’s kinda the South, but anyone who thinks it’s The South needs to drive somewhere, but not on the interstates.  I love the interstates, but to ride on them is like looking at a picture of something instead of the real thing. 

            Anyhow, the South is still there, and its literature is one of the reasons.  The South is vast.  It’s a place.  I use the word place deliberately instead of region.  Not all regions of the country possess a sense of place as native Southerners do. 

Please don’t go getting offended by the word “native.”  It merely means “belonging to.”  For my part, I like belonging.  I also still love the word Dixie.  I’ve been told not to use either word.  To which I say, “You need a nap.”

To illustrate that the South is still a place, I would ask if you’ve ever heard anybody refer to “northern literature.”  The answer is no, because the North doesn’t have any literature that holds up the North as a distinct place.  The South does.

Place shapes us far more than we realize.  Americans are moving around so much these days, but I still believe that buried in every human heart, except that of the eternal motorcyclist, is the desire to settle down and call something home.  How many times have Southerners with rural backgrounds referred to “the old home place” where they grew up?

It’s mainly because of a “sense of place” that Southern writers birthed and cradled what we now call Southern literature.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love and have learned much from New England and Midwest writers.  No writer, or poet, inspires me more than Maine’s Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  Walking in his house in Portland a few years ago was a spiritual experience.  Massachusetts poet Robert Frost, with the help of an 11^th grade teacher, convinced me that poetry wasn’t just for girls or for the boys who lived in town.

But in spite of so much good literature from Yankee land, no place or ethos was described or heralded by it.  It is Southern literature that has represented and given portrait to a place. 

Southerner Elvis Presley didn’t set out to change the face of music.  He simply did his thing, and his thing did the changing.  As with music, so with literature.  I doubt that Georgia’s Flannery O’Conner, North Carolina’s Thomas Wolfe, Alabama’s Harper Lee, or Mississippi’s Eudora Welty set out to produce a body of “Southern literature,” yet their common themes did just that.

How could they not?  They all deal with life’s everyday realities, large and small, as experienced by a people whose history has included loss, defeat, poverty, and a cursed earth that demanded toil and sweat.  Harper Lee bravely broached the subject of race.  Flannery O’Conner, a Catholic in the early 20^th century protestant South, bravely heralded Christian values and Southern ways.  Thomas Wolfe deals more with relationships, showing how Southern families fuss, fight, and love still.  Wolfe got it wrong, of course, when he famously proclaimed “you can’t go home again.”

And Eudora Welty, whether describing Jitney Jungle or her hairdresser, has kept us laughing through it all.   

Not that Flannery O’Conner couldn’t be funny.  Who but Flannery O’Conner would even think of training a chicken to walk backwards?  At a writer’s conference in New York, she was asked, “Why do Southern writers write so much about freaks?” (the village drunk, the village “idiot,” the “40-year-old whose daddy still calls her ‘Baby’,” etc).  Georgia’s unpretentious First Lady of Letters answered, “Because we still know one when we see one.”

Southern or not, don’t ever think that today’s youth can’t be “reached” by literature.  Not only is it true that the world loves a story.  It’s also true that everybody has a story.  And certainly everybody desires a place.

As Eudora Welty put it, “One place comprehended helps us understand all places better.”

Roger Hines

5/18/16

Have we lost our minds?

                                Have we lost our minds? 

                                                                             Published in Marietta Daily Journal May15, 2016

How simple, how naive of me. I figured that when the government said that a man could marry a man and a woman could marry a woman, things had gotten just about as illogical and chaotic as they could get. 

As it turns out, man’s capacity to adopt and adapt to illogical, chaotic public policy is infinite. Comes now the argument that bathrooms don’t matter. Anybody should be allowed to use any bathroom they wish, regardless of their gender, the argument goes. And of course, the federal government is defending that argument. 

Early this week, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch vociferously declared that the Justice Department was filing suit against North Carolina because the state doesn’t want to get its house in order regarding a matter many of us thought was settled when the human race began. In her fevered speech, Ms. Lynch didn’t actually fault the North Carolina Legislature for passing the bill that disallows transgender bathrooms. Her guns were aimed at Gov. Pat McCrory. Seems the governor is sticking to his own guns, defending the Legislature. In fact, McCrory is suing the federal government, claiming that a court, not an agency of the government such as the Justice Department, must clarify what the law says about the matter. Finally, a governor who will defend simple, naive, “regular” types like me and not be bullied by Washington’s social transformation juggernaut. Would that this could be said for a few other governors we don’t need to name. 

At issue is the plight of supposedly transgender people who want to use a bathroom they are comfortable with, no matter what the sign on the bathroom door says. But the issue goes beyond the supposedly transgendered. The cry now is that anyone should be allowed to go to a bathroom with which he/she “identifies,” whether a male or female at birth and whether or not he/she has been “transgendered.” 

Dear reader, stop now and think about this. Is there anything in the mind of a progressive that is nailed down? Any principle, any biological trait? And how in the world did “progressives,” of which the Obama administration is the epitome, come to be called progressives? Indeed they are regressive — regressing at least as far back as the 1st century. Yes, it was the indecisive Pilate who famously raised the question, “What is truth?” 

Even Aristotle didn’t share Progressive Pilate’s mindset. His goal was to find the truth, not deny there was any such thing. Progressives care nothing for Aristotle’s time­honored scientific method: observe, record, theorize. Feelings are much more important than the thinking of a Eurocentric, dead guy Westerner like Aristotle. Old verities must be replaced with new preoccupations, the chief of which is sensitivity. With scorn for absolutes equal to Pilate’s, with utter denial of physical facts, progressives are pushing a relativism that has now reached our children for sure. Let’s see how moms and dads stand up to this. I say any dad of a small or teenage girl who isn’t awakened to social policy by North Carolina’s situation is working too hard or doesn’t care. 

The whole matter is all about being nice to those who are sexually unsure about themselves. So, for less than 1 percent of the population, we are going to put children and women at risk. As a former high school teacher, I can tell you that lots of high school boys (not perverted boys, just mischievous ones) are going to have some fun with this. If dads and moms across the country don’t rise up on this issue, then we have indeed become a nation of sheep and deserve the kind of government we get. 

Attorney General Lynch’s argument leans on the Civil Rights Act and on Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972: “No person in the United States shall on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal funds.” 

Sounds good to me, but progressives are saying that use of the bathroom of your choice is a civil right, one of the “benefits,” a “participation” afforded you because the state you live in receives federal monies. In her announcement, Lynch equated “Men” and “Women” bathroom signs with “Whites Only” signs of days long gone by. Please re­read that sentence. 

Title IX, which ignited the feminist movement, is now being used to defend craziness. Target Corporation is feeling the heat for joining the craziness. 1.2 million Americans have already signed a pledge to boycott Target stores and Target officials are also having talks with the American Family Association to discuss their boycott. 

Dads, where are you? Your daughters need you. 

Cultural Q and A about Things That Matter

               Cultural Q and A about Things That Matter

                                                   Published in Marietta Daily Journal May 8, 2016

                Below are 3 questions that beg for answers.  I believe they are serious questions that the nation’s future could hinge on. 

           Number 1: In the event of a multi-hit attack on the nation, one far more pervasive and more destructive than 9-11, do you think the ban against public school prayer might temporarily be suspended?

          I predict the ban would be ignored in a heartbeat.  There would be no tepid “our hearts and prayers are with our nation.”  I suspect the President would implore citizens to get to their places of worship and pray.

         On the evening of 9-11, I drove to my church for a quickly announced prayer meeting.  I envisioned 25 or 30 people gathered on the front pews to pray.  Arriving at the church, I found the parking lot full.  Along with others I parked on the road.

 Finally inside, 5 minutes before starting time, I couldn’t find a seat in the 1500-seat auditorium.  Eventually an usher seated me on the very back row.  Scores stood along the walls.  Why this good turn out?  More pointedly, why did I see friends whom I hadn’t seen since Easter?

 My guess is that if or when our nation is seriously attacked, we’re going to get religion again real fast.  Our talk about faith being a private matter will vanish. Our supposed separation of church and state will be the furtherest thing from our minds.  We won’t object to faith expressions from political leaders.  Religious differences notwithstanding, schools will probably have prayers.  If in fact I am right, what does this say about us as a people?

Number 2: Does it matter that within 50 years America will no longer be a predominantly Anglo-Saxon land?  Racially/ethnically it shouldn’t matter, but politically and culturally it matters tremendously.  It wasn’t Eastern philosophies, a Middle Eastern ethos, or African tribalism that birthed the institutions America has benefitted from.  Jurisprudence, free enterprise, individualism, freedom of speech, and religious freedom took their baby steps in Western Europe.  Why else do we (or did we) call it western civilization?

 Greeks, Romans, and Brits are America’s cultural/political forebears, though not our religious ones.  Judaism and Christianity are of Middle Eastern origins.  Ironically those two faiths have been most fleshed out in Europe and America, not in the Middle East.  Who knows more about the practical counsel of the Hebrew proverbs, about the laborer being worthy of his hire or about the parable of the talents than Christians and Jews?  Has any nation given legs to these ideas more than America?

 Culturally, America is both Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian.  Point to a nation on the globe that has produced more freedom and more groceries than those living under these two traditions.

  Those who run the world are those who have the most babies.  America and Europe, the geographical base of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian thought, are having fewer babies.  They are also aborting more babies than any other areas of the world.  Simultaneously, the out of wedlock birth rate for American Hispanics is 51% and for American blacks is 70%.  Hence the expected demise of Anglo-Saxons.

 This second question, then, must be split and re-worded.  Does America wish to perpetuate political, economic, and religious freedom?  If so, how must it be done?  No matter which ethnicity prevails, America must adhere to the things that birthed her.  If she doesn’t, America dies and so does western civilization.

Number 3: What are the siren voices to which Americans have been listening and which have been moving us from our dawn to decadence?  They are too numerous.  A frightening number of young Americans, like their European cousins, are embracing the absurd: the beliefs that free lunches really do exist, that gender is a matter of preference, that learning can and should be easily got, that marriage is passé, and that pleasure is the goal of life.  Immersed in a cyber-world, most 13 to 19 year-olds are incapable of understanding what Solzhenitsyn meant when he wrote, “To destroy a people, first sever their roots.” 

Roots?  Who needs roots, given the immediacy and “intimacy” provided me by my technology?  

If we moderns value pleasure more than we do freedom, we will soon fail to see the connection between roots and life. Our modernization will be totally achieved, but our roots will have withered.

The glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome, and the sun that never set on the British Empire are no more.  It’s time to ask serious cultural questions lest America go the way of her forebears.  

Roger Hines

5/4/16

Public Ed Isn’t Always Public … or Publicly Influenced

             Public Ed Isn’t Always Public … or Publicly Influenced

                                                Published in Marietta Daily Journal May 1, 2016

            The waning school year might be a good time to ask who the chief influencers of public education are.

            Public education is a complex endeavor and gets more so each year.  How far we have come from Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and Abe Lincoln on the other.  One wonders if our vastly increased sophistication has vastly increased learning.  Abe did pretty well, you know, despite the log classroom and studying by fireplace light.

            Public schools have become the instrument by which groups of all stripes try to move their agendas. Got an idea that advances your ideology?  Get it into the curriculum or persuade schools to celebrate ____?___ Day (fill in the blank).  It would seem that reading, writing, arithmetic, a survey of history, the sciences, the arts, and computer competency would be the primary time consumers at school.  Even if they are, there are distractions.

            Sports, music and other such good, non-core studies aren’t the distractions.  The distractions – some old, some new – are drug ed, bullying, Earth Day, sensitivity training, sexual assault prevention, gender identity, diversity training, fuzzy math, multiculturalism, and incessant testing, to name only a fraction of them.  If your school hasn’t been touched (or swept) by these non-academic social diversions, hold on tight.  The tide of social transformation is coming in.

            Compare the above list of non-academic pre-occupations to the following: mathematics, English, history, geography, literature, foreign languages, technology, biology, physiology, chemistry, social skills, and character education.  Which list sounds more like real education and less like social engineering?  Which does your child or grandchild need more?  Who are the influencers that push each of the lists?

            Strangely, the subject matter teacher organizations to which many public school classroom teachers belong don’t always push the right list.  I’m referring to private groups such as the National Council of Teachers of English, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and National Council for Social Studies.

            There are many others with various names.  My purpose is not to demonize, but to scrutinize these organizations, and to remind parents that there are countless influencers like these who shape their child’s education, some of which hold social views quite opposite to those of parents.  Your own local school principal, school board member, and  state school superintendent are all but a tiny part of the big picture we call public education.  There are many influencers and most of them are not local and are not known.

The word “council” is misleading.  The National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE) is not a council.  It is a 40,000 member organization that writes standards, curricula, reading lists, etc., and lobbies state school boards and publishers to adopt them.  Sounds ok until you check to see what’s in those offerings.

            For 20 years or so I was a member of NCTE and its local state affiliate.  Its national conventions were beneficial when their sessions focused on the teaching of English.  But like so many other organizations that lose touch with their rank and file, NCTE became a politicized, resolution-passing body.  It began passing resolutions on women’s rights, homosexual rights, union rights, classroom teachers’ rights, student rights, and minority rights.  Soon English instruction got buried as politics was elevated.

            This trend of going political, and progressive at that, has marked most of the other subject matter classroom teacher groups.  Like so many educational leaders, these organizations like to blame parents when academic achievement declines: parents are too busy; they don’t spend time with their children and don’t read to them any more. (I doubt that Lincoln’s parents did any of this.  Mine didn’t.  Coming from the fields, they were mighty tired at night.)  “Therefore,” say the ideological professional educators, “Give us your kids.”

            Classroom teacher organizations are probably outnumbered by the administrator organizations.  All of the following private groups must get their two cents in and are well organized to do so locally and nationally: school superintendents, principals, board members, curriculum co-coordinators, counselors, testing specialists, PTA, and countless others.

            Oh yeah, Uncle Sam.  Uncle Sam is really a paper tiger, but he still influences by dangling his Department of Education money.   But to receive it, states must jump through hoops and accept such things as Common Core.  School leaders usually choose to jump.

            And you don’t think the LGBT community knocks on the school door to talk about curriculum?  So do Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jane Fonda.

            So many voices, such weighty rigmarole.  See why so many parents turn to home schooling and private school?   Conservative Americans have cracked the media, but they haven’t touched public education.

Roger Hines

4/27/16