Why a small set of succinct aims is not a good basis for gathering people

Let’s return to the question of how to form these groups—how to find the people and bring them together. I identified three issues (technology addiction, over-consumption, and over-supervision) that these groups might initially address. 

 

So you could say: we’re looking for people who are worried about technology addiction, over-consumption, and over-supervision in child rearing. 

 

But I think that’s too pared down. It leaves us with an incomplete picture. One easy way to show what I mean is to look a little closer at the issue of over-supervision. This is not a simple issue, and if we treat it as simple, we are in danger of misunderstanding it and only making things worse in trying to make them better, or else alienating parents who might actually fit in very well to these groups. 

 

Over-supervising is obviously closely related to over-scheduling, which is clearly connected to the pressure we put on kids around school and college admissions. All of these are different expressions of our anxious need to control kids’ lives: to make sure, on the one hand, that nothing ever goes wrong, and on the other, that our children “get ahead,” that they win the race of life. This is an inability to accept the most basic facts of human life: (a) that fate is uncertain, that misfortune may befall us, that we don’t know what the future holds; (b) that we are here on earth, we don’t know why, for a limited time, and then comes death, which we will never understand.

 

But even as we try to exert excessive control over kids regarding their safety and their “future,” we are often indulgent to the point of negligence in satisfying their whims and appetites. My emphasis here is not on what we buy (over-consumption) but on parent-child interactions: the tremendous difficulty parents have saying no to their children, drawing clear behavioral boundaries, teaching conduct. We coddle them, indulge and reward tantrums, give in to demands, feel powerless to exercise authority. 

 

I am not putting down individual parents (or teachers). These patterns of over-control and under-control are expressions of deep underlying (and interrelated) cultural issues. Far be it from me to suggest that I fully understand them, but it seems like they have to do with deep ambivalences and uncertainties about adulthood, childhood, authority, obligation, fate, meaning, purpose—that is, with the whole instability of modern life, the doubt that has seeped into our foundations. At the very least, it is clear that both over-indulgence and over-control are expressions of very similar states of anxiety.

 

These underlying problems cannot be made to just go away, but it is possible to respond productively to them, to raise kids better. But that’s only possible if we have the whole problem, not just half of it, in mind.

 

For example, there are some educators and parents who, reacting against the excessive pressure and control on kids, recognizing that boredom and interest are signs of where real learning is and is not happening, adopt a philosophy absolutely opposed to any form of “coercion.” We should never, they argue, force kids do anything they don’t wish to do; without our coercive interference, natural curiosity will lead them to deep and passionate learning. This goes by a few names, but the one I’ve encountered most often is “un-schooling.”

 

Whatever the merits and demerits of these ideas in the abstract, what I’ve seen of them in practice has left me leery. Classrooms and schools run on these principles appear limp. What reigns is not natural curiosity and passionate learning but malaise and lethargy. Now, I’ve seen only a handful of these spaces, and there may well be ones that work better. I have in fact met un-schooled people who had learned a lot and developed unusual maturity at a young age. There are clearly some real insights in the ideas of A. S. Neil and the later romantic educators of the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. But it seems to me that certain basic realities of the human condition and of the nature of childhood are being overlooked in this philosophy; and I suspect that if these kinds of ultra-romantic programs do sometimes work well, it is because the parents and educators involved have an implicit sense of children’s need for guidance and structure, of the value of learning patience, discipline, self-control, etc.

 

 

In all of the above, I’m obviously thinking of particular demographics—primarily, upper-middle class and especially affluent parents. Clearly, ethnicity also plays a role, but a more complicated one: parents of different ethnic backgrounds not only tend to control and indulge, be strict and lenient, in different proportions but also in different situations, about different things, and in different ways. And I do not have enough experience to say anything at how politics plays into this, but I bet it does. But the weird paring of excessive control and misbehavior does cross cultural and demographic lines—though sometimes it is an effect of schooling rather than parenting.

 

I was first struck by this while observing classes at a high-school in China in 2007. This was a large, government-run school in a mid-sized city. Classes were 50-60 students and one teacher. During class, students sat quiet and attentive, requiring virtually no behavioral redirection, studiously answering the teacher’s questions as he, e.g., went over a series of difficult geometry problems. Then class ended, the teacher walked out of the room (leaving the kids alone—something American teachers are not even legally permitted to do), and the kids burst into loud, boisterous chatter and literally started climbing out the windows. A year later, I found myself working in a charter school where students (99% low-income Black and Latino) were required to walk in silent single-file through the hallways between classes, and teaching was a constant battle against class disruption. This does not necessarily imply any correlation—a million factors differentiate these two contexts—but the symmetry struck me, and the more I thought about it, the more I saw it in different settings.

 

 

I have been led (as usual) down a bit of a tangent, which I allowed myself in part because my earlier comments about over-supervision had gotten some deserving push-back from at least one reader. But the above discussion also offers some initial evidence of why a small number of succinctly stated purposes may make a bad starting point for a project of the kind I’m describing.

 

We can immediately see two problems: 

 

(1) People from different backgrounds (political, socio-economic, ethnic) are going to see things from different angles; a succinct critique is liable to look very right and convincing to some people but quite wrong or simply irrelevant to others; a more detailed discussion will show where the needs and challenges of different groups coincide and diverge; it will allow people to discover where the common ground, and thus also the productive differences, lie. 

 

(I would not fault anyone for feeling that any sort of community is better than none, and even if one does not have much diversity, one can still give one’s children a healthier peer-group. I would not fault them either for pointing out that a certain homogeneity was actually a common feature of traditional communities. I think it is essential to form a very non-homogeneous group, not because I have some strict moral stance on it, but for more practical reasons, which I’ll have to save for another crumb.)

 

(2) When a succinct statement (of a value, a critique, a purpose) does exactly land for a particular family, it’s likely to suggest an overly simplified and perhaps one-sided analysis—and the more squarely it lands, the less obvious the missing complexity. Without a sense of the complexity and many-sided nature of our problems, we will not be effective in addressing them. To really break with mainstream culture, one must be very careful. In setting out into the open space to create new forms of life, it is much easier to work from a half-truth than from a whole one. Soon one is able to see only a corner of reality, in which all one’s views are confirmed and what is right and true seems simple and clear. That way disaster lies. Dylan said “To live outside the law, you must be honest.” In our case, the law is not that of the police and courts but that of accepted forms and conduct, and the honesty required is the honesty to actually look at the world, again, every time you find yourself in it.

 

A third (and more dubious) problem emerges on further consideration: it is not only that a succinct statement tends to be one-sided and simplistic; it also tends to be superficial. It describes behaviors and says little about their underlying causes. I realize that my “underlying causes” (e.g. “an inability to accept the most basic facts of human life”) veer into the philosophical and may seem like just the sorts of things that would make bad conversation-starters with potential parents. That may be true—it probably is—but it does not mean they can be safely ignored.

 

The relentless focus on technical problems and technical solutions is a defining feature of our age. We want to see everything in terms of clearly defined problems: there is a gap in test scores between wealthy kids and poor kids—we want to eliminate it. There are not enough jobs—we want to make more. We do not ask: Should test-scores (or academics in general) be the focus of all children’s lives from age 6 to 18? Should they spend their days in classrooms? What sorts of lives are we preparing them for? What in fact do we want for them? We do not ask: what are these jobs we’re creating? Do they need to get done? Is there some way to distribute wealth without increasing the amount of meaningless labor people do? What in fact is the good of all this wealth? 

 

--These are philosophical questions, not practical ones. That's fine, if what you want to do is philosophy. But if you're trying to solve practical problems, you can't think that way.

--The severing of the practical from the philosophical, the separation of the concrete world of action from the world of ideals and morals, renders the business of society empty. It is (part of) why we struggle to find meaning in modern life, why young people are so dissatisfied with their jobs, why avarice has become so rampant—because the pursuit of extreme wealth is the purest expression of the loss of any deeper purpose, because this infantile game is all we can think of to play. It is part of why we self-medicate with devices and with pharmaceuticals and with explicit consumption, why we are so prone to addictions.