“This crisis of idleness and passive drift is profound for every citizen of this republic. For this nation is premised on the idea that the government exists not to define and secure the good, the true, and the beautiful, but rather to maintain a framework for ordered liberty—so that free people can pursue their happiness in the diverse ways that they see fit.”
“We need to find ways to liberate our kids from the tyranny of the present. One basic way to do that is to know other people, especially older people.”
“Consumption is not the key to happiness; production is. Meaningful work—that actually serves and benefits a neighbor, thereby making a real difference in the world—contributes to long-term happiness and well-being. Consumption just consumes.”
Schooling philosophy Realist vs. Romantic, Augustine vs. Rousseau, sin vs. self
Doesn’t like Dewey, who crusaded to make schooling central rather than supplemental to parents
“I have no interest in my children being formed by the zeitgeist, by the majoritarian sentiments of any particular moment, by what Dewey celebrated as an abstract ‘social consciousness of the race.’ Instead, I want my children to be formed by ideals and principles that are definable and debatable—by me and by them—even if such ideals and principles are not always in vogue.”
Children would do work according to ability rather than age; citizenship a goal for kids
Romantics associated childhood with purity and innocence, whereas early Americans willfulness and obstinacy
Today’s child-centered, nurturing approach is a choice; would have been foreign to earlier generations
Character building: break tyranny of generation segregation, develop work ethic, embrace limited consumption, travel, learn how to read well
Coming of age factors: medication, screen time, video games, porn, living with parents, less marriage, softer parenting, less religion, more intellectually fragile
Visual media eroded childhood: adult things known only by literacy, which required work and self-discipline to learn; TV a “total disclosure medium” (Postman)
“There is almost nothing more important we can do for our young than convince them that production is more satisfying than consumption. Anyone who swims so completely in a sea of material surplus as to be unaware of the virtues of the simple life is flirting with great moral risk.”
“Denying meaningful rites of passage and obscuring the distinction between childhood and adulthood cheats the generation coming of age of something vital. Lowering expectations, cushioning all blows, and tolerating aimlessness not only hurts them, it also deprives their neighbors, who desperately need their engagement.”
Schooling=large-scale institutional tool; education=goals and dreams we have for our kids
Need more diversity of institutional forms: family school, crafts schools, etc
P16 a more standardized transition to college: bad. Just perpetuates teens as cogs in machine (cf Postman)
“Unfortunately, centralized education and bureaucrats tend to see every failure as a product of still not enough centralized bureaucracy. Most of these experts are blind to the possibility that perhaps we are still trying to spoon-feed young adults who we should instead nudge to travel and to read, to work and to become the kind of students to ask questions before being handed a three-point formulaic answer.”
“Too much formalized schooling inevitably crowds out communities of the heart and soul, voluntarism, flexibility and choice, cross-cultural experience, exertion, success and failure, and time—essentially everything for becoming a fully formed adult, an emphatic citizen, and a worker-learner flexible enough to navigate the accelerated pace of job expiration and change in the new economy.”
Education is about “the good, the true, and the beautiful. It is not the private domain of the experts. It belongs to all of humanity.” (Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning)
“Education that focuses on tools and techniques at the exclusion of the student’s role in directing his or her own learning is destined to fail. As Socrates taught, it is almost impossible to educate someone with an answer until he or she is invested in asking a question.”
“The same procession of grammar, then logic or dialectic, then rhetoric applies to virtually every subject. A student needs to become conscious of learning how he or she learns.”
“parent with the grain”
Three stages of child development: Poll-Parrot (learning and recitation is easy), Pert (contradicting, answering back, high nuisance value), and Poet (yearn for independence and self-expression) — aligns with Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric process
“If a free people is going to be reproduced, it will require watering and revivifying and owning anew older traditions, and awakening the curiosity in the soul of each citizen.”
“Our kids are not commodities; they are plants—they require a protected environment, and care and feeding, but most basically an internal yearning to grow toward the sunlight.”
“Allowing our culture to devolve from one that encourages self-sufficiency into one that indulges permanent dependency is to tolerate a disengagement of the soul akin to permanent training wheels. Letting the next generation believe someone else will solve their problems imperils not only them but our whole society.”
“We latch onto evidence hinting that aging can be put off, perhaps indefinitely. It’s no surprise then that our young today inherit a fear of growing up and growing old, and a near allergy to confronting honestly the only certainty in life besides taxes.”
Three purposes of sex: covenant, procreation, pleasure
“For people who are alive, really alive, their brains are in motion.”
Ellen Parr: “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” Curiosity is the mental mortar for building strength and resilience.
Advice for teen parenting: Less helicopter and more stealth-drone; encourage good behavior; invite to ask hard questions of house guests; sing together; rethink flotations and training wheels; memorize poetry; family dinner; family digital detoxes; give choices; mix storytelling with walking; model gratitude; focus on habits
“A hallmark of virtuous adulthood is learning to find freedom in your work, rather than freedom from your work, even when work hurts.”
Thomas Carlyle: “Whatsoever of Strength the man had in him will lie written in the Work he does…Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God’s name!”
“We believe you’re most fully alive when you distill things to the essentials of life—and then learn the habit of finding great pleasure and great gratitude in those essentials.”
“Bloodless revolution” of printing press helped create America, but now without literature canon we lack a common culture and values
Thomas Hine: American adult anxiety about growing older leads us to undermine our own kids’ growing up; parent need to feel young makes them reluctant to acknowledge child maturity
Arthur Brooks four factors of “happiness portfolio”: faith, family, community, work
Idea of America, “negative” build of Constitution, framework of ordered liberty all need to be taught; majority of Americans don’t know basic civics