Committed to finding ways out of the coercion/self-sacrifice mire of conventional parenting. We are variously critical rationalists, libertarians, home educators, attachment-parents, but we take our ideas where we find them.
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Joanne Jacobs writes about children expressing their feelings about war in their school essays. This reminded me of a particularly repulsive programme I watched on British TV after 9/11 where ordinary UK schoolkids who had nothing to do with America or the WTC at all were asked to express their grief, horror and outrage at this bunch of complete strangers getting killed. They managed to simulate some, but most of it sounded like received bullshit, frankly. I'm sorry to sound so extreme about it, but when serious tragedy murders people in horrific ways, this "let's look at the sweet children weeping" idea, put together with the "of course, we all feel terrible about it, just as terrible as if it actually affected us..." patronising Dianified nonsense... well, I think it's horrible, fake, and totally insulting to the actual people involved.
The normal response to 9/11 for a small child living in the safety of an English town should, I think (probably, generally, if one were to do a survey of such a thing), be something like, "Well yes, that's terrible. Thank goodness none of our own friends was there. Why do they keep showing it on TV over and over like that?" or something similar.
I think the reason why children are always going to feel anti-war is, everyone should feel anti-war. Nobody likes wars. Wars are not fun. Unfortunately, sometimes they are necessary. Sometimes they even save more people than they kill, especially when they involve deposing evil murdering dictators. But painful necessity like this isn't something children are necessarily interested in; and why should they be? Maybe Playstations are more important to them, and they actually trust us adults to do the hard political stuff on their behalf?
If you listen to them. Children are often very good at conceptualising very fundamental ideas-sets, the kind of basics that higher-level ideas need in order to develop, especially about how people think and learn. They are learning much faster than adults, so they ought to be more conscious of some of those learning ideas. Even a child who isn't necessarily great at finding the words they want right away may brilliantly choose a metaphor or image that expresses his ideas beautifully.
If things are going well, your children are hopefully less fucked-up than you are, due to the general process of the evolution of ideas and the fact that you have made a conscious and serious attempt to share ideas that actually make sense with your own children, rather than transmitting nonsense and suffering just because "that's the way things are and always have been" or whatever. If you question your ideas about parenting seriously, which includes all the ideas you share with and that impact on your child, which includes... well, all your ideas, then you'll be doing a lot more than a very large number of people ever get round to doing.
Unlike cats and dogs, human beings are actually designed to create new human beings with better ideas than themselves. This is how we progress. Rather than just accepting things as they are and handing them down, we question our universe and try to improve things. In fact, if we don't do that, we can very quickly find ourselves left behind in the various markets of human life: as creatures designed to evolve, we must actually keep on learning to survive and prosper. That's why older people who do crosswords live longer: neglected minds make for less healthy bodies. And it means a child who knows better than you is the pinnacle of parenting success.
But it can be disconcerting realising that one's child has better insights on things than oneself. It can be tempting to feel self-pity ("My mother never said she loved me!") or to be too hard on oneself ("The poor child deserves better parents than us!") and it can make us feel like the kids are "in charge" instead of us, and we don't "know better" than them after all. The answer is to give up those irrational expectations, and appreciate their good ideas as we would appreciate the good ideas of any of our adult friends. When our kids are doing better than us, that's a sign we probably did something good: we didn't actually manage to stop them. And maybe we even helped them on their way. And that's the most a good parent can ever do.
This blog, Biased BBC, is devoted exclusively to instances of left-wing bias in the institution. Why left-wing bias? Well, obviously it's not being written by New Labour MPs, but people who consider the BBC to be generally biased in a left-wing direction, and who also think this is a bad thing. What about right-wing bias? Well, if a bunch of left-wing people get together and decide that it's worth identifying right-wing bias in a longstanding institution claiming to be politically objective funded by a compulsory license fee, then, good for them; the public should not be forced to pay for propaganda disguised as "unbiased" reporting. But in the meantime, they haven't.
In the meantime, Brendan O'Neill complains about pro-war bias in the blogosphere, and hopes that "warbloggers" (supporters of George Bush) are not as influential in the breaking of news as some people are suggesting they might be. Unfortunately, he does not actually deign to give any examples of bias, which he conflates with "prejudice" despite the fact that most pro-war bloggers are completely honest and upfront about their political beliefs.
What has all this to do with parenting? Well, without wanting to get back into The Great TV Debate, it does demonstrate that in order to find accurate information on which to base one's opinions, one needs to be able to assess the reliability of one's sources somehow. To my mind, sources which admit their politics openly are a lot more reliable than those which pretend to an objectivity they simply don't possess. To criticise the BBC one doesn't have to disagree with its politics, merely have some ability to distinguish between fact and opinion or spin. Everybody seems to agree these days that we must be sceptical of the hidden ideas buried in large institutions: the entire anti-war argument is based on the fact that governments can't be trusted too far. Unfortunately, however, the idea that governments can't be trusted too far is nothing new, and the answer is not to conclude that one lie indicates that every single other message is diametrically opposite to the real truth (if only things were that simple).
Criticising things for truth is a complex business. Children do it constantly, unless they are either hampered or denied the resources from which to acquire new lines of knowledge-pursuit. Watching TV (especially adverts, especially when one has a certain amount of income to manage) requires a complex series of such skills. Any kind of discussion about ideas, or the news, likewise. Or questions like, "What if I run out of ideas for thinking about?" or "What if the world is just a dream?" can lead to fascinating analyses of what concepts are true and useful.
There is still a strong trend towards restricting children's knowledge growth to areas considered beneficial for them. But one major solution when children want knowledge from areas parents are worried about is, to help them develop the critical skills they need in order to deal with that knowledge safely. Watching alarming medical dramas with your fascinated five-year-old means he has access to the information he needs to avoid anxiety. Talking about the dodgy idealised family values of The Brothers Garcia encourages children to add pinches of salt to their propaganda. Sex education is better than locking up your daughters.
And there's a dynamic to learning learning skills: criticise one issue with your parent, say, and you can very often criticise a lot more on your own. It's entirely possible that restricting children's growth to pre-ordained areas results in nothing more than parents making rods for their own backs. Resourceful independent kids are the easiest kind to live with.
I heard about a UK government scheme lately (sorry, no link, just a vague recollection) to pay teenagers for going to school. The ideas was to increase the attendance records and lower the truancy levels. At first sight, it seems kind of offensive and missing of the point. If kids want money for learning, how are they ever going to work out how to make their own way in life? What about the reasons why they won't attend in the first place? Why should taxpayers add this bill to their already huge school-subsidising taxes? And so on.
However, there is some, albeit accidental, logic to the idea that children might be paid to go to school, I think. What's a big reason why many home-ed friendly parents decide against home-ed? The loss of a main income, due to a parent having to stay home in the day. What's a child's major benefit from attending school, then? A bigger house and garden, more playstation games, sunny holidays, maybe?
The point here is not that children need adult supervision, and/or how much of a say they should have in what that is. It's not even that going to school doesn't in itself obviously lead to financial profit. It's this: the reasons why children go to school are not entirely consumer-based- schools are actually a combination of consumption, and growth-production. Schools consume the money of the taxpayer, and children consume the knowledge of the teachers: but schools also provide a childcare service for the parents. Childcare, as any working parent of pre-schoolers will know, is very very expensive.
So, if children had any serious say in whether they were schooled or not (which of course they basically don't), then it would make sense to pay them in order to change their preference in some cases from home to school. Mind you, I don't think there are many parents who could afford it, really. What price freedom- the more, the better?
Brian Micklethwait blogs about how educational information is going online. I think there is a serious trend towards freedom of information, in this financial sense: it always amazes me how much one can do and find out on the net without paying for the information itself at all. I found an incredibly good online guide to, erm, certain personal adult matters the other day (no, not pornography, just things not appropriate to this blog), which someone had written and published for free. In the past, this sort of thing would have been a worldwide bestseller. But now, it's on the net, completely free, and funded by either nothing or a few advertisements.
But there's the problem: nobody gets paid for writing this blog, which is fine, because everyone who blogs here expects their money to come from elsewhere. But people who are currently living on the pittance they get from academic journal articles and university teaching (presumably it's a pittance...) will have to take up burger-flipping if their academic stuff isn't paid for. I can't think of an answer right now, but as a great believer in the internet, it seems to me that ideas that don't make it onto our screens may well have trouble growing and spreading in the future. If you want to make a few quid, publish in a journal. But if you want people actually to read your ideas, go on the net.
Personally, I think the spreading of information from the universities to the internet will be revolutionary: I predict a radial overhaul of the university system as we know it, probably to something that doesn't require "bums on seats"** at all, and the amateurisation of large sectors of academic knowledge. The process will have its own momentum, as many people will stop wanting to read heavy expensive paper stuff anymore in favour of handy easily-referenced computer files and websites. Paper will still exist, and be wonderful, but as an aesthetic historical source of knowledge, more than a modern one.
Or all that could be wrong; I just can't wait to find out. Hurrah for the future!
** GB "bums on seats" US "asses on seats"
GB "asses on seats" US "donkeys on seats"
