"Bus, do your stuff"

Jaron Lanier seems to imagine the future of pedagogy as a ride on the Magic School Bus. [wiki] “In the future, I fully expect children to turn into molecules and triangles in order to learn about them…” Cool, take me into the ballgame. This was always my favorite episode, of course:

young at heart

The fictional Thomas Kurton, part Ray Kurzweil ("Humans Are So Yesterday")and Aubrey de Grey, part Craig Venter, part Jean-Paul Sartre ("existence precedes essence") thinks aging is a disease. He's desperate to cure it. His rival colleague is closer to the mark, I think: the disease  is desperation itself, the cure is generational. There are qualities of childhood that can make us better, if we don't kill them first. If we don't kill ourselves.

Aging is not what's really killing us. That's an immature equation. But we can still reasonably hope to die before we get old. Generosity again:

real generosity

The great Richard Powers' last novel, Generosity, prescinds from a familiar quote from Camus-- "real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present." Sounds very wise, but what it means in practice is an ongoing experiment and challenge. I don't think we can afford to ignore the future, but of course the present is the bird in hand we must attend to.

Then, Powers offers an epigraph from Kay Redfield Jamison:

Exuberance carries us places we would not otherwise go— across the savannah, to the moon, into the imagination — and if we ourselves are not so exuberant we will, caught up by the contagious joy of those who are, be inclined collectively to go yonder.

Exuberance, generosity, presence... to me they all point forward, but they're also all prime markers of the wilderness of childhood: a place, an imaginative space of play in which mere reality does not constrict the dreamscape. More on this to follow.

routine, or rut?

I love my parents, bless their mortal souls. And I do think I've veered, in my life, in a significantly different direction. I also think Jennifer Hecht is on to something. But what do I think about it?

The patterns we grew up in have a way of re-insinuating themselves into our lives as we age. This is not entirely a bad thing. She thinks it's a pretty good thing, on balance. My question today: does this phenomenon bode well or ill for the future of childhood, and the future of the mature spirit of childhood? In other words, can we embrace routine in adulthood without squinching the spontaneity and fun-loving freedom of childhood at its best?

Whether you love or hate your parents, you probably think that you operate pretty independently of them. I say that because psychology is so out of favor these days that some of its best truths are not part of the modern conversation.

The thing is, if your folks never gardened, you don’t much either. If you spend your spare time fixing electronics at home, and your parents didn’t, ask yourself if they did something that looked a lot like it. Did they sit at the kitchen table for hours with a set of tools and a bunch of items? Or were they always out skiing? Skiers who deny a patrimony of skiing still likely had parents who went outside and did stuff a lot. 

Was one of them at his or her desk all day? Are you at your desk all day? Did they have parties for their big life events and now do you? Did they take a lot of walks or not so much? You?

We think we branch off, and we do. We do. We go in some opposing direct, so as to exist. But we are still the same wood, same bark, same berries. 

They were lawyers, we are outlaws, or vice versa. Still, our basic behavior is a simple copy of theirs, because when we do things that feel, to our bodies, like the way our parents acted when we were growing up, we feel at home.

We can do other things, the things they never did, but we do not feel at home. Most of the time, as we get older, though we liberate ourselves from some of our inherited craziness, we also get weary of fighting against what feels right. So though we used to go listen to music in parks with hundreds of other people, and we did like it, we who were not raised doing it don’t much do it anymore.

bright kids

I'm always climbing up on my soap-box to rail about the reprehensible mental and emotional crippling of children through religious-ideological indoctrination. But what is to be done about it? Miso's question yesterday in A&S, followed by Lauren's & Matt's & Dean's reports, all underscore the urgency of freeing children from this persistent, insidious virus.

Here's important new video on empowering the next generations of free-thinkers, featuring Dan Dennett and others, at The Brights site. Let's give kids the tools they need to break out of unreflective conformism, and watch what happens. The rippling effects of a relatively few enlightened parents, nurturers, and educators taking the simple initiative of speaking honestly and plainly on this subject in public, in schools, and in our homes could be astonishing and game-changing. Why don't we try it and find out? The Parenting Beyond Belief movement, too, is making impressive strides in this direction. (PBB video)

I used to think Richard Dawkins was over the top with his "child abuse" charge, but no more. Dean described being led by his "youth minister" to draw images of himself in Hell, at age 10. If I learned that any adult had attempted to implant such horrific ideas in my daughters' minds, at that or any age, I'm very sure "abuse" would be one of the mildest epithets to come immediately to mind.

marching in

Saints 31, Colts 17. I know just how you feel, Colts fans, and I offer sincerest condolences-- even though I am on public record as having picked this result. Rest assured, the sun will come up tomorrow. I've suffered more than a few of "my team's" losses in the Big Game through the years. It hurts more to share the loss, the earlier the attachment was formed... just as the thrill of victory is ever-more ecstatic when you can trace your allegiance to a time when you did not understand that it's only a game. Childhood is a time of intense loyalty and faith, for excellent evolutionary reasons. Is it worth it? Is it a good model for how to think about victories and losses in life generally? I don't know. 


I do know that we all want to be in that number, and that we all can't be, any more than we can all be above average. Alas.


But wait 'til next year, and get ready for Spring Training.

Hyperparenting is over?

I hope so, we do worry too much about the kids and rely too much on "experts." (Ann Hulbert, btw, writes a very good column on these issues for Slate, and wrote a very good book that we used in "Philosophy of Childhood" called Raising America.) But Lisa Belkin's conclusion is still sobering.

...we have replaced the experts who told us what a good parent worries about with experts who tell us that a good parent doesn’t worry so much. We may even see parents stop aiming to prove how perfect they are and start trying to prove how nonchalant they are. But worry is worry. The search to keep from messing up goes on.

For a few more years, anyway. The power of a parent to screw a kid up is daunting, the capacity of a kid to resist the best nurture is discouraging. But what would you be if you didn't try? You've got to try. (Not talking cheeseburgers here, Lyle.) "Parenting" is still a verb.