In Which I Tell The Kids To Get Off My Lawn

Like I've said, this is my third year teaching at a classical school.  At this point in their education, most of my older students could wipe the floor with your average basement-dwelling twenty-something atheist (and sundry other contrarians), and don't even get flustered when people try to challenge their firmly held beliefs.  They just bust out a syllogism and a few well-honed rhetorical flourishes and then graciously bandage their opponent's wounds, without breaking a sweat.

Coming up to this election season, though, I sort of wish they could go to Washington and teach logic classes to politicians and pundits.  What do they teach in Ivy-league poli-sci classes these days? 

Interviewer: So, your plan proposes decreasing the size and power of the federal government.  What programs will you cut to accomplish that?

Politician: Well, I think the American people will notice right away looking at the plan, that we're blah blah blah capping discretionary spending blah blah a savings of over $100 million blah blah!  That's a lot of money!  I think the American people are too stupid to follow an actual argument, so I'm going to throw around a lot of patriotic-sounding buzzwords and tell everyone that my plan will guarantee a sparkly unicorn to every family in the country AND set us on the path to financial solvency.  Except I won't use the word "solvency" because I think Americans are idiots.

I: Are discretionary caps enough to result in that kind of savings?  Which programs in particular will be impacted by that discretionary cap?  Also: you're a jerk.

P: Well, again, a $100 million savings in just the first year blah blah financial blah blah gibberish blah.  I think that the American people blah blah times of hardship blah blah lack of compassion blah blah.  Oh, and all those bleeding-heart liberals want to force every American to marry a unicorn and then agree to have no more than one unicorn-human-hybrid baby.  All I can say is, they're just out of touch with middle America.  Midwesterners love unicorns, they support unicorns.  But if they're going to have to marry unicorns, they'd better be able to have as many freakazoid humicorn offspring as they darn well please. It's a constitutional right!

How inconceivable would it be for the conversation to go:

Interviewer: So, your plan proposes decreasing the size and power of the federal government.  What programs will you cut to accomplish that?

Politician: This plan eliminates approximately 220 federal programs.  It does not eliminate the services provided by those programs, however.  It turns their control over to the individual states.  Our Constitution grants all powers of government to the states, and we're very serious about implementing a plan that accords with the law of the land! Besides which, it's just common sense. Rather than the federal government trying, inefficiently, to manage these hundreds of programs, in the future, states will manage them.  This allows states to refine and personalize each program based on the needs of its citizens.  A more efficient system ensures that each citizen receives the services he or she needs without unnecessary delay.

Interviewer: That was... remarkably lucid for a politician.  Wow.

At Least It Made Me Appreciate My Students...

After going-on three years of teaching at a classical Christian school, I'm so accustomed to polite, well-trained kids that I don't know what to do anymore when faced with rude or untrained ones. 

A girl of around ten ran up to our table this afternoon (at the J-town Gaslight festival where my school has a booth), pointed at the bowl full of beads, and demanded, "What are THOSE?"  When I told her she and her friend could make bead bracelets, she ran off without another word.  No "excuse me," no "thank you," no "Oh, let me go ask my mom if it's ok," nothing.

Here's the thing: I don't think the girl was trying to be rude.  It just seemed like she'd never been taught how to talk to adults.

Why do people not think they have the responsibility to teach their kids basic manners?  How is your kid going to learn manners if you don't teach them?  The reason you teach kids to say "please" and "thank you" and "pardon me" and "oops, sorry" and all that is not so you can show off what a good parent you are, nor is it about forcing your rambunctious little darling to become a boring Stepford child who smiles and says, "Yes, ma'am" on command.  You teach manners to children so they can get along in the real world, both as they grow up and when they're adults.

/rant

More Thoughts On Fiction and Entertainment

(see this post and comments section for the first part.)

OK.  I've asserted that it may be not only permissible, but also beneficial, for Christians to watch movies or read books without an explicitly Christian worldview -- even books or movies whose themes oppose a Christian worldview, or that are anti-gospel. 

Let me add one more assertion: I think it is the height of folly to judge a book or a movie based on what it omits rather than what it affirms.  Again, the Twilight books demonstrate how this happens.  Edward and Bella, the two main characters, refrain from sexual intercourse until they are married, at Edward's insistence (leaving aside for the moment that he does so because he fears he will be unable, in a state of arousal, to keep control of his desire to kill Bella.  And that she, knowing this, keeps pushing him to have sex with her).  I can't tell you how many times I heard, from the girls at my school or from Christian parents of my acquaintance, "Well, it can't be that bad; at least they stay pure until they're married!  It's a good example to teenage girls!"

Do I dare insult your intelligence, dear reader, by pointing out the folly of ignoring an onslaught of insipid prose both describing irreparably twisted relationships and suborning heresy because the two main characters narrowly and for the wrong reasons avoid one form of immorality?  By all means, read insipid prose describing twisted relationships and suborning heresy if you identify them all as such.  But don't pretend that it's "not so bad" as you stretch out on your blanket in the park for a sunny afternoon's passive absorption of insipid prose, twisted relationships, and heresy.

I'd much rather my students come to class and say, "Miss Roberts, we watched Massive Gory Shoot-Em-Up: Part IV on Friday night and, geez, it was so wrong!  I couldn't believe how Studly McHotness treated women!  And the way women threw themselves all over him even though he was a total dirtbag... ew.  I thought it would be cool, but I just couldn't get into it," than, "I went shopping at the Christian bookstore and bought this great new book -- I'm A Christian Princess!  It's all about how God is the king of everything and that makes Christian girls princesses, so we should make sure that everyone treats us like princesses!  Isn't that right?"

Christians cannot avoid evil, and we must not pretend it doesn't exist.  Whether non-Christian media, and its depiction of evil, hardens our consciences toward the real thing or trains us to address the real thing depends on how we approach it.

I think the first step is to ensure that we and the young people in our care are absolutely crammed full of Bible.  God's Word contains everything we need for godly lives, but if we don't know it, it's of no use to us.  Why are there so many stories in the Bible?  I think it's so that, when our life stories start to run along the same lines, we'll know the outcome of certain actions.  We don't have to come up with an object lesson to teach young men not to ogle naked chicks.  We just have to send them to the story of David and Bathsheba! 

Beyond the Scriptures, God has given humanity two priceless teaching tools: a colorful and checkered history, and an irrepressible urge to write stories.  In these we see an affirmation, whether intended or not, that God's word is true. 

As N.D. Wilson puts it, my goal is for my students to learn to recoil from sin, to see in the Scriptures and in fiction and history a tiny taste of the fires of Hell.  I want my boys to be so familiar with Lady Folly and Becky Sharp and the Green Knight's wife and Anne Boleyn and Mata Hari that they learn down to a fundamental, instinctive level to stay the heck away from the house of the seductress.  I want my girls to know Mr. Rochester and the Highwayman and Count Vronsky and John Wilmot well enough to recognize the sort of twisted romantic obsession that drives women to forsake -- or nearly lose their lives to keep -- their most dearly-held principles. 

This sort of education will, ideally, have two results.  First, it will enable them to recognize good and evil in fiction.  A young man who recoils from Mata Hari will have no trouble recoiling from Our Mrs. Reynolds.  A young woman who learns to despise the Highwayman instinctively will hardly be fooled by the endearments of the be-sparkled Edward Cullen.

Following on from number one, this sort of education enables them to recognize good and evil when they encounter it in real life.  Again paraphrasing N.D. Wilson, I want my students to know that if the Fool follows the Seductress to her house on page 4, on page 10 he's going to get way more than he bargained for.  I want them to know that judgment follows sin as surely as B follows A, and I don't want them to have to learn it the hard way.