The Dangers of Childhood

A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.
            Colette, 19th-century French writer

A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.

            Robertson Davies, 20th-century Canadian writer

About seven years ago, I worked with my mentor and friend at my previous school to learn more about the history of the community.  To do so, we flipped through and studied past senior yearbooks, which thankfully stretched back to the 1910s.  For anyone who has done so, one is struck by a single observation – the fact that the teenagers appear to be adults.  I think, in comparison and by every definition, students today appear and act younger.  Over the last five years, I’ve assisted a good friend and colleague in taking students to Germany and hosting German students in the U.S.  Once more, I’m struck by the maturity (both in appearance and actions) of the Germans.  Between these two experiences and over an 18-year teaching career, it is apparent that the way we treat and handle children and teenagers is ultimately doing them a disservice.   

One of the refrains I hear the most, particularly within my capacity as a teacher, is the concern that issue “A” is too much stress and responsibility upon younger people.  I have heard administrators and teachers alike mention high school students as children.  It is the culmination of our attitude towards them and what we expect from them.  We see them as helpless, as someone to be coddled and protected.  Therefore, we protect them from bad grades, failing grades and being held back a year.  The infantilization of our students is realized in the students’ perception of their own abilities.   

As has often been cited in international studies, American students have high opinions of themselves and their potential but produce very little.  It is the end result of our coddling.  We pump students up with praise at the drop of a hat, take away all possibility of failure and in the end, we get a gaggle of cocky ne’er-do-wells.  Everything the education system does is designed to create immediate results and little to no thought is given to the long-range impact of these decisions.   

The second feature of this condition is the child-centric approach to parenting, marketing and the like.  Modern family psychologists talk of the importance of praise and finding worth in everything the child says and does.  The fear of damaging self-esteem has created, in some cases, some intolerable people to be around.  It is not the students’ fault but it is a problem that we adults have created.  The question is what should be done?  Unfortunately, many people don’t see the problem.  If we cannot show people the problem, there is no hope of reaching a better path.   

Compounding the problem of officials, teachers and parents not recognizing the problem is the fact that they try to demonize those who object to their education philosophy.  Over my career, I and others like me have tried to make the point that we need to take a different approach to students.  What we receive is the criticism that we don’t like children, we want them to fail, etc.  They have no argument to back up their philosophy so the only thing left is to create a moral argument with reformers playing the role of the boogeyman.  They attempt to invalidate our position, not with a cogent argument of their own but with demagoguery.  It is frustrating and irritating.  It is one thing to have a discussion or debate and to fail to convince or convert others.  It is another thing to be discounted altogether and to be characterized as antithetical to your true beliefs.  I care for my students and want what is best for them.  The current environment is not it.   

Martin Buber, the German philosopher and writer, once said that teachers must focus on teaching the adult the child will become.  Even pop-psychologists like the late Steven Covey preached the idea of keeping the end in mind.  We as teachers and administrators cannot make decisions with regards to students based on what is best for them now.  Rather, we must consider the impact on the adult they will become.  The more we infantilize our students/children, the greater challenges we place before them as adults.

 

A Constitutional Viewpoint

Now the Senate is looking for “moderate” judges, “mainstream” judges.  What in the world is a moderate interpretation of a constitutional text?  Halfway between what is says and what we’d like it to say?
            Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, address to Chapman University, 2005

Much talk has been given to the appointment of judges upon the Supreme Court of the United States.  For those not familiar, such judges are appointed by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate.  They have life-time tenure.  The thought was that such a tenure would allow judges to exist and to issue verdicts above and removed from political pressures.  For many Americans, legal studies and the inner workings of our court system might come across as rather esoteric but within the wranglings and debates, arguments and dissenting opinions lies a committed guarding of the U.S. Constitution.  The justices who seem to have the right answer are called originalists.

There is an older judicial term called strict or loose constructionism.  It was designed to interpret the extent to which one stays connected to the U.S. Constitution.  Today, a more proper term is originalism.  Originalism or textualism is the concept of judges making a decision on the basis of the exact words of the Founders and the context in which they wrote.  Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the Court’s most brilliant and controversial judges, has often used the death penalty to explain.  Some activists suggest that the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution and its warning against “cruel and unusual” punishment, in essence, invalidates the authority behind capital punishment.  Justice Scalia said that the Eighth Amendment obviously does not suggest that since all the states had capital punishment as a possible consequence to criminal behavior.  How could the Founding Fathers ban something on one hand and allow for it on the other unless they considered the death penalty neither cruel nor unusual?

If we as a society purport to hold valuable the words and intent of the Founding Fathers, why do we try so hard to perform logical gymnastics in order to justify various unfounded political opinions?  The whole purpose of the Constitution is to provide a guideline that brings us through temporary controversies and debates – a calming voice that strongly rejects legal contradiction and moves us away from our worst vices.  To further highlight the importance of an originalist’s point of view, let us take a view at another social dilemma.  Anti-gun advocates suggest that the Second Amendment’s wording suggest the Founding Fathers wanted only those in a militia to have weapons.  However, that was not the context within which they were writing.  In their days, many families, many of them not in a militia, had weapons.  If it was acceptable in 1789, why would the Founding Fathers suggest, reaching through time, that it is not acceptable? 

Behind the power of the point of view of the originalist is a belief in the power of the words of the U.S. Constitution.  If, indeed, these words serve only as a guideline and not irrefutable demands from those who constructed the country, then what is the purpose of the document?  Justice Scalia once said, “Robert F. Kennedy used to say, ‘Some men see things as they are and ask why.  Others dream things that never were and ask why not?’  That outlook has become a far too common and destructive approach to interpreting the law.”  If the United States, its citizens, its lawmakers and its judges cannot agree in the inviolable character of the U.S. Constitution, we could cease to exist as what we were once envisioned. 

 

The Importance and Misunderstanding of Voting

Over 120 million people voted last Tuesday as President Barack Obama won his second term.  I have had a great deal of fun speaking with my students on the election and from time to time, my status as a government teacher has also elicited questions from my friends.  Of all the questions and all the remarks I hear from others, two are brought up most often and need to be addressed. 

Remark one – I don’t understand the need for this “electoral college”; we need to get rid of it.  The Electoral College was initially devised as a check on an unpredictable and emotional electorate.  As a way of preventing the people from electing someone horribly unqualified or unsuitable for the position, the Electoral College was created by our Founding Fathers.  Today, it is has developed to serve another purpose.  If the election was strictly one based on population, candidates would focus their efforts in the major population centers only.  Places like Wyoming, Alaska or Nevada, states with low population and/or low population densities, would be ignored.  However, with a race to 270, the three to five electoral votes of some of the smaller states have a greater percentage of voice and influence on an upcoming election. 

Remark two – My single vote does not count/I live in a predominantly blue/red state and I’m of an opposite opinion....There are many types of comments like this that downplays the individual relevance of one’s vote.  This is the completely wrong way to look at voting.  The importance of voting is not based on whether you get what you want or whether your guy wins or not.  It is about having your voice heard.  In a world that increasingly frames things based on the individual, people have developed the wrong idea about the power of voting.  The importance of voting is that you have the right and responsibility to cast your ballot.  Governor Romney lost the election but by voting, I let the Obama administration know that one more person does not agree with his policies and must be considered when setting new policy.  Assuming he truly believes that he is president of “all Americans.” 

The United States and other democracies around the world share the responsibility to vote in a world where this right and duty largely does not exist.  Throughout the world, people struggle to have their voice heard and taken under consideration and increasingly, insecure dictators or quasi-leaders suppress or pervert the will of the people.  At the core of the power to vote is the people’s power to control their government.  That is why some “leaders” subvert the power to vote because they do not recognize the power of the people.  People who refuse to vote or don’t because they feel it does not count must keep this in mind.

 

A Tragic, Chinese Summer

It was a sweltering summer in Beijing, China in 1900.  Not only were the temperatures at record levels, but so were the political tensions.  The previous December, two missionaries were hacked to death in a rural area outside of the Chinese capital.  The culprits were labeled as members of a secret organization called the Boxers.  It was an organization that had begun as an anti-dynastic group but over the last couple of decades, it shifted its focus against the presence of Europeans and other outsiders in China.  

In late June of that year, the Boxers surrounded the foreign legation quarters in the capital and began a siege that would last until August.  The British, a leading power in the world, represented the main leadership of the foreign powers and organized their defense.  The French, the Americans and the Japanese also served in a leadership capacity in their attempts to defend the foreigners in the legations.  In addition to the foreigners in danger, the legation quarters were also sheltering a slew of Chinese converts to Christianity who arrived from various beleaguered missions in the surrounding mountains and fields.   

Through those summer months, a waiting game ensued as the legation defenders and their Chinese “guests” attempted to hold out against an increasingly hostile, emboldened and imperial-sponsored rag-tag group of fanatics while at the same time, waiting for a relief force made up of the world powers coming from Tianjin, a port city to the southeast.  As the allied forces made their way to the capital, the defenders fought day and night, they ate increasingly inedible food and slept very little.  Among the military and diplomatic officials who helped in the defense, missionaries also helped in the fight while the wives of missionaries served as nurses to the injured.  In mid-August, the legations were finally saved, the Boxers were defeated and the Qing Dynasty given a fatal blow. 

Over the course of the siege, westerners were already speaking of the legacy of the event.  Missionary William Martin melodramatically suggested, “this siege in Peking (Beijing) will undoubtedly take rank as one of the most notable in the annals of history.”  Sarah Conger, the wife of the U.S. minister to China, had a more level headed assessment.  In a letter to her nephew, she wrote, “What do you think of the history that is being made?  Only a small portion of it will ever be handed down for future generations to ponder.”  Sadly, history has fallen into favor of the minister’s wife.  There was one film made on the subject called 55 Days in Peking back in the 1950s but in the last decade, new scholarship has been conducted on this forgotten period of Chinese and U.S. history.   

I was first drawn to the uprising because so many knew so little about that Chinese summer.  That is actually what motivates my current research interest.  I hope that my article has stoked a level of interest within the reader – perhaps, one might even do a little research themselves.  History is replete with these types of struggles; the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, the Biafra revolt in Nigeria, the Kampuchean revolution in Cambodia or the Zapatista Revolution in Mexico.  The researcher will learn two things – one, there is much more to history than previously thought and two, history is much more interesting than the same stories told every year.

 

This Story Shall the Good Man Teach His Son

I have this morning witnessed one of the most interesting scenes a free people can ever witness.  The changes of administration, which in every government and in every age have most generally been epochs of confusion, villainy and bloodshed, in this our happy country take place without any species of distraction, or disorder. 

            A Philadelphia woman in a letter to her sister on the occasion of Thomas

            Jefferson’s inauguration, 1801

It was March 4, 1801 and Thomas Jefferson, the tall and distinguished gentleman from Virginia left his residency of the last few months, a boarding house in Washington, D.C., to make his way to the Senate chamber.  The election he had only recently survived was a tumultuous and dirty campaign; one that would make modern-day campaigns seem quaint and genteel in comparison.  Jefferson’s followers had called his opponent, President John Adams, an atheist and suggested that he sought a re-uniting with England.  The Federalists were worse.  They called the Virginia politician “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father…”  On top of it all, the actual election was only recently resolved the month before after a contentious fight between Jefferson and Aaron Burr.  Yet, despite the hatred and the vitriolic nature of the debate, a country came together to honor a new president.  Not just a new president, but a new political philosophy – different from the two previous Federalist presidents. 

In accordance with congressional law, which states that a general election will be held every four years on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, Americans will gather to vote for president.  The amazing part of the whole process is that on November 7 (hopefully), we will usher in either a new term or a new presidency.  Despite our convictions, our beliefs, we will accept the will of the people, as expressed in the vote cast next Tuesday.  For the last four years, President Obama has been my president and I have taken umbrage to those who disrespect the man.  No one, and that includes people like me and others who have criticized him over the years, has any idea what it is like to be president or the pressures that fall on that person.  Still, I hope that in a week’s time, we will have a new president.  I trust Mr. Romney’s vision for the future more than the president’s.  However, if the president is re-elected, my responsibility as an American is to accept him and respect him.   

There are those around the country who allow their viewpoints and paradigm to cloud their responsibility.  However, for the most part, I believe people do respect the office of the presidency and in that regard, we are unique.  It is not to say that other nations do not respect their leaders but they are seen in many places as more interchangeable.  Still, it is strange.  As a whole, we are a people who are known for its respect of its political leaders, its law enforcement agencies and as kids, we are told early and often to respect our elders.  Yet, we are a nation of individualists, who tend to be anti-authoritarian.  I’m fond of the scene in The Great Escape when the German commandant asks Steve McQueen’s character, “Are all American pilots so ill-mannered?”  McQueen responds, “Yep, about 99% of us.”  That is the United States but we still see our leaders and our president as different.  We don’t put him on a pedestal, or we shouldn’t…the president is not better than us but he can be the best of us.   

So, I anxiously await Tuesday.  I’m pulling with much enthusiasm for Governor Romney and think he has a good chance of winning.  His economic approach is more sound and more friendly for people like us trying to pull ourselves out of our economic blight.  His understanding of the U.S. position and role in the world is also more historically sound and ultimately, will make my country and the world safer.  And no matter what happens, my politically contradictory spouse and I will still be able to deal with one another (what to do with her yard sign though...hmm).  So will the United States.  It has been that way since the first men ascended to the position of president.