Train up a child in the way he should go – Part I

My grandmother and I had a lot of conversations. They were usually one-sided with me asking questions but mostly listening to her stories. Of Cherokee ancestry, Sally Pearl (Downey) Hart was born in 1890 in Indian Territory and lived near present-day Ryan on the Red River. She came by wagon with her parents, brothers and sisters to the banks of the Arkansas River across the river from the tiny settlement of Tulsa in 1895. As there was no bridge over the river, the wagon had to be ferried across in order to get to where present-day Owasso is located a few miles north of Tulsa. She and my grandfather met and married in the newly minted state of Oklahoma, and they eventually operated a dairy farm near Owasso.

She told many stories of her early life and family. She was an avid reader and read many stories to me. One of the few books she actually owned was Martin and Osa Johnson’s Four Years in Paradise. I was fascinated as she read to me of their exploration of Africa in the early twentieth century. I still have that book. When I was about seven years old, I recall sitting on the couch beside her as she made a doll out of empty thread spoons, some yarn, and a few bits of cloth. She called it Ezra Taft Benson. Of course today not one in a thousand people will know who Ezra Taft Benson was, but at that time he was the newly appointed Secretary of Agriculture under President Eisenhower. As the wife of a retired dairy-farmer, she wasn’t too enamored with his agricultural policies. Apparently it made such an impression on me that I still vividly remember that time sitting on the couch beside her and listening.

She was an exceptionally loving, wise, and Godly woman, and much of what I later learned in life and believe today had their beginnings in those conversations with her when I was a small child.

Conversations are important and none more so than those between a parent or grandparent and a young child. It is in such conversations that our cultural inheritance is passed on unimpaired. In a larger sense, family is where “socialization” takes place, that is, the generational transfer of moral and cultural values. From primitive peoples huddled around communal campfires in the millennia of the past to the generations of the early twentieth century, children received most of their values and worldview from their parents, and the local church and community almost universally reflected those same values and worldview. [Johnson, pp. 28, 311.]

However, the generational transmission of America’s cultural inheritance was challenged by the rapid rise of the humanistic worldview during the Boomer generation’s formative years (born late 1945 through 1964). This new moral order not only challenged but significantly damaged the generational transmission of the moral order upon which American society had flourished for over one hundred and fifty years. What made the Boomers different was the occurrence of a series of significant shared events and formative experiences that came together in a unique time and place—the perfect storm as it might be called. This series of significant shared events and formative experiences would ultimately result in dramatic changes in family life and child rearing, education, culture, religion, politics, and government. [Johnson, p. 11.]

One of the most significant formative experiences of the young Boomer generation was the dramatic arrival of television. With the advent of television, there was a new member of the family seated at the communal campfire, and in all of history no intruder into the family circle would so quickly and thoroughly usurp the authority of parents and family in transmitting cultural values. The American child would be exposed to substantial external influences for long periods of time each day. In a series of exceptional essays published in 1981 about television as a social and cultural force, Richard Adler wrote:

The TV set has become the primary source of news and entertainment for most Americans and a major force in the acculturation of children…Television is not simply a medium of transmission, it is an active, pervasive force…a mediator between our individual lives and the larger life of the nation and the world; between fantasy and fact; between old values and new ideas; between our desire to seek escape and our need to confront reality. (emphasis added) [Adler, pp. xi-xii.]

Television was the perfect tool for the transmission of a humanistic worldview to the Boomer generation. Michael Novak called television a “…molder of the soul’s geography. It builds up incrementally a psychic structure of expectations. It does so in much the same way that school lessons slowly, over the years, tutor the unformed mind and teach it ‘how to think’.” To Novak, television is a “homogenizing medium” with an ideological tendency that is a “vague and misty liberalism” designed “however gently to undercut traditional institutions and to promote a restless, questioning attitude.” Television served its masters, the state and the great corporations, even when exalting “…the individual at the expense of family, neighborhood, religious organizations, and cultural groups…that stand between the isolated individual and the massive institutions.” [Novak, pp. 20, 26-27.] The “restless, questioning attitude” is an excellent description of what the Boomer children of the 1950s would exhibit in the 1960s. Many historians and sociologists believe that the greatest number of significant shared events and formative experiences that defined the Baby Boomers as a distinctive group was provided by television—more than the influence of parents and more than the massive numbers that form the Baby Boomer cohort. [Croker, p. 20.] [Johnson, p. 29.]

Television robbed families of time together for conversations necessary for the transmission of their cultural inheritance and replaced it with a humanistic worldview. But television was just the beginning of a new media culture in which technological advances dramatically changed how we live, work, and communicate. In the last twenty-five years we have become a screen culture, but in our rush to connectedness, we have become disconnected. [Elkind, pp. ix-x.] We are inundated with information from television, computers, cell phones, iPads, and monitors in businesses, churches, restaurants, airports, and any other location where there is a concentration of human traffic. We may have hundreds of friends on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter but are starved for real face-to-face relationships in which there is time to listen. And we cannot effectively transmit our cultural inheritance to our children with a few keystrokes and recorded sound bites.

Richard Weaver captured the essence of this loss of time for listening in Visions of Order:

The individual conservators of the past exist no more or they are no longer listened to: the grandmother preserving the history and traditions of the family by the fireside, the veteran relating the story of his battles in the shaded courthouse square, even the public orator recalling the spirit of 1776 on commemorative days. There is no time to listen to them, and time is of the essence. (emphasis added) [Weaver, p. 41.]

There is another thief that has also robbed three generations of American children of their cultural heritage—American education under the humanistic philosophy of John Dewey. This will be addressed in Part II.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods – Humanism and Christianity – The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishing, 2011), pp. 11, 28-29, 311.

Richard P. Adler, ed., Understanding Television – Essays on Television as a Social and Cultural Force, (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1981), pp. xi-xii.

Michael Novak, “Television Shapes the Soul,” Understanding Television – Essays on Television as a Social and Cultural Force, Richard P. Adler, ed., (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1981), pp. xi-xii.

Richard Croker, The Boomer Century 1946-2046, (New York: Springboard Press, 2007), p. 20.

Richard M. Weaver, Visions of Order – The Cultural Crisis of Our Time, (Wilmington, Delaware: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1995, 2006), p. 41. Original copyright 1964 by Louisiana State University Press.

David Elkind, Ph.D., The hurried child – growing up too fast too soon, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, 2007), pp. ix-x.