Are you watching?
Take this tall pint of frothy deep thought in and see if your head doesn't spin.
I was recently around a very nice, thoroughly Christian woman, who is a great parent and solid american citizen and as such the sarcasm and general rudeness of any statement I make shouldn't be viewed as an attack on her, but one the thought process of so much of the population. Take the jump to have your mind blown.
With that giant run on sentence out of the way, let me tell you a story that will blow your mind, remember me talking about that a second ago? The topic of "The Simpsons" came up in conversation one day and this dedicated and well intentioned mother said something along the lines of, "I don't let my mine watch those misbehaving kids." Then another mother nodded in agreement. It's been a few days and I was just making up my Amazon.com wish list when I happened to run across the ample seasons of The Simpsons. I almost clicked it then I heard that nice and fully competent mother's voice in my head.
I paused and thought about what I was going to do, then I started thinking about this. If it is so bad for children to watch a cartoon television show under the watch of their parents then how much worse is it to send them to public school where the kids are worse than Bart could ever hope to be and some of the teachers make Homer look like a role model.
I have lots of friends who home school or are going to homeschool. They get abused for their choice a lot by parents who think their kids need to be around the things that they abhor on television. I think the logic is pretty strong that if you don't think your kids should be around it when it's fake, then your kids shouldn't be around it when it's real. So if you've ever thought that way, then check your hypocrisy switch, it might be flicked.
I'm not trying to draw a line in the sand either. Home schooling isn't for everyone and a lot of that is because of time and cost. Don't hate me. It's a sticky topic, one best answered by Voddie Baucham. He's pretty fair and balanced. Wink Wink.
You may now begin picking up the pieces of your mind.
3 comments:
I have no idea what your point was ... but I'm responding anyway.
I think it's important to protect children from physical danger and harm; there is a time when they will hate you for not letting them play on the train tracks, and there is a time in the future when they will understand why you were right. I also think it's important to prepare children for the real world, and that shielding them from it - real or fake - can aid in delayed self awareness and cause greater pain and damage later in life as a result of not learning the easy way when they were younger.
Public school is a godsend to maturity and the development of social skills. Home-schooling is a way for parents to escape the responsibility of teaching and preparing their children to make the right decisions. Veiling children from satire will not only create a malnourished sense of humor, but prevent the opportunity to explain exaggeration and irony. I was not allowed to watch The Simpsons, but my parents took the responsibility to teach me to question authority and understand the difference between truth, lies, and sarcasm; when it's brilliant and when it's wrong. I begged and begged to be home schooled at least two different years of my education. I was tortured, no one understood me, and I didn't fit in. Luckily my parents didn't give into my plea, otherwise I would have graduated high school and tried to fit into a world in which I didn't belong; a world that didn't exist at home. That would have been torture.
It's important to protect children. It is also important to prepare them to make the right decisions and allow them to begin making those decisions on their own as soon as they are able. It is important also to recognize that your children could be ready sooner than you think. They will occasionally make wrong decisions, but so do adults. They will certainly experience pain, but so do adults, and it is this pain that grew us into adults. Delaying pain, and especially hiding its existence, is delaying your child's self-awareness. And that's not about protection, it's about control. Drop the ego, pack the Hannah Montana lunch box full of compassion and wisdom, swallow your pride, and send your kid off to the real world to practice being human.
That is why I will file this one under "Posts where I try to be deep but can't pull it off and wind up not making a real point at all."
I think I was trying to make an argument that people don't carry their logic all the way through and used homeschooling as a terse metaphor.
Thanks for responding with such depth and candor. I might respond to this more in-depth with a post about what you've said.
To reply specifically to your point, then, while it does sound like these parents are completely out of touch with reality, I can't say it's hypocritical to censor certain television programming while continuing to send kids to public school. I think the difference between something real and something fake is that often the real thing shows real consequences or has real context. The imitations and satire sometimes limit the view to only a certain behavior with little context and no resolution. Children can come home from school and ask for advice about what they saw or experienced; they know that the real world is full of corruption and that it can be hard to identify. Children don't as often question what they see on TV, but view it as a representation of truth before they are old enough to discern for themselves.
Hypocritical? No. Lazy, disconnected, unaware? Yes. I see a valid difference between the two, but as I made this point in my first reply, I think the real issue is teaching children discernment and allowing them and trusting them to begin practicing at an early age.
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