Marriage, family, and home are necessary elements in the socialization of children. However, nurturing is the glue that must be added to this mix for socialization to occur. As we learned in Part I, conversations between parent or grandparent and child are a major part of nurturing. It is in such an environment that “socialization” takes place, that is, the generational transfer of moral and cultural values—our cultural inheritance.

But nurturing is very difficult in modern society as family members are rarely together for extended periods of time. The demands on families in a fast-paced, technologically driven, and rapidly changing society makes nurturing of children difficult at best. The difficulties expand considerably in households requiring two-incomes, particularly in a society dominated by a humanistic worldview focused on the individual as opposed to the biblical worldview which emphasizes relationships. For most Americans home has become merely a place to sleep and store stuff, and family members are reduced to tenant status where there is little mutual dependence, connection, or cohesiveness. [Johnson, Ye shall be as gods, pp. 336-337.] There is little if any time for conversations and other elements of nurturing, but time is the essence of nurturing.

The cultural and moral values of the colonists and America’s Founders were rooted in the biblical worldview. Regarding the education of children in this biblical worldview, parents are admonished “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” [Proverbs 22:6. KJV] The implication is plain that the primary purpose of a child’s training was transmission of cultural and moral values. This purpose is upheld by the words of Samuel Adams, known as the “Father of the American Revolution.” Adams instigated the Boston Tea Party, signed the Declaration of Independence, and served in both the Continental Congress and the U.S. Congress. His views on education paralleled those of many other Founding Fathers. [Federer, p. 21.]

Let divines and philosophers, statesmen and patriots, unite their endeavors to renovate the age, by impressing the minds of men with the importance of educating their little boys and girls, of inculcating in the minds of youth the fear and love of the Deity…in short of leading them to the study and practice of exalted virtues of the Christian System. [Federer, pp. 23-24.]

Until early in the twentieth century, transmission of parents’ cultural and moral values to their children was supported by the educational system and other institutions of American society such as religion, government, and popular culture in general. Beginning principally in the 1960s and 70s, the generational transfer of a family’s moral and cultural values to their children has been significantly hampered in two ways by the progressive education establishment.

Train children to have a humanistic worldview

First, the American educational system is totally immersed in the philosophy of John Dewey that purveys the humanistic worldview which stands in opposition to the Founders’ central cultural vision based on a biblical worldview. John Dewey was a signor of Humanist Manifesto I in 1933, and his humanistic philosophy and worldview have saturated substantially all of American education.

Robert J. Roth describes Dewey’s philosophy as one of naturalism in that…“man with his habits, institutions, desires, thoughts, aspirations, ideals, and struggles is within nature, an integral part of it…and insists…on man’s continuity with nature and on the fact that man can achieve self-realization only in and through nature.” Effectively, Dewey is saying that the human being survives and develops only in and through his material environment. [Roth, pp. 100-101.] In summarizing Dewey’s philosophy, Roth states:

Nothing can be admitted which transcends the possibilities of concrete, human experience. There is no absolute, no transcendent being, no extra-mundane reality…there is no room for a supernatural religion…and that “supernatural” means that which transcends the possibilities of concrete human experience and involves an absolute being. [emphasis added] [Roth, p. 101.]

Thus, we have the dominant theme of John Dewey’s philosophy—denial of God and human self-realization accomplished only through interaction with nature. Under such policies, the primary purpose of this “progressive” education is to prepare children for a career and to be a contributor to the goals of the secular state. The educational system is no longer an ally but an enemy of the generational transmission of the cultural and moral values of the parents.

Limit exposure of preschool children to the biblical worldview of parents

The second way the American educational system stands in opposition to the status of parents and family in the socialization of young children of preschool age is to remove them from the home at a younger age and further isolate them from parental influence in those formative preschool years. The cradle to career approach of education undermines the philosophy that parents have the primary responsibility, right, and privilege to provide the best education for their children. But such social engineering that relegates parents to secondary status in the socialization of their children is unnatural with regard to human nature and results in dire consequences for such a society.

The pressures for universal preschool began in the 1960s. In the Preface for the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition of The Hurried Child, Dr. David Elkind wrote of the 1971 enactment of the Comprehensive Child Development Act (CCDA) which mandated compulsory attendance of every preschool child in America at federally run centers. The bill was vetoed by President Nixon who stated that the effect of the bill would be “…to pledge the vast moral authority of the federal government to the side of communal approaches to childrearing [nurturing] as against a family centered approach…” and ultimately lead to destruction of the American family. [Elkind, p. xiii.]

Almost a half century later, the educational progressivists are once again peddling the communal approach to nurturing through a vast, federally controlled early childhood learning program. This time it is Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) which provides grants at the state level “…to improve the quality of early learning and development programs and close educational gaps for children with high needs.” RTT-ELC includes the establishment of early childhood systems that “ambitiously” moves forward a state’s early learning and development program. Like the first RTT initiative, RTT-ELC mandates include early learning and developmental outcomes, common standards within the state, assessments that measure child outcomes and address behavioral and health needs, and extensive accountability and data gathering programs to name just a few. Families are also to be engaged in the RTT-ELC process (and therefore effectively buy into the concept of federal control). [U.S. Department of Education] All of the flaws associated with federal control of education were enumerated in “Common Core Curriculum Standards – The devil is in the details” and need not be repeated in this article. [Johnson, “Common Core Curriculum Standards – The devil is in the details.”]

Not only does RTT-ELC push federal control of education downward to the preschool level, more importantly it is also flawed in the same manner as is the decades-old Head Start program, and children are the unwilling victims. Dr. Elkind gives an insight into our Orwellian future under the current educational model.

The concept of childhood, so vital to the traditional American way of life, is threatened with extinction in the society we have created. Today’s child has become the unwilling, unintended victim of overwhelming stress—the stress borne of rapid, bewildering social change and constantly rising expectations. [Elkind, p. 3]

The homogenizing progressive education system is the force that maintains the factory model of education. Such a model allows the progressives to control the child and ultimately to instill a humanistic worldview. Parents have been shoved aside and the emotional damage to their children will last a lifetime. Elementary schools have become assembly lines where textbooks and curriculum are standardized on a national level, testing has become standardized and one-size-fits-all, teaching is driven by the curriculum content necessary to pass the tests, teachers and administrators are held accountable for educational failures with roots that go far beyond the classroom walls, and teacher creativity and innovation are smothered as they spend as many hours in non-teaching work activities as they do in teaching. [Elkind, pp. 49-50.] The value of many highly qualified and hard-working teachers as well as schools and school districts is measured by test scores significantly influenced by external circumstances and the realities of children’s capabilities over which the teacher has little or no control.

Somewhere in the midst of all of these progressive educational reforms the child has been forgotten as the factory model of education relentlessly hurries children into adulthood. Individual differences in mental abilities as well as learning rates are ignored as children are pressed to meet uniform standards as measured by standardized tests. There is a progressive downward thrust of curriculum, i.e. the pressure to introduce curriculum material at an ever younger age. [Elkind, pp. 50-51.] Parents contribute to the problem by rushing children to a multitude of programmed extra-curricular activities which allow little down-time for un-structured play. Hovering over all of this haste is the omnipresent fear of retention if one doesn’t measure up. Dr. Elkind believes that we have lost perspective about what childhood really means.

…it is important to see childhood as a stage of life, not just as the anteroom to life. Hurrying children into adulthood violates the sanctity of life by giving one period priority over another. But if we really value human life, we will value each period equally and give unto each stage of life what is appropriate to that stage…In the end, a childhood is the most basic human right of children. [Elkind, p. 221.]

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 Publishers, 2011), pp. 336-337.

William J. Federer, America’s God and Country, (Coppell, Texas: FAME Publishing, Inc., 1996), pp. 21, 23-24.

Robert J. Roth, John Dewey and Self-Realization, (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, Publisher, 1962), pp. 100-101.

David Elkind, Ph.D., The hurried child – growing up too fast too soon, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, 2007), pp. xiii, 3, 49-51, 221.

U.S. Department of Education, “16 States and D.C. Submit Applications for the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge,” ED.gov, October 18, 2013. http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/16-states-and-dc-submit-applications-race-top-early-learning-challenge (accessed November 14, 2013).

Larry G. Johnson, “Common Core Standards – The devil is in the details,” culturewarrior.net, November 8, 2013. https://www.culturewarrior.net/2013/11/08/common-core-curriculum-standards-the-devil-is-in-the-details/

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.