preparing children for armageddon

So in a grand and glorious tradition, I'm making a quick blog post from Peet's (though the one near my work, rather than the one near Eiga's apartment.) I was reading the NYTimes as I often do for reasons I'm not particularly clear on, and it was full of the usual bourgeois bullsit, when I came on a review of an article and book. At first glance it looked like a typical "You Aren't Doing What You Should To Be An Adequate Parent, So Your Child's Life Will Be Terrible"-type thing, but a couple words caught my eye and made me stop skimming and re-read it more carefully. The article is wondering if we're going about parenting all wrong by assuming that we ought to prepare our children for a wired, 21st-century world with an advanced degree (or two or three) the bare minimum requirement. Perhaps we would be better off preparing our children for a world where they'll have to provide a lot of their own food; work together within their actual, physical community to produce most of what the community uses; and deal with radical, catastrophic environmental change.

It is a good question indeed, though the assumption that our generation, at least, will be fine is a bit ridiculous. Lots of people right this very second would benefit in this economy from making connections with neighbors and family to share costs, reducing what expenses they can through lost 19th-century skills, and looking for a economy-safe job, like bike repair or microbrewing beer. Look at it this way: most people's jobs involve something like sitting in a room and messing around with a computer. This does not provide what we need to live, but we hope that the massive, complicated, teetering machine (seriously, go read that. Can you believe it was written in 1909? That's sci-fi at its best, right there.) will provide us with the food and shelter we actually need, because what we do helps that machine tick over. That does not sound safe, and certainly doesn't sound like we're bargaining from a position of power.

Anyway, go read the original article that the NYT was glossing. It's really well written by someone who doesn't have any sort of political axe to grind, but is just pre-theoretically worrying about their kids. I'll leave you with one good quote from it:

“When education started in this country, the goal was to round off people who were already practically skilled,” McKibben says. “Most people grew up knowing how to do things like raise their own food and an astonishing number of tasks that we no longer know how to do. You went to school to read the classics and get some polish.

“We’re now kind of in the opposite situation, where kids spend one-hundred percent of their time in a mediated environment. We learn about the world through one school or another. So we might need to be thinking more about using school to introduce us to those practical things that we don’t know how to do anymore.”

Sounds true, minus the part where he implies that non-snooty school was ok, rather than even from the outset largely about enforcing conformity and rules-following to train the next generation of 19th-century factory workers.