Have you ever looked at astonishment at how utterly intolerable a child was behaving – and wondered how this was possible, how the parents were so oblivious to the abomination they had created?
I am inspired again and again by the example of my half-sister to write a long essay on the education and upbringing of the youth. In none else is failure at education and parenting more clearly illustrated. Frequent observations of her nature and the relationship between child and parent compel me with a force I have not felt in many years to put my words to paper.
I have had the great opportunity of getting a chance to observe her complete development from infant to now – and it is quite clear to see that she became corrupt once she was exposed to TV and the public schools (at approximately the same time). She spends 90% of her “free time” in front of the TV most days, does not play with any friends and is fed directives by advertising which she attempts to realize by conning my parents into buying her things, at any cost. The public schools have not bettered her but made her more superficial and eliminated a natural curiosity which she seemed to exercise before exposure to the system. Due to the constant exposure to advertising and “children entertainment” programs on TV she has come to imitate dysfunctional pop culture figures and wasteful, disrespectful characters from shows.
How such failure and abomination could be attributed to “attention deficit disorder” shows us how far we have come as a people: we perpetually fail to take responsibility for our failures and instead attribute the dysfunction in our children to medical causes. Self-defeating methods of parenting are implemented again and again and the only result is a more superficial, treacherous, barbaric, sycophantic, greedy, pernicious and depraved child, with a love only for pop culture trends realized with a disturbingly obvious set of deceits learned in order to achieve needless consumption of it.
Every child today is a Nero and we celebrate their oppressive tyranny by allowing them to scream over the muffled and docile words of elders. We celebrate their tyranny by making compromises with them so that they might behave normally, when they perpetually deceive their parents into buying them what the ever-pervasive pop culture has demanded. With constant exposure to a television dedicated to indoctrinating the child into a rage of desire, the true parents are the advertisers: they set the values.
‘If you stop screaming over your grandmother I will buy you a Polly Pocket’
The deceitful Nero does not know what it means to be good and only judges what is right and wrong by consumption. Those who offer to indulge the tyrannical desires are rewarded with fake love, those who refuse are punished with intolerable behavior. Discipline and setting boundaries is considered archaic and barbaric and so after seven warnings the child continues to rape the dignity of the parent, only to laugh sadistically when scolded by those who hold wisdom.
It is has become a taboo in our society to deny to children any desire – the popular wisdom dictates that the child which is spoiled most extravagantly has the best parents. No expense is spared to encourage our children to buy worthless trinkets! Buying, and indulging desire becomes the sole purpose of Nero’s existence and seductions which would convince others to give gifts are practiced. This appearance is only gilded and lying behind it is a monster who sells loyalty and love to the highest bidder. Every good action must be rewarded and is never done simply for the sake of. The parents, who themselves are in all likelihood not good and probably worship at the Mall, still try to sell their ‘traditional morality’ and ‘manners’ to their corrupt progeny by offering material prizes for behavior which should be expected anyway. Let us always settle for the mediocrity and indecency of yesterday instead of thinking about how we ought to live today!
Enough ranting for now… I must organize this panic into coherence.
Fate: How much longer?
As far as educating children is involved, I have a lot of ideas which I want to get down – but whenever I start thinking about this topic I get so worked up and furious that I end up ranting. I think over the next vacation where I have a month or more to think about these things, I will spend a lot of my time trying to think of an elegant way of presenting my thoughts. I also need to read Emile by Rousseau and re-read The Republic, as those two texts really relate to my mode of thought.