When I said that I was working from memory, I meant memories of stuff I had read over the years, not necessarily memories of stuff that I have actually done. I have always been interested in hunter-gatherers because I am kind of one myself. I'm no professional, you understand, just a hobby hunter-gatherer, but I have read lots of stuff about real hunter-gatherers in my life. The point I was trying to make was that real hunter-gatherers didn't have anything like the modern adolescence we have today. Their period of 12-20 was spent as hunters and/or warriors. By the age of 25 or30, if they lived that long, they became elders in most primitive cultures. Instead of warriors, the women became mothers and, if they lived long enough, grandmothers.
Our modern youth culture came into being around the time we were born. Our parents generation was the first one where most kids went on to high school after eighth grade, and ours was the first generation where a college education became the norm. Before that, most people were working by the time they became teenagers. I never really identified with the youth culture, considering childhood to be a part time job with no future in it. We have discussed this before, so I will go look for that essay before I start repeating myself.
WHAT'S WRONG WITH KIDS NOWADAYS?
by Talks With Beagles
Socrates (470-399B.C.)
Ever since the days of Socrates the Greek, people have been asking the question: "What’s wrong with kids nowadays?" Of course, if Socrates had driven a school bus, he would have figured out the answer in only seven years like I did. Nevertheless, since history repeats itself, we would have gone through it again in modern times anyway.
The origin of our present difficulty dates back to my parents’ generation. These were the people who grew up during the Great Depression and World War II. Life was hard and kids had to grow up in a hurry in those days. Many of these people, feeling that they had been deprived of their childhood and resolving that their kids would have a better life, began to institute a child-oriented culture in America.
The first thing they did was make a whole bunch of extra kids that nobody needed, like my little sister. At the same time they were doing this, they invented machines to do all the useful work, so that these extra kids would have nothing productive to do. Then it became necessary to build more schools to store all of these extra kids and keep them off the street so they wouldn’t clog up traffic. To justify all this expensive construction, it became necessary for the kids to spend more time in school. In order to be humane about it, it was decided to make school fun so the kids would be able to tolerate spending more time there. Meanwhile, the parents had to start working overtime to pay for all this, so they had less time to spend with their kids and had to trust the professionals to raise them in collective groups. Whenever people are herded together in groups like this, they have a tendency to bond to each other and form their own internally validating society. To understand why this is a problem, you need to know something about primitive tribal cultures.
In most primitive tribal cultures, the name that the tribe calls itself translates into English as "The Real People". Their neighbors, who live in the mountains, are referred to as "The Mountain People", but the mountain people don’t call themselves "The Mountain People". They call themselves "The Real People" and refer to the other tribe as "The Valley People". This practice is known as "The Illusion of Central Position", and is a natural thing.
The kids of today spend way more time with each other than they do with adults. Time spent in anything like school doesn’t count as time spent with adults, since the kids greatly out number the adults and are obviously the Real People here. It doesn’t matter how good of a teacher or parent you are. Nobody is going to pay attention to you because you are not one of The Real People. I laid this theory out to one of the kids on the bus once and he said, "Well, there are way more kids in the world than there are adults, aren’t there?" Your Honor, I rest my case.
There is an old African proverb that says, "It takes a whole village to raise a child". I think what they meant was a whole village of adults, not a whole village of children raising each other. The problem with kids raising kids is that everybody learns how to be a kid but nobody learns how to be an adult. Nobody wants to grow up anyway because all of The Real People are children. Of course, this doesn’t stop them from having kids of their own and raising them the same way. After several generations of this, the child culture has totally displaced the adult culture and civilization has ground to a halt.
A lot of people nowadays believe that kids should have more discipline in their lives. In my opinion, kids already have way too much discipline in their lives. One of the first things a kid hears when he starts kindergarten is, "Keep your hands to yourself". For the next thirteen years, all kinds of people put all kinds of pressure on him to comply with this rule. When he finally graduates, guess what? He still doesn’t keep his hands to himself. It is human nature to follow the course of least resistance. To remain steadfast against pressure like this takes real discipline. The problem here is not lack of discipline; the problem is that we are not all marching in the same army.
Armies use discipline a lot because it is the only known antidote to mass hysteria. If you were at the Mackinac Bridge Walk and everybody started jumping off the bridge together, that would be mass hysteria. If you had discipline, you could use it to resist the impulse to jump off the bridge with everybody else. On the other hand, if you knew about a bus load of people that was headed to the Mackinac Bridge for the expressed purpose of jumping off, common sense would tell you not to get on the bus in the first place. Discipline is no substitute for common sense.
Many people believe that sports teach kids discipline. As far as I am concerned, the only real sports are hunting and fishing; everything else is just a game. The only thing I know about games is what I’ve seen on television. First a bunch of people get all sweaty by running around and crashing into each other. This inspires the audience to scream and holler and jump up and down. After the game, everybody goes downtown and stages a street riot. This is not discipline, folks, this is organized mass hysteria.
I don’t know if hunting and fishing teach discipline or not, but it doesn’t matter. You can’t have mass hysteria when you are out in the woods all by yourself. Some say that, if you stay out there too long, it makes you funny in the head, but I have never had a problem with this.
The reason I know so much about discipline and mass hysteria is that, when I was in the Army, our unit specialized in riot control tactics. We never did a real riot, but we practiced a lot. We were so good at it, that once a year, we put on a demonstration for visiting dignitaries from America and all the NATO countries. One year I was part of the riot, and the next year I was part of the riot control. Little did I know, at the time, that this experience would be so valuable to me in my later employment as a school bus driver. When I first started this job, I thought that these kids either were on drugs or needed to be on drugs. While there may be a certain amount of truth to that presumption, there is more to the problem than that.
Did you ever wonder why you get drunk faster when you drink in a bar or at a party than you do when you drink at home alone? This is because there is something in human nature that causes people to become energized and excited when they do something together as a group. This is useful when you are trying to kill a hairy elephant, build a pyramid, or win a war; but it can be down right dangerous when it is all dressed up with no place to go.
People who are instinctively trying to bond together as a group need something in common. The one thing that everybody knows how to do is to act stupid. To insure that everybody qualifies for membership, we all model our behavior on the stupidest acting person in the group. This is known as "The Lowest Common Denominator Effect".
In summation; what's wrong with kids nowadays is that there are too many of them, they spend too much time together in groups, and they have nothing productive to do. Most people alive today don't remember living under any other kind of system, so they think that what we have now is just fine. Sooner or later, people will get tired of this, like they do everything else. When this comes to pass, here is what we need to do to fix the problem:
The first thing we need to do is stop making kids faster than we can assimilate them. Way back when I was a kid, some experts were concerned about over population in the world and they told us all to have 2.3 children. I think what they meant was 2.3 children in your whole life, not 2.3 children with each partner.
Now, my generation wrote the book on The Sexual Revolution way back in the 1960’s, and I’m sure that I was just as revolting as anyone in those days. The way I remember it is that you are supposed to use birth control until you are ready to settle down and raise kids properly. Of course, some people still don’t believe in birth control, but they don’t believe in The Sexual Revolution either, so they are not part of this problem.
The next thing we need to do is find some kind of productive work for these kids. In the olden days, children worked like slaves and laws had to be passed to stop this practice. Nowadays, both parents are working two jobs and the kids are bored because there is nothing to do in this town. Somewhere between these two extremes there must be a happy medium.
I started working with my parents in the family business at the age of seven. Now, I didn’t work very hard, I didn’t work long hours, and I didn’t make a lot of money, but it was my own money, and I could spend it without asking permission from anybody. At the age of fourteen, I bought a canoe, not a toy canoe, a real canoe. How many fourteen year olds do you know today that can paddle their own canoe?
The next thing we need to do is start including these kids in our adult activities; one at a time, not in groups. The kids should never out number the adults in any given situation.
When I was ten years old, my father bought me a shotgun for Christmas and started taking me hunting with him. Not long after that, I gave away all of my toy guns. I didn’t totally stop playing with the other kids, but it became a low priority on my agenda. Nowadays everybody is worried about keeping guns out of the hands of children. Well, that’s how I got my start, and look at how good I turned out!
Many people will argue that adult activities are not suitable for children. Are they then suitable for adults who act like children? Because that is the only kind of adults we are going to have in this country until we can start getting kids to grow up again. TWB
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