They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
This Be The Verse - Philip Larkin
The parents in Larkin’s poem, written in England in 1971, are typical of that time and place, conservative and emotionally stilted.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats
A more prevalent version of fucked up parenting in modern society is the combination of conservative and neurotic, as in Pink Floyd’s song Mother:
Mama's gonna make all of your nightmares come true
Mama's gonna put all of her fears into you
Mama's gonna keep you right here under her wing
She won't let you fly but she might let you sing
Mother - Roger Waters
Mother was written only 8 years after This Be The Verse and although both authors are English and well educated, Philip Larkin (b. 1922) and Roger Waters (b. 1943) are a generation apart, which could explain the change from emotionally stilted to neurotic in their observations of parenting.
By this time, parents of hippiedom and the counter culture had already spawned a host of children. Some of these “alternative” parents naturally found alternative ways to fuck up their offspring, largely by inculcating them with values and a world view so at odds with mainstream society that they found great difficulty negotiating it.
Follow this evolutionary path a couple of generations and we arrive at a modern, lefty / “progressive” instance of Larkin’s poem: a Canadian couple, David Stocker and Kathy Witterick, dubbed “the world’s most PC parents” for trying to raise their child without gender specific cues.
I think skepticism toward fiat authority should be part of every child’s education, so I’m not in any way suggesting that children should be raised to conform to mainstream society. However, it is absurd to reject the notion that they may as adults choose to spend most, or even all of their time in it.
Consequently, parents are harming their children when they raise them as more extreme hippies did and as this Canadian couple are, not only with a perspective and reading of the world which is radically different from most people they will meet, but also insufficient grasp of those other people’s world views.
The harm is twofold: the denial of choice through deliberate ignorance and potential ostracism through the inability to connect with a significant proportion of the population.
The same harm is done by conservative, often religious parents who won’t let their children mix with people from a variety of backgrounds and be exposed to ideas which challenge their orthodoxy, or by immigrant parents who want to raise their children, especially their daughters in the ways of the “old country”.
The children grow up to be seen by many in the wider community as dorks, religious nuts, wogs, ... They have a community on which to fall back, but become insular as many areas of employment and more general social interaction are closed to them. Often, they subsequently attempt to rationalize their comparative isolation via the position that it is them who have rejected wider society, because it is immoral … and hence the problem is passed onto a new generation.
Humans are a very social animal and feeling ostracized can be very damaging to the psyche. It’s already happened to the Canadian family: one of the sons was “recently shunned at a playground by two girls who said that they did not want to play with the girl-boy".
I wonder how the parents explained the rejection. “There’s nothing wrong with you, it’s all the rest of the world’s fault”, perhaps?
Unfortunately, there is something wrong with you, son: you’re struggling to interact with most other kids … and it’s your parents’ fault.
I’m not sure which aspect of the Stocker / Witterick child rearing philosophy I find stupider: the non-gender specific upbringing or “unschooling”, where the child decides what he or she wants to learn. Of course, both imply at least home schooling.
The non-gender specific upbringing is a caricature of leftist political philosophy, in which behaviour is overwhelmingly determined by environment, which can even be shaped to materially modify behaviour with a strong biological basis.
It’s understandable how one could form such a view in the intellectual climate of the mid 19th century, where even Gregor Mendel’s pea experiments and theories of inheritance had not been published and Marx adhered to Lamarck’s theory of the heritability of environmentally acquired traits.
But surely we’ve learnt something from biology in the past 150 years? It’s true that gender is not always straightforward, however mostly it is.
Which is the more sensible approach?
1. You’re a boy / girl. There are some things that boys and girls do that are different, such as girls can have babies and boys can’t, but most things boys can do, girls can do too (or vice versa).
2. We won’t mention our child’s sex in case someone else stereotypes them. We’ll let our child develop a unique sense of identity. Oh no! One of the other children asked our child if it’s a boy or a girl and now it’s crying because it doesn’t know and it’s being teased.
“Unschooling” eh? How, exactly, will the child know what it doesn’t know? How will it know what it wants to learn unless you teach it a sufficiently diverse range of facts and ideas from which to make a meaningful choice? Who will decide on those initial facts and ideas? Oh, that’s right, you.
I bet your kids didn’t decide to go and visit Zapatista revolutionaries in the mountains of Mexico all by themselves.
So, just like any other parents, Mr. Stocker and (I presume) Ms. Witterick have projected their world view onto their children, proving Philip Larkin’s point.
The big difference is that being un / home schooled, there is no one else to provide a counterpoint to the bullshit with which this pair of lefty clowns will inevitably fill their children’s heads.
Which brings us to an important point for a philosophy of Liberalism: when should the state or community interfere?
It should be clear to most that by pursuing such separatism, the parents are harming their children for the reasons given above. But are they harming them MORE than religious extremists, racial purists or immigrants who won’t assimilate? I doubt it.
That’s not to say the harm is not material; rather, other upbringings do just as much, if not more harm. If the community is going to take action against Mr. Stocker and Ms. Witterick, why shouldn’t action be taken against a whole range of people for filling their kids' heads with rubbish and not allowing them exposure to anything that might challenge it?
Well, most Western societies do draw a line. There is a clearly defined educational syllabus up until at least the age of 15. Parents are required to send their children to school to learn it. Those who home school are audited to make sure they are teaching at least this syllabus, as in fact are schools audited to ensure the same.
Many people may not concur with some elements of the core syllabus, but I’d suggest literacy, numeracy, science, historical and geographical facts, civics and financial and technological competence are sufficiently generally agreed. We can at least see that our children learn this basic set of skills.
Unfortunately, home schooling has the capacity to endow almost everything taught with the slant of the parents: civics, science, history, even basic finance.
“Yes, but institutional education endows everything taught with the assumed correctness of our political and social system”, Mr. Stocker and Ms. Witterick might say. True, up until later high school.
The difference is, parents who send their children to recognized schools can give their kids an alternative view if they want. With home or “un” schooling, the community has no chance to expose those children to mainstream perspectives if their parents choose to eschew them, thus denying their children the ability to easily negotiate mainstream society should they wish to seek employment in it, for example.
Then should a liberal society ban home schooling for all but those children with developmental problems? Not if we allow religious schools, military schools or hippy community schools. Each has its own problems.
Going to a state school in a poor socio-economic neighbourhood can actually be worse for a child than any of the above, given the general attitude to learning of many dominant peer groups in such environments.
I’d suggest public exposure and discussion of extremist attitudes toward children’s education and upbringing is the best way for an open society to tackle these issues. This means the gathering of evidence on outcomes and robust debate, including satire and feeling secure enough to point the finger at the religious conservatives and the Stocker / Wittericks of the world.
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