Affirming our Children to Death
One of the undeniable dynamics driving the recent growth in classical schools has been a rush of parents away from the failures of the larger school system. It is evident that many families are simply looking for a haven from the chaos and futility of their local schools. And why shouldn’t they? The inhumane conditions that have come to prevail in America’s schools simply beggar description: extremely sub-standard curriculum and instruction, classroom environments filled with disorder, technological distractions permitted and even encouraged at every turn, a social milieu fraught with cruelty and violence. What wonder if parents wish to shield their children from the worst effects of such toxic environments?
But in my experience, what is motivating the majority of parents to seek out the alternative of classical education is a horror at the progressive ideological agenda now being imposed upon students across this country. The purposeful advocacy of racial animus and lurid sexual experimentation that is now indisputably occurring in our schools rightfully disgusts parents, and stirs in them justified distrust towards the teachers and administrators who are supposed to be nurturing the healthy growth of their children. The culmination of this progressive doctrinal program is the wicked cult of transgenderism, as moronic in its premises as it is destructive in its physical and psychological effects upon the young people swept up in its malign faddishness. Most ominous of all about this trend is the manner in which school officials have arrogated to themselves the right to deceive parents who dissent from the whole stupid thing. In any sensible social order, the fact that educators are now deliberately soliciting this destructive behavior from students behind the backs of parents would instantly and automatically disqualify them from any further contact with children.
Much has been written and stated about this pernicious trend, most of which locates it within the broader movement to radically transform conceptions of human sexuality that has been unfolding since the middle of the twentieth century, at least. Regarded in this light, as one of the fruits of the so-called “sexual revolution,” it is very easy for Christian and conservative parents to reject transgenderism, just as they reject the broader movement of sexual transvaluation. But let me here invite the reader to consider this phenomenon under a different aspect, and to reflect candidly on whether or not it instantiates principles in currency far beyond the realm of progressive advocacy that most parents in the classical world are convinced they abhor.
Consider what happens when any specific incidence of transgenderism unfolds. A boy declares that he is really a girl, or a girl declares that she is really a boy, at which point some portion of the adults in that child’s life – whether parents, school officials, or medical professionals - rush to demonstrate their acquiescence to this declaration by referring to him or her by a new name, by arranging for therapeutic and surgical interventions, and so on. In other words, the first and most basic response of the adults to the child’s state of mind is to affirm it, and to assure the child that the self-conception (or, as we say now, the “identity”) they have constructed out of that state of mind is entirely good and true. This is the pattern discernible in almost all incidence of this trend.
Step back for a moment and consider that pattern from a different conceptual perspective. Prescind the issue of gender from the situation, and think about the behavior of the people involved at a more abstract level. A child declares that he believes x, or he thinks of himself as x, or simply that he wants x, at which point the adults uncritically accede to the child’s state of mind by affirming his convictions and working to satisfy the desires stemming from those convictions. This, as I said, is the underlying pattern at work in almost all incidence of transgenderism. Is it at work anywhere else in the child’s life? Can we recognize this dynamic underlying any other examples of adult interaction which that child is likely to experience?
Of course we can. It is at work everywhere in children’s lives nowadays. It is the same pattern that shows itself when a student complains that she really deserved an A in Chemistry class, and her mother instantly gets on the phone with the school demanding a meeting with administration to know why her daughter did not get that A. It is the same pattern at work when a player on the basketball team is miffed by his lack of playing time, and his father shows up after practice to berate the coach for it. We see the same pattern when a student declares her aversion to certain forms of assessment, so the guidance counselor shoots an email to her teacher requesting routine exemptions from those assessments. It is the pattern at work when student bodies complain about facets of the dress code, and administrators readily alter their code accordingly. It is the pattern we observe when a ten year old insists he needs a cell phone like all the other children, and his parents run out and purchase him the latest model. In short, the affirmative mode is the standard mode of child-rearing and education in America. The immediate and uncritical acquiescence to a child’s wishes is now the default response of millions of parents, educators, and public officials across the country, including millions who would otherwise regard themselves as inveterate foes of the progressive policies that result from this basic cultural tendency. Far from being an extreme or peripheral cultural phenomenon, the transgender movement is really just the highly predictable consequence of America’s most common habits of child-rearing.
To any normal person, the appropriate response of a conscientious adult when a young woman declares she is really a young man is, “no, you are not.” What is befuddling to those of us observing this trend is why so many adults find it impossible to offer that response. But the answer is rather obvious. It is because most adults have zero practice responding “no” to anything that children say these days. The appropriate response to most of the students complaining that they deserved an A is, “no, you did not.” The appropriate response to the ten-year old who demands to have a cell phone, is “no, you cannot.” Yet American adults on the whole find it impossible to offer these responses either. American adults have proven, on the whole, unwilling to check the desires of children on a whole range of issues. Why then would we expect them to summon that will when the issue at hand is gender confusion?
Anyone who has worked for a minimal stretch of time in America’s schools knows that the affirmative mode of instruction is the dominant operative mode of these institutions everywhere. The people running our schools believe that their highest priority is to safeguard the emotional and psychological placidity of their students, and to ensure that their self-regard never suffers even a momentary challenge, from which distress may be likely to result. Schools are structured now to affirm students’ own conception of themselves, no matter how far distant from reality that conception might lie. Anything resembling a real standard – by which an individual child is liable to be measured and found wanting – has been systematically eradicated from modern education. The working assumption whenever a student fails academically or behaviorally is that some external factor is the cause – say, dereliction on the part of his teacher or failure of administrators to be sufficiently sensitive to his unique circumstances. Improvement can then be predicated on changes occurring in the external environment, rather than in the one place that would actually make a difference – in the student’s character. Nothing is more distressing to young people than to find out that the causes of their lack of success lie in their own laziness and irresponsibility. So everything is done now to make sure students never have to confront such uncomfortable facts. Educators do everything they can now not to correct, not to reprimand, not to impart consequences for student behavior, because doing any of these things might seem to withhold some measure of affirmation from students, and to provide endless and unqualified affirmation is what the majority of American educators consider the sum of their duties in regards to children.
Not only do they think this, but they think that any adult who does not conceive of his duties in regards to children the same way lacks compassion or proper affection for the students – is, in short, a bad person. Again, anyone who has worked in one of our schools and pushed back on the prevailing zeitgeist has experienced this. If you as an educator believe that it is necessary for students to endure the consequences of their own actions as part of their formative development, if you think that they should regularly be challenged and corrected, regularly invited to engage in self-critique and self-improvement, then you will quickly make yourself a pariah among the larger portion of your colleagues who only want to preserve the self-esteem of the children entrusted to them. The affirmative mode of education is not simply the preferred mode of our schools; it is the required mode.
That is why it is important to state forthrightly that the affirmative mode of child-rearing and education is not merely misguided or insufficient, but malign and destructive. Adults who reflexively accede to children’s every belief and desire are doing incalculable harm to those same children. The transgender phenomenon demonstrates this beyond a shadow of a doubt: by affirming a child’s belief that they are really of another gender, the adults in that child’s life are condemning him or her to ongoing psychological torment, to the lasting effects of unproven medical regimens, and, in the worse cases, to the gruesome mutilation resulting from a variety of dystopian surgical interventions. Already, there are young people sharing horror stories about the mental and bodily anguish they have suffered, and continue to suffer, as a result of being lured into this trend; in the years to come, many more such stories are bound to materialize. All it would have taken was a simple “no” from one responsible adult in their lives to spare these children their suffering.
But in a much broader sense, the affirmative mode of child-rearing has absolutely devastated the souls of America’s children, rendering them far more miserable, far more wayward, far more incapable of navigating the ordinary challenges of adult life than any generation of human beings has ever been. All the markers of mental fragility among young people – depression, anxiety, a sense of loneliness and purposelessness – have risen in recent years, and it is impossible not to recognize the links between this increased fragility and the affirmative tenor of the upbringing to which the majority of this cohort have been subjected. Relentlessly assured that they were fine just as they were, young people are heading into the world and suddenly realizing that they have been lied to – that there is in fact a broad range of virtues and competencies required to confront even the most mundane of life’s challenges, which they have never developed because they were never pushed to develop them. Rather than preparing their charges for the trials inevitably lying ahead of them, the adults in their lives kept exacerbating their complacency; consequently, those trials, when they have come, have proven far more discomfiting and bewildering than they ought to have. Those who have self-righteously insisted on wrapping our young folk in layers of affirmative mendacity need to acknowledge the psychological and emotional wreckage so prevalent among these same young folk and understand that they are largely to blame for this state of affairs.
There is a balance to be struck between encouraging young people, and driving them towards improvement, and like everything else involved in child-rearing, it is a balance that is infinitely elusive. The education of young people is the most intricate of arts, the ends of which we always ever approximate, and never fully achieve. There are words by Chesterton which bear on this issue; he says somewhere, in speaking of our proper relationship to the world, that we ought to hate its evils enough to want to change them, yet love the world itself enough to think it worthy to be changed. Likewise, we might say of the proper disposition of a parent or an educator: we must love our children so much that we want them to grow into everything that they are capable of becoming, and so must commit ourselves to combating all their inherent folly and intemperance, which traits are liable to inhibit that growth. By conceiving of our duties in this manner we can avoid the great educational heresy of our times, which inheres in the belief that an adult’s love for a child can be measured by the extent to which she says things that the child wants to hear. Rather, we can see clearly that authentic love for the child means routinely challenging, correcting, and even punishing the child, so that his present shortcomings are never allowed to stymy his future maturation.
It is obvious that this conception of what adults owe to children was the prevalent view informing the educational practices of our forbears. With them, the primary thing was not to affirm the child, but to affirm the standard by which the child was to be formed. The way to encourage young people, they thought, was not to praise them, but to praise the ends held out in front of them for their attainment. Students would be motivated in their studies not by repeated assurances of their own competence, as we see instantiated in the widespread phenomenon of grade inflation, but by being repeatedly reminded of the intrinsic value and wonder of those studies. They would be driven towards growth in virtue not by constantly hearing how virtuous they were, but by constantly hearing how beautiful virtue itself is. They would have models set before their eyes of all sorts, as testimonial embodiments of the character that they were laboring to carve out of the raw materials of their own selves. In this manner, an awareness of their own deficiencies – their own basic incompleteness – would be steadily cultivated in children, yet in such a way that the drive to supply those deficiencies and continue striving towards completion was not stifled but rather strengthened within them.
This is why it was so common in the past for students to be habituated to regard their education as a probationary period, a sort of extended apprenticeship in the arts of citizenship. Through a host of daily rituals - encompassing dress, gesture, address, and other elements – students repeatedly imbibed the sense that they had not yet proven themselves according to the standards of the school or the society whose values it represented, and still had far to go in the process of maturation. At a thousand different junctures, in a thousand different ways, they were compelled to hear the message, “not good enough,” so that they could once more take up their unending pursuit of the good. That is because the adults in charge of their education really did desire the good of their students, and not its anodyne but ultimately corrupting facsimile. They understood that the development of a child bears a great resemblance to the molting of a crab, since with every passing season, a worn-out and encrusted version of his self is shed, and a new sturdier, more spacious version forms in its place. They recognized that the duty of a preceptor was not to placate a child’s momentary desires, but to constantly seek to transform and sublimate those desires towards higher ends. They could tell the difference between an accident and an essence, and knew perfectly well that a child’s character passes through a long succession of accidental flaws on the way towards approximating her essential completion, which is never fully realized but always remains an ideal for her to aspire to. They understood that the child’s worst enemy during this process is the adult who interposes in the midst of its unfolding and attempts to lock the child into any one of these stages of imperfection by calling it his “identity,” thereby rendering impossible all subsequent maturation and improvement, and condemning the young person to confront the harsh tides of life bearing only a soft, half-formed, and constricted personality to serve as his armor and his home.
There was great wisdom in that approach to child-rearing, which we have now all but squandered. In its place we have substituted a regimen of endless affirmation, and our children have suffered immeasurably for it. There is no denying it any more – in the prevalent angst, the ennui and anxiety of our young people, and now at last in their broken, desecrated bodies, the evils resulting from this approach are all too evident. So now we have a duty to turn back to that wisdom, absorb it into our dominant modes of education and child-rearing, and stand ready once again to offer our children at every turn the loving response of our “no.”