Posted by
ilona on Monday, December 18, 2006 3:28:58 PM
If what what sociologist Brigitte Berger calls the “family’s great educational
mission.” Education is the daily drip, drip, drip of details that
engender in young children the aspirations and the tools to make a
better life for themselves in their pursuit of happiness" - as articulated by
Suzanne Fields is true, then we need a more cohesive agenda to improve our priorities in our nation.
We tend to look at life in little bits and pieces instead of a conceptual whole, and in doing so we miss the small opportunities to instill the important details we so obsess about. There are immediate needs, yes, but concentrating on the call of the urgent sometimes is a self-perpetuating cycle of urgency. Strengthening the state of marriage, giving full support to alternatives like homeschooling, these are building blocks that while seeming to be just part of society, actually serves to vitalize the whole of society. Whatever helps the family unit to be better able to provide those drips of social material to the children they are raising is elevating the calibre of our society in its entirety.
The way this works is like this:
The institution of marriage, kept to its traditional role of insuring a stable home for children, allows for more fruitful time spent in cultivating the Civitas in the larger community. It is the basic building block of the society in the formation of the coming generation of leaders and citizens. Marriages which are helped to stay intact through many types of social support will not suffer as many disruptions in the very important job of passing on not only the instruction in social contract, but emotional intelligence needed to help society function properly. If the teens who perpetrated Columbine had a home where the prestige of the parents pivoted more upon how involved they were as a family rather than how much they accomplished as individuals ( or other like interests), and if the schools those boys attended had nurtured more sense of community and allowed for less competitive bullying, along with an open atmosphere in all parts of the community to build more of the spiritual currency of that which stirs the best in people.... how different history may have been?
If we truly believe that we can determine outcomes in society, then it is our business to look at what tools actually create greater happiness, generally, for humankind. I don't think family life of a dependable and stable type can be eliminated from the list. Yet, many of our social agendas encourage just that. Parents are discouraged from being involved in any meaningful way in their children's education...relegated to cheerleaders and troubleshooters for teachers who themeselves, are not held to any consistant form of standard. Welfare as disincentive to apply real effort in becoming productive. Penalizing the religious efforts in a community, while inflating the already ineffective and bungling goverment agencies in meeting the needs in both crisis and chronic situations. Instead of family helping family...it is the great impersonal Big Brother who is expected to come through. The trouble with such types of "Big Brothers" is that they are robotic institutional entities, and unable to perform something they are not properly programmed for.... but the ones who could best help, not only in the immediate material need but by example of a society's citizens, are left scattered and undermined.
And they still work better than government allocated agencies, for all that.
Because against all odds the family is meant to work. And it is surviving , no thanks to social engineers who have stripped it of its official relevance, hobbled it with burdensome laws and interfering agencies, taxed it to crippling proportions and denied it many of its best opportunities to shine.
The family isn't perfect, not in abstract or in individual reality, but it is vitally important that it be as good as it can be. And that is where we ought to put much of our social and legislative effort: strengthen and support the institution of the family unit.