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February 20, 2006
“We don’t teach
values.” Sex educators fond of promoting condoms and birth control to
teenagers are also fond of making this claim. “We are
values-neutral!”
It’s never been
really clear to me just why they take such pride in these claims. It
seems to be a sideways admission that one has lived on the face of the
earth for nearly forty years and has been unable to come to any
conclusions about what really matters.
This prideful
admission that no values are important enough to single out for
passing on to our children was birthed in the 60s. Bored with
tradition, and encouraged by our relationship with science and the
brave new world of space flights and men on the moon,
America
launched into an artistic love affair with hopelessness.
I distinctly
remember crashing into this dark fantasy in 1969 as a freshman at
Arizona State University. A group of us freshmen on the sixth floor
of Manzanita dorm packed into a car one Friday night and headed for
the drive-in to see
Midnight
Cowboy.
From beginning
to end, watching the movie, I couldn’t understand why this film had
won the heart of
America.
While viewers found it elevating to see the naive male prostitute Joe
Buck and his sickly friend Ratso struggle to survive on the streets of
New York City, they had to overlook the fact that Joe Buck and Ratso
were lying, thieving thugs.
Their story
could have been more cheaply and honestly told by standing a camera in
the middle of the worst, dark New York crime infested streets and
filming the muggings, beatings and killings that hurt people and
landed perpetrators in jail.
In one case,
real-life criminals were given cells and prisoner numbers. Their
attitudes and behaviors were considered hostile to civilized society,
and they were expected to reform.
In the other
case, celluloid criminals wore fancy duds paid for by wardrobe, showed
up in Hollywood limos for a red-carpet walk down the aisle between the
rich and famous, and walked away with an Oscar.
Our love affair
with the crass and dark and hopeless and brutal and profane is also a
love affair with failure. We are failing to stake a claim on what our
responsibility is for raising the next generation of Americans…our
children.
The latest
episode of focusing on failure is taking place at Orono High School in
Maine. Out of the hundreds of thousands of books available for
educating freshman, the English department settled on “Girl,
Interrupted.” The school is defending their choice as “real.” These
memoirs of author Suzanna Kaysen’s hospitalization in a mental
institution at age 18 contain graphic descriptions of sexual acts and
suicide.
Is this the best
picture of the “real” we can offer our children in a literature
class?
Then, after
freshman English, do we send our children to sex education for a
lesson on how to put on a “real” condom because we tell them “real”
children in the “real world” are going to have sex anyway.
And, finally,
when parents come to school to demand answers and a change in the
message of what “real” is and should be, do we tell them they are
pushing their values on a school system where values should never
exist?
Values? Is
there anything we do or say or think in our entire life that doesn’t
involve making a value choice? Values-neutral? Who are they
kidding?
If love makes
the world go round, when are we going to elect this value as worth
consideration in our movies, our songs, our English classes…and, most
importantly…our sex education classes?
If you live in
Orono,
Maine, or
in any other city where you care about the values we are teaching our
young people, there is a great book to recommend to your high school
English teachers. The Art of Loving Well is a new and novel
idea for many educators. It is a book that knows the values that
matter and takes the time to make them matter to young people.
This 340-page
anthology of ethnically diverse selections, includes short stories,
poems, essays, drama folk tales and myths that elevate the values that
matter most for the happiness and future of our young people.
Values-neutral?
Impossible! The Art of Loving Well lays claim to its
responsibility for passing on worthwhile values to our children,
helping adolescents learn responsible sexual and social values through
good literature which reveals the complexity of life and love
relationships.
English
teachers…teachers of all kinds…are always teaching values. “Reality”
is a poor excuse for defending the kinds of books and movies we offer
our children. We offer it because it is real?
Love is real.
And if we want our children to be successful in love, then it’s about
time we started teaching the values that matter most…the art of loving
well.
October 10, 2005
Wonder Love
February 21, 2005
Sex Without
Value
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for more past editorials.
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