Sex and community

Rod,

You and Julie speak approvingly of the bubble Julie she was raised in. Let me in good faith accept her description as accurate and your approval as well-founded.

However, as writers and artists have pointed out for centuries (if not millennia), there are many examples of bubbles which are founded on good principles but flawed in their execution, i.e., idealized communities which, when examined more closely, turn out to be marred by any combination of hypocrisy, greed, flat-out hucksterism, pedophilia, adultery, etc.

So what you're saying is that you approve of honest, sincere, well-executed virtuous communities. (In your particular case, of course, one immediately thinks of the Catholic priest pedophilia scandal and your subsequent conversion to O.C., which in addition to its active virtues you hope will possess the passive virtue of simply being marred to a lesser degree by the flaws of the R.C. church.)

I'm not sure what point I'm making -- certainly I'm not saying you're flat-out wrong. Perhaps it's just that, when one hears anything as complex as what you're talking about being extolled, one's knowledge of the real world throughout history seems to necessitate some sort of sad aside about how possible it is that any given ostensibly virtuous bubble will in fact prove to be terribly flawed. (And, FWIW, far, far worse than an average public school upbringing in a non-intentional community.)

I can summarize what I learned about sex in two statements:

1) Never mistake lust for love.

2) Never expect sex to replace friendship.

The best relationships I've had were a direct result of finally learning those lessons subsequent to the mistakes I made by not effectively learning those to lessons on the first (second, third...) try.

The hardest thing I learned, the thing that made me stand in awe of my mother when I finally learned it, was the ability to step away and let my children learn by making mistakes.

I don't have kids (yet), but I've thought about the kind of sex education they might recieve from my wife and me, as well as from whatever school they attend.

I attended a Catholic high school. Sex education was part of the curriculum. What I remember is a course that focused on biology, not morality. Now, the school may have assumed that morality would be taught at home. At the time, of course, I didn't give it much thought.

My thinking had led me to believe that a good, school-based sex education curriculum would include aspects of both. I support teaching abstienence, but as part of a broader education.

It is bubbles, after all, that lead to Muslim women wearing hajibs and the niqab, of Amish women facing rampant sexual abuse and incest, and to fundamentalist Mormon women ending up in polygamous marriages. The bubble can be a source of protection and a source of oppression. It both protects the child from the outside, but also prevents the child from obtaining the freedom of the outside.

Ossicle, your latest post to Nate: very well said.

Nate, I ask the following not to criticize your upbringing, but to help set expectations and avoid assumptions.

Set up: I've observed both outcomes from "bubble" communities: a vast majority of well-adjusted kids-to-adults; a significant number (about the same as your average "non-bubble" community) of problems like teen pregnancy, alcoholism, etc.

Query: in your view, assuming (hoping, actually) that you've seen both sorts as well, what is/are the significant differences that would or might explain the success in one and the (relative) failure in the other?

I don't mean this to put you on the spot, either. There is no right answer, just information.

Don,

I was following Rod's use of the word bubble in his original post, so you can draw from his use of it and mine what you will. I haven't defined it rigorously and won't attempt to do so now, as I'm comfortable with the contextual meanings it's had so far. (As for being overly technical, I'd say you haven't even gotten started, so no apology is necessary -- feel free to take a crack!) I'd agree with you that "[h]aving a culture apart from sheer hedonism does not automatically make something a bubble," but that's an uncontroversial claim.

Don, based solely on my own experience of course, I will gladly confirm that your imagination is firmly based in reality.

I can further assert, again personally, that abdication of responsibility for the "brokering" by a large segment of parents is a very large contributor to the decline of public schools as both a learning and social environment. No one told teachers that they should be primarily responsible for socialization, nor do I know of a teacher who would accept such responsibility outside of his/her immediate community, and then only as a member of that community who just happens to be a teacher. This would be why I get my dander up when the game of blaming the teachers happens in my presence.

I should probably just keep my mouth shut, but I just have to mention how obnoxious and annoying it is that everytime someone says anything, no matter how self-obvious, someone else feels the need to jump in and point out the obvious as if it were a legit critisism no one would ever think of one their own. Like Rod's about to go, "what? you mean that communities which re-enforce common values can become corrupted and even oppressive?!? What? You mean this isn't a guarenteed spot-on formula for sucess 100% of the time and in all circumstances? Someone get me my smelling salts! My paradigm is being messed with - it's all going dark! Next thing you know you'll be telling me that not every public school sponsors after school group sex, please stop - you're killing me here!"

Why not have some itsy-bitsy amount of respect for people and start from the assumption that they aren't complete and total idiots?

Here's the deal - if someone expresses something positive about something, particularly something which harkens back to the past, it can be fairly assumed that they are well aware of potential pitfalls and are probably actively trying to avoid them. Heck, just yesterday Rod talked about reading a book by a guy whose parents set up the sort of self-contained Christian community he's interested in and it didn't turn out well. Yet today he thinks that bubbles are the answer to everything and can never go wrong and is in need of someone much more enlightened to point this out?

I'm not actually trying to pick on anyone in particular here as it goes on ALL the time. This is just an example. So, for the record conservatives are aware that:
religion can go bad
marriage can go bad
protecting your kids can backfire
the fifties weren't nirvana
the earth isn't flat (I wish I could add that it wasn't made in 7 days, but much to my embarrassment, too many fellow conservatives would make a liar out of me!)
The difference I see between conservatives and liberals on these issues is that conservatives see problems as pitfalls to be avoided and worked around whereas liberals seem to think that pointing out dirty bath water requires dumping the water, the kid, the soap, the tub, the plumbing and probably moving off to a safe distance from which to warn people: bathwater can get dirty, you know. Gee thanks. What would we do without ya'll?

OK, now that I'm done with my rant, perhaps I can add something useful to the discussion. I am a homeschooler and I have often talked of what my family is doing as creating a bubble. However, it's a clear bubble. which to me means that we control in large part what gets in, but we are also capable of seeing and pointing out what goes on around us. I don't want to just shut everything out; I want to equip my children to be able to manuver in the wider world without falling prey to it. In practice this means that I not only share my values are with my kids, I explain why I believe what I believe, I explain that many people think differently about the situation and do my darndest to give a fair and accurate account of the thinking behind those who disagree with me, why I think they are wrong and why they think I'm wrong. At the end I make sure to tell my kids, "what I'm saying may make sense to you now, but one day you're going to have to decide for yourself what you think. In contrast I have a good friend who is extremely liberal who is proud of the fact that she's passing on her values by telling her kids what they are and explaining that those who think differently are hateful/bigoted/bad people. She thinks she telling him the Truth. I think she's raising Republicans.
As for the wider world. It's a crap shoot. There are good spots and a lot of bad spots. One year you'll have a great teacher/school/peer group for your kid and the next everything could be different and your kid could fall apart. Some people expect that the better part will be more prevelent and the worse parts won't matter so much. Other people like myself just don't want to bother messing with the whole dang thing anyway. Perhaps your kid will do better than mine. I don't know. All I know is that it's my responsibility to do the best I can figure out how and that's what I'm doing. If you do it differently, well, that's on you. Maybe you're smarter than me, who knows? Maybe I'm smarter than you. Maybe it's not a damn competition at all and we're all just muddling through the best we can and should cut each other some slack. Heck, maybe it would even be nice to share my thoughts and experiences without being treated like a brainless ninny. Maybe I should go take a nap ;]

"unwittingly making excuses for their own disinclination to take more responsibility for the environment in which they're raising their children"

But those of who have chosen not to homeschool or send our kids to private schools ARE taking responsibility for the environment our kids are in. We are engaged in the culture--not cowering in the corner afraid to look out the window--and we are trying to create change that helps our families and our communities. I want my kids to know children of different races, of different economic groups, of different faiths, with different values.

It's hard work being engaged in the community and helping shape an environment that not only works for the people under my roof, but also under the roofs of the rest of the community.

Your sanctimony and "homeschoolers are better parents because we work harder" attitude is what many find so infuriating. Arguably, life would be easy if all I had to do was worry about what was happening under my roof. But my responsibility--and a responsibility my children learn--is that we can't just worry about the people under our roof and the people who look like us, pray like us, and act like us.

daniel, you're accusation of sanctimony is complete fiction. Rod was pointing out that those who say, "well you can't protect your kids from everything" are usually issuing themselves a blank check not to do even the minimum to sheild their kids from things they are not equipped to deal with, not saying that anyone who send their kids to public school is a crappy parent.

Your characterization of homeschoolers cowering in the corner is even less connected to reality. When my oldest was in public school, he spent his day with 24 white kids from middle to upper middle class, mostly intact, Christian families who had all been born within 18 months of eachother being lead by a middle aged white christian woman. Now that we homeschool, are a multiracial homeschooling family, involved in local homeschool groups which include immigrants, people of south American, african and asian descent, kids whith serious physical and developmental disabilities, liberal christians, fundamentalist christians, LDS, atheists and agnostics, jews and a muslim family. They know homeschool kids who are being raised by single moms, people on government assistance and trust fund babies. We attend an inner city church that's about 65% minority and has a wide range of income, political views and ages. We spend our days in the community with people who are of all ages, races, creeds, abilities, income levels and perspectives.

If I had kept my kids in the local public school, then perhaps I could be accused of cowering in a corner, afraid to send my kids into the real world and leaving them ill-equipped to interact with people who are different themselves. But that characterization of what we (and most of the other HS'ers I know) are doing is laughable on its face.

Does homeschooling make me a better parent? Maybe, maybe not. It all depends. Does it make me sanctimonious and scared? Only if you've completely taken leave of reality.

Let me start by repeating what I said when I started my post: I'm not accusing anyone here of holding these views. I always get the feeling, Daniel, that you put the worst possible spin on what I and other opponents of yours here say, so you can blunderbuss about what a pack of nogoodniks we all are. There was no reason for you to have assumed that I was talking about you, or public schools: I was talking about parents who use the idea that "you can't shelter kids from everything" to justify not making the effort to shelter them from anything. But you never do miss a chance to take a crack, do you? I don't understand why you hang around this blog. There are liberals who come here to engage with conservatives, but I am hard-pressed to think of a single time in which you did anything but lecture conservatives on what bad people we are.

Which is fine, I guess, but bizarre.

Anyway:

But those of who have chosen not to homeschool or send our kids to private schools ARE taking responsibility for the environment our kids are in. We are engaged in the culture--not cowering in the corner afraid to look out the window--and we are trying to create change that helps our families and our communities. I want my kids to know children of different races, of different economic groups, of different faiths, with different values.

Pure self-congratulatory cant. Because, you know, homeschoolers are all hiding under the bed, and want to keep their children from knowing diverse people. I hear that they are also poor, uneducated and easy to command.

Your sanctimony and "homeschoolers are better parents because we work harder" attitude is what many find so infuriating.

Stop right there. I'm not a homeschooler, for one thing, and for another, who the heck is making that argument? It's another of your straw men. I wish you would actually engage what's being proposed or argued here.

Arguably, life would be easy if all I had to do was worry about what was happening under my roof. But my responsibility--and a responsibility my children learn--is that we can't just worry about the people under our roof and the people who look like us, pray like us, and act like us.

Which has little or nothing to do with the point being discussed about moral community and raising children. You avoid the complex questions around the moral communities in which we raise our children by asserting that anybody who cares about that sort of thing is therefore a selfish fraidy cat.

Listen, I've got a dear friend who works in a public school, and who lives in a place where private school isn't an option, and he and his spouse are really worried about the peer groups in their adolescent kid's school -- the same one in which he teaches. He's been in that school for years, and knows what's going on there, and it really worries him that his daughter is going to have to get through that school with its reining peer cultures that normalize teen sex, drinking and drug use. I suppose my pal and his working wife are backwards bigots in your eyes.

I've got another friend who is a public school teacher and a recent father. He's having to deal philosophically and professionally with the fact that he never wants his daughter to darken the door of a public school in his city, given how out of control the peer cultures are with regard to sex and substance abuse.

He's a secular liberal. I wonder what kind of slur you would pin on him, Daniel, to avoid having to confront what he and his wife are dealing with?

Franklin, the only difference I see is that your community was nearly everyone's community at the time; Rebecca and others are trying to reestablish pockets (bubbles?) of that community at a time when it has been rejected by the dominant culture.

There was a time when the community's values were fairly stable. This was not always a good thing, as negative values like racism tended to remain stable as well as positive values like the importance of family and the unacceptability of certain public and private behaviors that were seen as deleterious and potentially destructive to the community at large. (I once had a fascinating conversation with four single mothers about whether or not the removal of the word and concept "slut" from the wider community vocabulary was, in the end, a good or a bad thing. I was surprised at what some of their insights were.)

The problem today is that we don't choose between a bubble and normalcy; we choose between a bubble and participation in the escalating downward spiral of antinomian materialistic hedonism that surrounds us.

If Rebeccat and Erin Manning ever teamed up and started a blog, it'd be a massive hit. IJS.

Rebecca,

This is all the more reason that we need Stalinist law professors, having grown wear of their current intellectual hobby, to divert their attention into telling you how to run your life:

"Teach Your Children Well, or Else!"
http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2007/06/teach_your_chil.html

"I will not, however, vote for one penny to wage any sort or level of battle with people who choose to reject science and rational thinking for the sake of indoctrinating their children in the religion of their choice."

Franklin, my sense from reading the author's abstract was that she spoke in fairly broad generalities. I don't have much experience with homeschoolers who believe in creationism, but suppressing forms of "rampant sexism" seems so overly broad to include sending the boys to shop class and the girls to home economics class. My biggest fear is that it would encompass further encroachments into regulation of matter that the powers that be would out of the mainstream or "undemocratic" (which has been frequently used by opponents of homeschooling's existence).

To be clear, I did not post to the link b/c I agree with everything every homeschooling family does; rather, my intention was to focus on the effects of placing the family at the service and submission of the state.

Don,

Your clarification is well taken. I did not intend to be as broad as the article; I should have been more clearly focused on the subset of homeschoolers whose intention is like our friend Donny's, to create walls around their children against a perceived threat from the liberal atheist scientist anti-Christians.

The ills of public schools are not just perceived. My wife has been a public school teacher for 35 years, except for a brief hiatus all of it in an urban center (Philadelphia). That, and years of listening to the individually anecdotal evidence of hundreds of teachers from diverse environments makes it rather easy to track the decline of public schools (and to see parallel declines in parochial schools) in general.

It's important to focus on the things from which we want to spare our children, not as evils to be avoided, but aspects of life that they will face at some point. Will they be prepared to face them effectively, or will they be surprised and further injured? Some of them, as bad as they seem from an adult perspective's view of the child, really are best learned by doing. Others are to be avoided if at all possible, but the parents really do need to realize that they will not be around 24/7 throughout their children's lives. Knowledge is power; we really do want our children to be powerful, in a manner of speaking.

Anyway, my longwinded clarification is this: the states are not reacting to the Rebeccas of their citizens; they are reacting to the Donnys who think that building walls around children's minds will prevent them from being corrupted by their personal definition of the evils of the world, definitions which are easily debunked for anyone except those whose minds are also closed and walled.

It may surprise some readers to know that those of us who want the state (and the rest of you) out of the homosexuals' bedrooms also want the state out of the lives and intentions of parents. We already have laws defining and punishing child neglect and abuse. They are clear and precise. It is not exaggerating to liken a state's invasion of the homeschooler's home to their invasion of the bedroom. Certainly, any sane person would like to head off injury to a child; our legal climate and protocols are very clear on that, however. We are not authorized to intervene because we think a crime is about to happen. It's the same realization as those parents, we cannot be there 24/7 to monitor all parents (or even just the homeschooling ones) just because some of them might be preparing their children to be injured at some ill-defined future date or situation.

So, while I impolitely make fun of Donny, I really do seriously support his right to do as he says he will do. In my private thoughts I exhort his God to have mercy on him and his family, but that is as far as any intervention is to go, and I will not hesitate to stand at his shoulder to fight against anything more... or, as I originally put it, to vote against any money to pay for any effort by the state to intervene in his life.

One more thing--I think we probably are coming to the same conclusion in different, albeit significant ways.

My means has to do with less of a libertarian view of the world. I think, rather, that as a natural institution, the family has certain inherernt rights which cannot be subordinated to the state. You could probably poke holes in the argument, but I shudder to think of the implications were it merely an institution organized around utilitarian objectives.

Though this is not the time and place to discuss this subject, that is probably why we go separate ways on some of the homosexual issues.

I actually rather like the idea of home-schooling, what with the public schools being run by paranoid lunatics and social experimenters on one side and the private schools being run by religions that I would never want my child to embrace on the other. Fortunately I don't have children so I don't have to make that choice!

But I do have a step-granddaughter and as she is now in adolescence, I know that the hormones are going to start flowing if they aren't already and keeping her in a bubble is not likely to work, if only because the time will come when she will leave the bubble and follow the call of nature, as it were. This is simple reality. And in the final analysis the type of life she will live will be her decision and no one else's. Oh, she may be influenced in any number of ways, but she will be the one doing the living.

Fortunately for her future she seems to have more brains in her little finger than both of her parents possess in their overfed bodies and I can only hope that when the time comes she uses them.