It's The Family, Stupid

Back from Chicago tanned, rested, and ready (well, none of the three actually), I direct the fearless reader to two stories from Rod Dreher.  Last week Dreher commented on a story of third graders who plotted the death of their teacher.  While reports differ as to how serious the kids were, this seems to have gone beyond juvenile "I hate teacher" games.  Dreher opines:

One must be careful drawing conclusions about The Meaning Of It All without more information, but it's not hard to figure out where kids get these ideas. Violence and permissiveness is everywhere in our popular culture -- and many parents are too lazy and/or stupid to do their jobs. I've said before how undone I would routinely get as a film critic, when I would leave screenings of intensely, graphically violent films, and see parents exiting the theater with very small children in tow. (snip)

The culture is so degraded, and so all-enveloping, that it's easier to minimize the threat -- especially if you don't have the resources, financial or otherwise, to get your kid out of a school that has a destructive peer culture. Remember Caitlin Flanagan's line? "The 'it takes a village' philosophy is a joke, because the village is now so polluted and so desolate of commonly held, child-appropriate moral values that my job as a mother is not to rely on the village but to protect my children from it."

This brings to mind a conversation I had with an acquaintance a couple years ago.  This fellow has five kids and he expressed his frustration over raising these kids in a culture that undermines his values at every turn.  As he put it, he can control his own house, but he can't control all the other houses in the neighborhood or those of his kids' friends.  We live in a culture which bombards children with all sorts of violent, sexual, and generally vulgar messages.  This is a kid hostile environment. As David Tubbs argues in this book, contemporary liberalism, with its emphasis maximizing the liberty of the  autonomous individual absent the consequences of such an effort has created a culture antagonistic to childhood and children. 

Dreher comments on a second story pointing out, again, that family structure is more correlated with persistent poverty than any other variable including, remarkably, income.  In other words, a child from a poor but intact family is low risk for continuing in poverty. Nothing explains persistent poverty like family breakdown.  Thus the only way to break that chain of poverty is to combat the still sky-high illegitimacy rate among the poor generally and blacks and Hispanics specifically.  As Kay Hymowitz argues, the really caste structure is not built on economics but on marriage, which then is represented in economic success.

For the umpteenth time, spending on education means little when compared to other variables.  While we in this state should increase our spending on education, let us not be fooled that increase in teacher pay can make up for two parents who care.