Bookstores make me sad. No not sad, melancholy? Or it might just be that I do all my deepest thinking at them. Maybe pensive is a better word.
But what do you care about semantics? You get a new blog post out of it. All three of you who would read this blog on a regular basis if I ever actually posted on one. I'm sure you're much more interested in why I feel the way I do than the exact feeling itself. Which is a much more difficult question. Thus the new post.
And so now you all get subjected to my stream of consciousness meandering until I figure it out. (Based on the previous sentence I'm back to learning toward melancholy.)
I think it has a lot to do with reading to Happy Feet last night. My oldest nanny kid earned the name a while ago because she has a hard time keeping any part of her body still for long. Anywho, she's been dying to have me read that Chris Colfer book, Land of Stories since it came out. And after months of me getting nowhere on my own, her mom suggested I read it to her since I'm reading a different book with her younger sister, Slytherin.
I'm liking it well enough so far (we're only a chapter in) but the way the teacher, whom one of the protagonists adores, talks about fairytales broke my heart. She basically makes them seem like moral tales that time forgot and now we live in this world where all forms of entertainment media are shallow and meaningless because we live in a fluffy, valueless culture without the dark life lessons we would have otherwise been taught.
I'm paraphrasing a bit, but it seemed surprisingly harsh. Especially coming from an author whose career is thriving partially because he plays an over the top character on a purposefully over the top show. Now for all I know he turns it around in the next chapter anyway and by the end of the book we've all learned why we have that kind of story in our narrative, but it's stayed with me, and the more I think about it the less I like it.
And maybe that's why, as I walked past signs above some of my favorite stories that say 'Just for Kids' and a children's section full of abridged classics (because heaven forbid they read a word they don't know yet) I start to feel a little blue.
Next week, Happy Feet will start middle school where she will be taking extra math classes instead of learning French because she's not up to whatever standard they've marked as average. And so the wheel turns on. And so we put kids who excel in the arts, or English, or social science, or team building in more math and science because they're 'behind'.
Because seven years isn't going to be enough time for HF to learn to balance a check book and prepare her taxes, and stay out of ridiculous amounts of credit card debt. Not that they'll teach her that anyway.
Because math and science can be graded and valued in a sense that never should have become traditional, and art and English and social science can't.
Because, like so many parts of our society, we've placed a child's value not on who they are or how they're growing, but on how many tasks they can complete.
We've accepted a culture that assumes we are defined by what we do and how perfectly we can do it.
So we yell at our kids' little league games, list every mistake they made in a performance afterward, and expect perfection at every practice and rehearsal. We push them to be better at their instrument/sport/studying/faith and reward them only when they meet our expectations. We turn everything they do into a competition. We assume they know we're proud so we don't bother saying it unless they win.
We wish our car/job/house/life was as good as someone else's. And we only worship God with perfect music, perfect words, perfect happiness, perfect faith. Because how could the Creator of everything accept anything less.
Somewhere in the last 5000 to 125 billion years (depending on who you talk to) we forgot that the Great Parent took their time when they created us. They didn't try to impress anyone. There was no standard to meet or quota to fill. They just created for the joy of what they were creating. And as messy and confusing as we've made the world since, they still revel in the joy of what they made.
So what if, instead of focusing on deadlines and standards and making children into functional adults, we let them become the people they were created to be? What if we took the time to let kids learn everything they needed, not just what we've decided is important? What if we found a space to enter into that didn't place value on subjects, or sports, or the arts, but let them all be equally valuable to the education of our kids?
