Conservatives AWOL on parental responsibilities
Clamoring for rights but a giving parents a pass on vastly more educationally important obligations
A feature topic in the so-called “culture war” between conservatives and liberals is “parental rights” over the education of their children affirmed by the United States Supreme Court in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925). (The culture war is phony because both sides ignore individual “justice” as the end of civil society and the subservience of hormonal instincts to cerebral reflection as the distinction between man and animal).
What is conspicuously missing from the culture war is the paramountcy of parental educational responsibilities. If you’re old enough to engage in sex and cause pregnancy, you’re old enough to be saddled with parenthood responsibilities. If you don’t want the latter, then renounce the former. Your choice. Don’t whine like the parricide pleading sympathy for his orphanage.
Parental educational responsibility number 1 is teaching your children to read and write at an early age and reading and discussing with them serious books daily. John Stuart Mill described his reading accomplishments under the tutelage of his father between ages 3-7 in Chapter 1 of his Autobiography:
…Aesop's Fables, the first Greek book which I read. The Anabasis, which I remember better, was the second. I learnt no Latin until my eighth year. At that time I had read, under my father's tuition, a number of Greek prose authors, among whom I remember the whole of Herodotus, and of Xenophon's Cyropaedia and Memorials of Socrates; some of the lives of the philosophers by Diogenes Laertius; part of Lucian, and Isocrates' ad Demonicum and ad Nicoclem. I also read, in 1813, the first six dialogues (in the common arrangement) of Plato….
In addition to John Stuart Mill’s list, parents should read to children Edith Hamilton’s Greek Mythology, Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Homer’s The Iliad, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and One Thousand and One Nights. Genius is within the reach of all. As Thomas Edison instructed, it is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.
Equally if not more important is the parental imperative of teaching children writing skills—the art of communicating with the brightness and voltage of lightening. Daily a parent is responsible for a child’s composing one or two critical paragraphs about the headline news. Every noun, verb, adjective, and adverb in the composition should be reviewed to discuss the possibility of superior synonyms. To the extent a word or phrase evokes an image in the reader’s mind, to that extent it graduates from the soporific to the electrifying. It is possible to make time for any urgent responsibility. Mothers are able to summon superhuman strength to lift heavy cars to save their children.
Responsibilities are toothless without sanctions. Child neglect laws should be amended to include parental failure to teach their children to read and write with proficiency beginning no later than age 4.
The knowledge that you will be saddled with strict parental educational responsibilities and sanctions if you engage in sex that eventuates in childbirth should concentrate your mind wonderfully. The touchstone of civilization is the imperative of parental responsibility for personally educating their offspring. Nothing is more important.
Good reading list but you forget the most important element of successful parenting: LOVE.