"I want to notice the way in which each of the movements he seemed to involve a religious reaction against a certain 1960s-style form of the counterculture.
"The Protestant case in the United States is especially instructive here. Whereas self-styled “fundamentalists” in 1920 identified themselves as opposed to Darwinian science and Liberal Protestant theology, in the 1970s their target had shifted decisively: feminism, sexual liberation, and secular politics were the new theological and cultural targets du jour. John Paul II’s resolve in undoing a great deal of the Second Vatican Council’s “new openness to the modern world” (another product of the mid-1960s) may be read in similar terms, as may Khomeini’s reaction against many Iranian clerics’ proximity to, and collusion with, the secular reforms of Western-leaning and Western-style political leaders. . ."
--“Religion at Decade’s End” by Louis A. Ruprecht in the “Religion Dispatches” online aggregator.
“The study, “Assessing the Long-Term Effects of Youth Service: The Puzzling Case of Teach for America,” is the first of its kind to explore what happens to participants after they leave the program. It was done at the suggestion of Wendy Kopp, Teach for America’s founder and president, who disagrees with the findings. Ms. Kopp had read an earlier study by Professor McAdam that found that participants in Freedom Summer — the 10 weeks in 1964 when civil rights advocates, many of them college students, went to Mississippi to register black voters — had become more politically active."
NYTimes 1/4/10
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Tim points out that these schemes for Youth Service teachers, like the system of using adjunct faculty, is really just a source of cheap and obedient labor for school administrators. My on-going dialogue with Tim Barrus pivots around our treatment of young people -- not just children -- in schools, law enforcement, families, and at large. We also share a yearning for the watershed counterculture movement of the Sixties and Seventies, which immediately evoked an unequal and opposite opposition from the established cultures. WWII is the earliest point in the sequence that I can remember, demanding the utmost effort, creating mortal drama, and leaving everyone exhausted. Some felt it was a hell that should be avoided at any cost and others rather longed for all that drama, esp. those who (like Cheney or Reagan) weren’t really involved.
The advantage of my ten years as a teacher on the Blackfeet Reservation was that it was essentially in the 19th century, so my eleven year age difference with Tim is lessened. We both entered the Age of Aquarius with naive eyes and a joyful welcoming of a potentially less confining and judgmental world. We have resented and resisted being forced back into the box. I’ve seemed to have been going along with the conventional, but only enough to keep from being stamped out, which takes a little more energy all the time.
The suggestion by Ruprecht is that we’re all going to be forced to give up some of this culture war in the face of global weather change. I accept this, but my question in this little 1,000 word blog post is what sorts of organizations will protect youngsters while allowing them to keep growing. Church and school badly need transformation.
Both institutions, for roughly the same reasons, have become petrified and self-eating for the ironic reason that they are trying to preserve themselves without having to change, which is impossible. The result is that most of the effective changes are coming from outside the systems in order to escape the corporate cement over all the best fertile soil. The new element that might allow the counter-culture to flourish this time is indubitably the Internet, a young people’s tool. We’re in the interstices and they are us, insuppressible.
The cultural break this time is music based, though more roots than rock n'roll. What could be more poetic? Joining math with emotion, it travels virally around the planet. Not only do we watch movies, we create our avatars (well, the youngsters do) and move into them.
Schools are both too boring and too ineffective. Faculties have become catch-basins for the local common-denominator culture, cash-cows for the enterprising principals and superintendents, and political machines for power mongers. They are beginning to age out.
Youth is criminalized. As Tim points out, running away from family will get you a jail term, even though “family” is hardly the right term for a poverty-stricken, drug-riddled, abusive household where people might or might not be genetically related. Men with second-hand families are not so likely to value their “possessions” which is still how many laws define children and wives. On the other hand, for women, freedom is just another word for “abandonment” and “the right to work” has meant a new slavery.
Okay. Enough negatives. Let’s envision something different.
I’ve always liked the old counter-culture idea of communes, which goes way back into history to the original bands of hunter-gatherers. Survivors since the Sixties have quietly existed for half a century, doing their thing. They are affinity groups who welcomed all the technology of organizational development that corporations pretend to adopt but then stamp out, including churches and schools. Any organization that values its own continued existence over the welfare of the individual human members has taken its metaphor of being a “body” far too seriously and has become a monster.
Now self-education is possible in a way never existent before, though books have helped. I’m thinking of Salman Kahn, whose gift for simple explanations was so helpful to his niece that it proved contagious and developed into a website http://www.khanacademy.org/ Even I can understand his explanations, which now include such arcane topics as the economy. I think it IS relevant that he’s not the usual Euro white male but rather from the region that invented math in the first place.
Education in schools, esp. higher education, has always been as much about horizontal peer exchange of information and worldviews as about mastery of a canon of some kind. The vertical dimension of professor/student=lecture has been weakening even as the “silo” forces of assigned disciplines have been dissolving. Now we can collaborate or witness others collaborating and investigate relevant information that was previously sequestered as someone else’s property. My own thinking about religion ranges from fMRI research through Blackfeet ceremonies through novels and geology, without excluding traditional religious studies in a university.
My high school class of 1957 chose the motto: “Now we have the timber; let us build.” It sounded kinda, well, “wooden,” at the time. But maybe there was something to it.
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