The Problem With Teaching Children Values
Sometimes they actually believe them
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There is a paragraph I read in a second-grade textbook that I have never forgotten.
It was on the right-hand side of the page, about three-quarters of the way down. I couldn’t tell you what the rest of the chapter was about, but I remember that paragraph.
You’ve probably seen some version of the same information. The numbers vary depending on the source and the year, but the basic idea is unchanged: Americans consume far more than our share of the world’s resources. We use more energy and generate more waste.
I was probably 7 years old, and a big sense of injustice cropped up in my little second-grade heart.
How could we keep doing this? Wasn’t anybody else concerned that we were taking up more than our fair share?
Apparently not.
The rest of the class read the paragraph and moved on. I couldn’t.
From that day forward, I became one of those people who worried about things. Environmentalism. Recycling. Climate change. The consequences of our actions.
I didn’t know anything about politics and wasn’t trying to make a political statement.
I just thought we were supposed to care.
The Day Sunday School Accidentally Radicalized Me
That wasn’t the first time my conservative community accidentally nudged me in a more liberal direction.
At church, we sang Jesus Loves the Little Children.
You know the one.
Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight.
I took that lesson seriously.
If Jesus loved all the children, then surely all the children were equal.
That seemed straightforward enough.
Years later, I realized many of the adults around me had not interpreted the song in quite the same way. Some casually used racial slurs. Others expressed remarkable hostility toward certain groups of people while insisting they loved everyone.
Someone I went to church with as a kid was positively gleeful a few years ago when Trump decided we should break up non-white families at our border. So were plenty of others who had no doubt sung that same song in Sunday School. (I don’t go to church anymore.)
The contradiction baffled me then and baffles me today.
These experiences changed me because I eventually discovered that many of the people teaching those lessons didn’t actually believe them at all.
That realization has shaped nearly every opinion I’ve formed about politics, economics and society ever since.
Keep reading with a paid subscription to access the lesson that tied these experiences together and why I’ve spent my life questioning conventional wisdom.
