I get accused sometimes of not paying attention to what is going on around me. Sometimes, that is a fair critique, and other times, my apparent lack of awareness is a ruse that helps me to maintain the tenuous hold on sanity that I have. I was caught totally unaware Monday evening at the school board meeting when I heard that our high school principal had unilaterally decided not to publish the names of the students who make the honor roll. I had missed that, somehow.
Principal Rupp told the meeting that she decided not to publish the names anymore because that publishing Honor Roll kids' names “could” make the kids easier targets for internet stalkers.
Seriously?
There is no denying that the world around us is full of dangers. But it always has been. The dangers change with changing times, but there have always been countless ways for people, somehow, to get hurt or killed out in the world. We don't have to worry about being eaten by wolves as our great grandparents did, but they didn't have to worry about getting run over by a truck, either. Life is brief, life is fleeting – one famous quote is “life is brutal, nasty, and short”. It is what it is.
One of our “jobs”, if you will, as responsible adults, is to protect our children from harm. This is a completely natural thing – we all know how animal mothers protect their young. Preservation of the species is one of the most dominate instincts in animals. We want our kids to be safe. We don't want them to get hurt. We want to protect them. That is good and natural and normal.
But, equally as important, is our role as trainers, in which we are to teach our kids how to exist in the world. This role as trainer might be even more important than our role as protector. How are our children going to function in the world when we are gone, if we have not taught them, prepared them, and forewarned them of things that they may face? There has to be a balance between protecting our children and preparing them for the dangers in life. We will have failed as adults if we protect our children to the point that they are completely unprepared to face the realities of the world around them.
We can learn a lot by watching the animals around us. The momma cat hides her kittens when they are born. She hides them from the tom cats who kill kittens so the tabby will come back in heat. But, as the kittens get older, she brings them out into the world that she knows. She teaches the kittens to stalk, to pounce, to fight. With each passing day, momma cat lets the kittens wander farther and farther afield. She knows that they need to explore and to learn, and yes, they need to face some dangers on their own. The mother cat knows that is how they will learn to survive. In several months time, the kittens that started out blind and helpless, hidden from their greatest danger, become fully active, young adult cats. The mother cat protected the kittens, but taught them how to exist in a world full of dangers.
I think that there are a couple of pathologies going on in modern American society that may help explain the overprotectiveness that we seem, as a society, to have for our children. Our culture is obsessed with youthfulness. We do not want to get old. We are infatuated with looking, acting, being young. And, if we let our children become young adults, then we can no longer be those same young adults. I believe that we are crippling our kids by trying to keep them “forever young” so that we too can remain “forever young”.
The other pathology seems to be a collective paranoia about real, and imagined dangers. The late author, Michael Crichton, posited in his novel, “State of Fear”, that following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, governments, news media, and academia teamed up to create the illusion of dangers where none actually existed. This consortium wanted to generate fear within the population as a people afraid, are a people easier to control. I am not sure that there is an actual conspiracy to create fear, but I do think that our news and entertainment media have created a perception of dangers far beyond those that really exist.
We have become convinced that our children are not safe if they are out of our sight for even a few minutes. Our kids don't play outdoors. Our kids don't spend summer days riding bicycles around town and around the area like we did when we were kids. We keep our children indoors and with us nearly all the time. We are not letting our children explore, live, and experience things. Because of our collective paranoia, we are depriving our children of many of the real world experiences that they need to have in the normal process of growing up.
It may be a very fine line between being protective and becoming paranoia. There is a danger in crossing that line because it is a rapid drop from paranoia, to stark, raving, lunatic paranoia. Shadows become monsters, the slightest noise becomes some unseen danger and nothing is real anymore. Not publishing the names of Honor Roll students to protect them from “internet predators” may have crossed the line into that land of lunatic paranoia.
The question now becomes, if it is dangerous to publish the names of Honor Roll students, isn't it also dangerous to name our athletes, our kids in extracurriculars, our students doing community services? Where does Mrs. Rupp draw the line? I really hope that all parents in the Redbank Valley School District will let the Superintendent and the School Board know that you want our students named in the paper so that they can get the acknowledge that they earn. It is an important part of growing up and part of us as adults, bringing the next generation into the community.
