Kids

After 20 years and $200,000 my five children have all passed through their pre-college years in a private Christian school.
Two of my daughters have graduated from the University of Minnesota now. One got her degree in nursing and the other in journalism. My oldest son must have spent too much time working with me out in the garage and on repair projects in the house because after one semester of college he simply decided to start his own construction company. He is doing well.

All three of my oldest are now engaged and looking to marry before 2005 is over. They did not come through life without some bruises and scrapes but they did make it to marriage without any real emotional or physical scars. They took no medicines. They carried no diseases. Their mates are all “on fire” radical Christians. They hold the same values and world-views and I think that they have a good shot at happiness and a good full life.

But don’t think for a minute that my kids are naïve or from an ivory tower. They are sharp, current, hip and popular. They are very multi-cultural and diverse, but not perverse. They have all worked at jobs and paid their own way through life. No silver spoon here. We live in the inner city in the 13th largest metropolitan area. We live here by choice. Our neighbors are from all walks of life and all of our cars are used.

I say these things because successful parenting in this day and age is a very difficult thing that takes a lot of work and a lot of money. We elected to spend our money on our kids schooling and not on ourselves. We went to all of our kids athletic and school events. We still meet as a family once a week on Sunday afternoon and evening and just hang out together because we like each other.

Contrast that to what I have seen at the University of Minnesota over the last 24 years.
Many come from broken homes. Here it seems that 27% or one out of four students have some sort of psychiatric disorder. One out of five or 20% have a sexually transmitted disease. Suicide is a continuous problem. Drunkenness and drug abuse are about the same as when I went to college back in the 60’s but still it’s hard to understand how there is any brain cells left. I see little in the way of real activism anymore. In a general sense, apathy has taken over. Just get your degree and get a job.

But that is what the secular educational system has become. That is why I removed my children from this existential soul eater. It has become the training ground to produce people who will produce more widgets. It is the worker bee breeding grounds for the corporate machine. The idea of genuine thought or scholarship is gone. They don’t teach classically anymore. They don’t teach how to reason. They simply produce people who are resourceful enough to make it through the system of hurdles and meet the requirements. Perfect candidates for the corporate world but not awake enough to build their own competing corporation.

And they take what soul you have, what awareness you have for a greater world than just what you see, smell, and hear, and drive it so far back from consciousness that you won’t find it again until you have kids and a house mortgage and a car note and can no longer do anything other than go to work and pay your student loan off.

Jesus assures us that there is more to life than this. There is hope, and dreams, and joy for all those who can break free from the shallow make-a-dollar-world. There still is greatness in this life that is beyond big houses and time-shares. There are values and nobleness that can still be found in this world, but I don’t think the universities are still teaching them.

If they can read, write and do simple math then they are good candidates for the corporate ladder. They had to go to college to get even these minimal skills because most of them didn’t have it after high school. Even after college many still cannot write or do math without the help of computers and calculators. This is just as the architects of our current social experiment mean for it to be. No God, just matter. No meaning, just things. Things are much more manageable that way.