How to Make Childhood Reappear

I noted in my first post on Neil Postman's book The Disappearance of Childhood that one thing I appreciated is his epistemic humility at the book's outset. Too often people reach too far in attempting to provide pat conclusions to complex issues. I appreciated Postman's reticence to do anything in his book beyond diagnosis.

However, upon finishing the book a clear suggestion is implicit: opt out. Postman's argument is that childhood is disappearing in our culture because we have replaced text-based literacy with image-based illiteracy. Whereas mass literacy prompted the development of childhood as an age distinct from adulthood--little kids can't read at advanced levels of cognition and adults can--our culture is removing the distinctions by flattening the differences. You can see these previous posts that spell out how Postman comes to this admittedly controversial thesis. 

But as I finished the book it became evident that a solution exists: resist the flattening caused by television and other mass media. Refuse to let your kids be indoctrinated into the world of the image and adhere to the world of print. In a move that would make the reformers proud, be iconoclasts. Smash the icons and idols of the modern technocracy.

Postman himself gets to this in the concluding chapter. He offers there a set of questions and responses for what to do if you happen to accept his thesis. His final question is "Is the individual powerless to resist what is happening?" The very wording of the question certainly implies that there might be a way forward (or backward, depending on your point of view). I'll quote his answer at some length:

The answer to this, in my opinion, is "No." But, as with all resistance, there is a price to pay. Specifically, resistance entails conceiving of parenting as an act of rebellion against American culture. For example, for parents merely to remain married is itself an act of disobedience and an insult to the spirit of a throwaway culture in which continuity has little value. It is also at least ninety percent un-American to remain in close proximity to one's extended family so that children can experience, daily, the meaning of kinship and the value of deference and responsibility to elders. Similarly, to insist that one's children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in sexuality, or self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place oneself in opposition to almost every social trend. Even further, to ensure that one's children work hard at becoming literate is extraordinarily time-consuming and even expensive. But most rebellious of all is the attempt to control the media's access to one's children. There are, in fact, two ways to do this. The first is to limit the amount of exposure children have to media. The second is to monitor carefully what they are exposed to, and to provide them with a continuously running critique of the themes and values of the media's content. Both are very difficult to do and require a level of attention that most parents are not prepared to give to child-rearing.  

Nonetheless, there are parents who are committed to doing all of these things, who are in effect defying the directives of their culture. Such parents are not only helping their children to have a childhood but are, at the same time, creating a sort of intellectual elite. Certainly in the short run the children who grow up in such homes will, as adults, be much favored by business, the professions, and the media themselves. What can we say of the long run? Only this: Those parents who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will help to keep alive a humane tradition. It is not conceivable that our culture will forget that it needs children. But it is halfway toward forgetting that children need childhood. Those who insist on remembering shall perform a noble service.

There is much to unpack here and by no means do I intend to do justice by all of it. The parts that I have put in bold are indicative of what I am focusing on for now. I have long had the sense that parenting in the way I feel called to do it is both an implicit and explicit rejection of our culture at large and even some of the subcultures I inhabit. The values that my wife and I value are out of step with the pull of American culture. The way we pursue them strikes others as extreme and over-the-top. But you cannot subvert a decadent culture with half-measures. 

Moreover, as Postman affirms in dubbing this the Monastery Effect, the goal of such parenting is firmly rooted in this world. The parents who make the decision to defy the culture are doing so for the good of the culture, ultimately. Christians, and here I break from Postman's own classically liberal concerns, are to live our lives for the life of the world. We reject culture not to reject the people that comprise that culture but in order to better love and serve them. 

This is the solution Postman denied in the introduction he would give. And the solution must begin at the individual level, expand to communities of faith who unite together to maintain and reclaim what is humane in our tradition, and only then can it ever expand to enact mass change. All other paths of resistance are Luddites smashing the machines. That will not work as long as the majority love the machines. We have to restore a vision of the world that makes the machines superfluous. That will be extremely difficult. But if we value not only our children but childhood itself we will put our hand to the plow.