We marvel at the resilient child who survives the most toxic parents and home environment and goes on to a life of success. Yet the converse — the notion that some children might be the bad seeds of more or less decent parents — is hard to take.

It goes against the grain not just because it seems like such a grim and pessimistic judgment, but because it violates a prevailing social belief that people have a nearly limitless potential for change and self-improvement. After all, we are the culture of Baby Einstein, the video product that promised — and spectacularly failed — to make geniuses of all our infants.

Not everyone is going to turn out to be brilliant — any more than everyone will turn out nice and loving. And that is not necessarily because of parental failure or an impoverished environment. It is because everyday character traits, like all human behavior, have hard-wired and genetic components that cannot be molded entirely by the best environment, let alone the best psychotherapists.

Besides playing on my biggest fear about parenthood (what if your kids are just plain rotten?!) the article brought to mind another point made, much more lyrically and with a healthy dose of cynicism, by Jason Peters: Too many people are going to college, and college itself is ceasing to do much of anything but harm:

It may be—it is certainly so in some cases—that “higher education” is little more than a poorly wielded blunt sword that maybe strikes, but for the most part glances off, the heads and shoulders of young people, and I suppose this is lucky.

But not in an ideal college experience. There’s a risk to education, and education should be worth the risk, to say nothing of the cost. It should result in better and more thoughtful citizens of given places. It should culminate in full human beings who know better than to be enamored of abstractions. If I allow that education should be driven largely by content, I hasten to add that it should also be ethical, moral, and humane. It should be conducted with respect for both the future and the past, which is to say its should be conducted with measured suspicion of and admiration for both.

Young men and women, if they have been properly educated, should undergo a crisis of conscience analogous to physical growing pains.

By and large they don’t. They undergo a closing of conscience–and of consciousness. They are introduced only to the easiest of moralities—“tolerate difference.”

[. . .]

It is difficult to imagine handing over democracy to such people, but we really don’t have any other choice. We can’t exactly hand it over to the cows.

And of course there’s the other kind of student who will not suffer any crisis of conscience whatsoever. He is the student who has been raised by fundamentalists, either religious or secular. He arrives at college knowing he will be assaulted and he is determined from the start to withstand the assault. He believes St. Matthew was written first and Revelation last. Or he believes all facts of existence can be explained in terms of natural selection, or by brain states, or by the subconscious. The great catastrophe of his existence is that mystery has been dismissed before he even gets a chance really to be confronted by it. He was raised by parents who on Sunday mornings either went Jesus-hunting at the Bible Chapel or warbler-hunting at the Cathedral of the Pines.

All of this is to say that there are both pervious and impervious students and that all of them are being introduced by “higher education” to a lower form of existence. Perhaps all of them are credulous young men and women, at best the trusting sons and daughters of trusting men and women who don’t know that they’re paying a lot of money so that their children can be told things that aren’t so by people who don’t know that they aren’t so.

Really, it’s hard to summarize a good author — you should read it all, though there is some mild adult language and a general jaded tone that belies his good nature.  (He’s the brother of one of my dearest friends, so I’ve met him several times.)

I could (and do) heartily agree that college is too widely seen as an instant fix for everyone: students who did well in high school are expected to cement their social and vocational status with a degree or two, and those who blew off four years are told they can make a comeback with the next four.

I could (and do) also second Peters’ suggestion that higher education should include compulsory manual labor — food preparation, cleaning, gardening or something designed to teach them the value of visceral, tangible effort.  It’s good enough for you that you should be forced to do it even if you wouldn’t have chosen to.

However, I think the important point in both articles is that we (I speak for Americans, though probably some Western Europeans are following suit) are far too empowered for our own good.  We think we can do anything, from changing dispositions to changing intellect.  We are all such complex beings that it’s ludicrous to try to pin ourselves to any one set of influences; we just don’t know where our minds and personalities come from.  We’ve all met nasty people and simple people, and though we’d like to think they wouldn’t ever exist in our families (or, God forbid, ourselves) odds are that some of us will have to accept that reality.  We just don’t want to.

For a music teacher, I live a remarkably music-free life.  Aside from the hours I spend in instruction and performance in my studio and church, I rarely listen or play much on my own.  I’m not sure why.  I think it began after I moved back home from New York; I found I had heard enough noise there to last through a very  extended silence, and I didn’t miss music even on long car trips and at home by myself.  Over the years I came to enjoy it again, but my laziness usually wins out: it takes effort, even the smallest sort, to put something on while I’m otherwise occupied.

[Aside: The other thing is that, as a visual learner, I cannot abide clutter in any form, and music feels like clutter unless I am focusing solely on it. I really do enjoy my students’ playing (and my own, when I can carve out some time for it) but it’s because it’s the only noise around.  Even a wiggly or talkative sibling in the room can ruin a lesson for me.  In the car, if I’m driving, I focus so much on the music that I’m afraid I won’t be able to pay attention; my last speeding ticket, several years ago, was the result of a rare trip with the radio on.  And my biggest complaint is to restaurants that blare a soundtrack so distracting I can’t converse.  Even sidewalk cafes feel the need to wire the outdoors so that you can’t possibly enjoy a moment of silence, save the tinkling of glasses and forks and the ocean’s swell of human voices enjoying each other's company.]

All of this is to say that it’s shocking and saddening how often I forget what music really means to me.  So it was an unexpected and memorable surprise to discover the Cite de la Musique at the Parc de la Villete one afternoon during our trip.  I wandered in to pass the time while the students were sketching in the park; I ended up staying long after everyone else had left, exiting only reluctantly when it closed.

(The Parc de la Villette, of course, is the sprawling complex of museums, lawns, and carnival rides that turned a seedy area into a bustling family-friendly mecca.  It’s punctuated with bright red follies that are a fun, lively, challenging example of deconstructivism, and I may have just a tiny crush on the architect. A tiny one.)

Though my French is pretty good (and was at its peak after nearly two weeks of constant practice) I most appreciated that the museum was set up multilingually.  An audio guide is included in the admission price – an unobtrusive pair of headphones wired to an iPod-sized device that hangs from your neck or handbag.  Throughout the museum, there are short audio samples – instrument demonstrations and soundtracks to accompany the videos on the screens throughout.  You just enter the number that accompanies the headphones symbol next to the exhibit you want to learn about.  And there are literally hundreds of them – everything from historical background to critique and performance.  I wandered through the displays of instruments –grouped by period, family and geographical location – in awe.  It was an amazing experience.  Here are a few of my favorite photos:

A huge bell – taller than me.  Probably a good thing this one was behind glass; it would have been really tempting to hit it with the clapper!

Intricate detailing inside a stringed instrument – a lute, I believe.

An antique wind instrument – much like a saxophone – with anthropomorphic tendencies.

One of the first keyboard instruments; clavichord, I think (I should have taken notes!)  I thought it was interesting that the colors of the keys are now reversed.

A guitar with gorgeous inlay patterns.

My favorite!  I think this guy is some kind of recorder.  Love his toady face.

Part of a huge set of Asian instruments; I think she’s part of the side of a huge gong.

Obviously, for a musician, the Cite de la Musique is an imperative stop on your Paris journey!  I hope you get to see it someday.

• The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy.  After I blasted The Road, my friend Matt convinced me to give this one a try.  I have to say that although it starts slowly, his style is very compelling and can explode into high-mindedness even in the midst of the most ordinary and banal life experiences.  Almost finished.
• The Awakening by Kate Chopin.  I just finished this one, after one of my students wrote a term paper about it and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.  After several pretty interesting character studies, I was massively disappointed in the ending, which I had been led to believe was amazing and beautiful.  It wasn’t.  Plus, although she may have been the first to write the Bored Housewife Finds Love Elsewhere narrative, I’d already heard it enough before.
• Farm City by Novella Carpenter.  Heartwarming and inspiring narrative about a writer named Novella (I couldn’t make that up) who raises bees, chickens and even pigs in urban Oakland.  And of course she has a huge garden, too.  Her personality irked me after awhile (a little too Julie and not enough Julia) but it was a pretty amazing story.
• Food Rules by Michael Pollan.  As someone with absolutely no food rules (I don’t even fast very well) I figured I could use some discipline.  There are some great ones in there (don’t fill your stomach where you fill your gas tank), although following all 64 would probably make you crazy.  What about one per week?  Sounds like an interesting project.
• A Separate Peace by John Knowles.  Also a student project that interested me enough to read on my own.  Barely started, but it seems a little slow.

Via The Week, I read on LiveScience last week that the more books a child has in his house growing up, the longer he will stay in school.  This assumes, of course, that the books are read and used, but I think one generally follows the other.

For instance, a child born into a family that had only 1 book but was otherwise average in parents’ education, father’s occupation, GDP, and similar variables, would expect to get 9.4 years of education themselves. Another person from an otherwise identical family with 500 books would expect to get 12.6 years of education (a senior in high school has 12 years of education), the results showed.

For years, educators have thought the strongest predictor of attaining high levels of education was having parents who were highly educated. But according to the findings, a good-sized book library is just as good as university-educated parents in terms of increasing education level.

And of course, if they’re organized like mine, they can be part of your decor, too.

One such example was last week’s issue, which spoke about Art Linkletter.  Apparently, I unknowingly stole borrowed the title of his book to use for one of my most popular tags, The Darndest Things (Three recent examples.)  Linkletter had a television show in which he interviewed children so that others could be amused by their hilarity and unconscious wisdom.

Here’s what I found interesting: how do you think Linkletter found kids that would consistently say interesting and funny things?  Easy.  He wrote to teachers and said, “Give me a few hours with the child you would most like to have out of your classroom.”

This is at once funny and sobering.  Oh, I hate thinking that I might be the teacher who doesn’t appreciate creativity unless it falls within prescribed parameters.  But I’m sure I would have willingly booted out some future TV stars if given the chance.

For instance, we’re going to see these guys live tomorrow night:

And yes, we paid money for the tickets.  Actual American currency.

E-mail me if you want to know where to send the sympathy card.

UPDATE: For all my whining, I have to admit it was a fun concert, if a little short.  Beautiful weather at Pier Six and fun, funky, soulful jams.

I still remember the day I discovered that salvation was neither guaranteed nor permanent.  It was one of the most frightening experiences of my life, a little like discovering that you don’t really own the house you just finished paying off.  Only, okay, a much bigger deal.

What helped me to make peace with this tenet of my church’s theology was the realization that ultimately what you believe is only important insofar as it affects what you do.  Take a guy who prays the sinner’s prayer and then goes on to live the rest of his life as — well — a sinner.  He figures he’s okay because he did what he had to do to ensure salvation.  But whether the “sinner’s prayer” phase lasts five minutes or five years, his conversion clearly wasn’t sincere, because it didn’t change him.

Now if you want to split hairs and talk about whether salvation comes from the act of the prayer or from the life that follows it, whether the prayer itself is even necessary or a mere formality that prefaces a much more deep and lasting commitment to a life of spiritual growth, whether the belief is the important thing or the actions that prove it heartfelt — well, fine, I’ll buy you a coffee and we can hash it out.  But ultimately it doesn’t matter.  What we do on this earth matters.  What we do in our hearts, with our neighbors, to our enemies — all of this matters.  All of this determines whether we will be saved.

This is why LOST is the most shockingly meaningful and significant series I have ever seen, the reason I haven’t watched much of anything else since it started, and the reason why I can’t get excited about much else on television.  It’s about the big stuff: about how we live, how the fallen seek and find redemption, how our lives and souls are shaped by those with whom we keep company — for better or worse, by choice or chance.

The trope of the antihero, the conman / prostitute / killer with the heart of gold, can be a morally-ambiguous cliche, implying that actions are meaningless and only “heart” matters.  (Remember Pretty Woman?  We’re supposed to pull for the protagonist because, despite her choice of a deplorable occupation, she has a soft spot for her attractive and wealthy rescuer.)  But in LOST, we see people whose sins are real and damaging: torturers who are haunted by their cruelty, murderers who are always running, children who are paralyzed (literally and figuratively) by their inability to forgive their parents.  They can’t just sweep those crimes off their proverbial slates; they have to reckon with them, to seek closure and possibly judgment, before they can even begin to heal.

Each person comes to the island, as a character says in one of the final episodes, broken.  They all have demons to wrestle, and they do so with nowhere to hide.  They become part of a community, literally in communion with one another; they love and fight with and learn from each other.  In the finale, one of the main characters explains it this way: “The most important time of your life was when you were with with these people.  That’s why you are all here.  No one does it alone.”  The heartbreak, the persecution and violence and pervading confusion that made the show famous — no one fully understood the complex mythology, maybe not even the show’s creators, who are wont to shrug and say, “no, we never intended to explain that” — all of that was simply a means to an end, a way for them to learn how to remember what was important and let go of what wasn’t.

So, ultimately, the hair-splitting is irrelevant.  Sure, I’d like to know the mechanics of the monster, the back stories of some of the minor characters, and the prelude and postlude to the short time frame that’s chronicled in the series.  I’d love to buy you lunch (coffee wouldn’t quite cover this) and debate about that just for argument’s sake.  But kudos to the show’s writers for refusing, in the end, to get caught up in the nit-picky intricacies of plot and setting.  What made the show great was its focus on the universals of death, love, forgiveness and deception — the human experiences and ideals we’ve all lived and suffered through.

And really (okay, stop reading here if you might someday want to be surprised by the ending) it also doesn’t matter whether the alternate reality depicted in the final season is called purgatory, or karmic reincarnation, or heaven.  The point is that each person in that church made a decision to live an honest and selfless life, and they were rewarded with a chance to right the wrongs they had committed, and to enter into the afterlife as purer, more whole human beings — free from the corrupting influence of mankind that extended even to their island paradise.

You know how I know it’s an amazing series?  I can’t wait to watch the whole thing all over again.  Starting tonight.  Who wants a Dharma beer?

I noticed something, though.  I was sitting up straighter, lest she should catch me from a bad angle.  I was smiling almost continuously in an effort to ensure a positive expression in the photos.  And somehow, those two things helped improve my attitude; I was patient and engaged instead of clipped and distant.  I was doing it for the wrong reasons, but getting the right results.

Similarly, the first time I recorded myself in the classroom and watched it back, I was appalled by how brusque and clipped my speech sounded, and how businesslike and strict I was with the students.  I haven’t had the courage to repeat the exercise, though I have tried to incorporate those thoughts into my teaching (and to speak in a lighter, higher tone, which is better for my singing voice anyhow.)

In Blink (a wonderful summer book, if you’re looking for one) Malcolm Gladwell interviews a team of psychologists that mapped out all of the different possible expressions on a human face.  There are hundreds, and as they struggled to separate contempt from bitterness and frustration from hurt, they found that the very act of forming the expression caused them to experience the emotion.  After a morning of making negative expressions, they felt angry, sad and discouraged.

So, why not the other way around?  It makes sense.  Forcing a smile might be a good thing.

Two recent Times articles that have to do with parenting, education and food, but come from vastly different worldviews:

On the Best side is this excellent treatise involving a restauranteur who believes that “Children’s menus are the death of civilization.”  Hear, hear!   Based on my experience and observation, kids will eat what they’re expected to eat.  When there are no expectations, you can hardly blame them for eating only macaroni and cheese.  It’s somewhat endearing at four, but downright embarrassing at fourteen; I’ve heard more than one high school girl unabashedly admit that she doesn’t eat vegetables.  At all.  I’m so grateful to my parents for forcing, bribing and tricking me into eating all sorts of weird things — from pork rinds to artichokes and snails and tandoori — those experiences gave me the courage to discover new passions on my own.

In the Worst corner is this article that appears to be making a serious case for labeling foods as choking hazards.  They’re actually printing quotes like this:

“You have a SuperBall that by government regulation has to carry warnings telling people it’s a risk to young children and you can’t market it to them, yet you can have the same identical shape and size gumball and there are no restrictions or requirements.”

Well, maybe that’s because gumballs were INTENDED to be put in your mouth.  And because it’s generally expected that parents will use common sense in feeding and supervising their children.  Truly, can we say that it’s necessary to affix a warning label to a carrot?  People, it’s called common sense and supervision.  And while I can’t imagine the horror that parents who have lost a child to choking have experienced, the reality is that accidents happen, even shocking and fatal ones.  Heaping up onerous legislation can’t stop them from occurring.  We need to make peace with the unpredictability and fragility of life.

Me: Um, no.  Why in the world would you think that?

Student: I saw it in a cartoon one time.

One more reason to ban television, I guess.

• The Good Morning America report. I’m sure it’s easy to find if you want to (yep) but in fact I don’t think I’ve ever watched Good Morning America, and I certainly wouldn’t accept a five-minute special report as unquestionable truth.  In fact, if GMA says it’s “extreme” and harmful, I’m willing to bet it’s a great idea that’s misunderstood and poorly reported.

• A lot of kids’ time and effort in school is wasted, much more so in the early years.  The teacher dismisses a child to go to the bathroom, helps another one find a tissue, allows three to sharpen pencils, and after ten minutes of directives, everyone is finally ready to go over the Math lesson.  Once it’s finished, it all happens in reverse, and the process begins again during the Reading and History lessons.  There is something to be said for learning patience with others, but invariably, the smart kids get bored and retreat into themselves (me) or goof off and get in trouble (my brother.)

• The teacher controls the classroom at the vast majority of formal schools.  Again, learning obedience to authority is a virtue, and one that many modern children lack.  However, this can become tiresome very quickly, and I’m not sure it’s valuable in the long run; it seems to me that it promotes unquestioning submission.  As much as I detest the constant complaining of parents at my school, I’m glad they feel they have the right to complain.  I also don’t mind ignoring them, since we all know I don’t need correction on any points.

• Kids in formal school are stressed. Period.  They know far too much about schedules, and “dates,” and they have very little time to explore things they’re interested in.  An unschooled child might choose to spend the whole day planting seeds and waiting anxiously for them to sprout, or reading about and drawing dinosaurs, or learning how to bake bread.  S/he will have learned far more than in a cramped, authoritarian classroom.

Con:

• Most parents lack the discipline, creativity and time necessary to expose their children to a wide variety of subject areas, such that the child truly has the wealth of knowledge necessary to make his or her own choices regarding education.  This may sound harsh, but I’m just speaking from experience.  My cousins are stellar examples of unschooling parents, but I have seen many more who only encourage their children (consciously or not) to pursue areas they know something about and are interested in.  This is natural, and maybe it’s okay, but I prefer the Liberal Arts philosophy, since:

• I learned a lot from taking classes I was forced to take. In high school, to graduate with honors I needed four History credits.  My only choice in my senior year was an AP Government class. Government?!  I thought.  Ugh.  How boring!  But the teacher was dynamic and funny (a drill sergeant, he had an unnerving habit of pointing and yelling “Go!” when he wanted an answer) and the class filled with overachievers like me, who pushed each other to succeed.  Last weekend at coffee hour I recalled the details of Plessy v. Ferguson, fifteen years after studying them in class.  I could quote more examples, but the point is, I never would have sought these interests out, especially if my parents had suggested them.

• The world doesn’t revolve around your kids, as much as you may want it to, and I’m a little concerned that unschooling may allow them to believe that.  We all have to learn to do things we don’t want to, and yes, sometimes it’s annoying and completely useless, but well, that’s life.  You don’t always get to choose what you want to do, especially when you’re young.  That’s a privilege that grows with age.

Conclusions:

• We’re pretty solidly in the homeschooling camp if we ever have children, at least for the elementary years.  There are certain formal programs I would support, but for the most part, we couldn’t afford Waldorf or Montessori and there is no Orthodox classical-education institution near us.  I’m not signing any pacts, but that’s where I am now.

• I don’t think I could unschool, and I’m a pretty skilled teacher and a pretty well-rounded person (if I do say so myself.)  I would worry that I had left something out that my kids might have wanted to learn.  I also think most ideas work better if implemented with a plan.

• One of my favorite bloggers, who recently retired, spoke about vocations in words I heartily commend.  She homeschooled five children, beginning with very basic instruction: a half-hour or so of formal math and reading every morning until about age eight, plus a wide variety of family activities that educated them enough to choose very diverse and specialized vocations.  I especially love what she says about organized activities: why young kids need to be on a soccer team or in an art class, instead of playing with their friends or drawing on their own, is an important consideration.