It doesn’t matter how many generations have been passing down family values, culture and tradition: it only takes one for all subsequent generations to be affected.
Communities and families are the key players that passed on ways of living through virtues, love and respect, culture and religion, and that became peoples. United by common values and customs, this is how what we call Western civilization developed, encompassing cultural nuances and different languages. Education, the primary responsibility of parents, had always taken place mostly within the family, and even when schools of instruction were established, moral formation happened at home. However, we have seen a process of transference of the role of parents and communities to the state, which, full of good intentions, has centralised education and shaped morals into ethics, as well as transformed knowledge into a pragmatism linked to modern scientism. Very practical and useful at first, but empty and fragile in the long term.
Over the last century and a half, in particular, various movements have pushed families in this direction; it was not just by choice. The impetus of feminism, which put women on the labour market, leveraged in some historical moments of war and post-war – when men were involved (or dying) in battles; the reduction of the purchasing power – while our grandparents were able to own their home and support their numerous children, our parents could take decades to do so and had fewer kids, and our generation for the most part has no way of achieving this, nor surviving (without sacrifice) if both of the couple don’t work – making it compulsory to outsource education to long-stay schools; there is a growing rate of divorces, which finantially and emotionally affects the family and difficults decisions on children education; there was the cancellation of religion by the ‘enlightened’, religion that has the sense of the absolute in terms of what is just, good and true, and was replaced by total relativism; and humanism unfoldings, one of them is self-centred protagonism, with the idea that individualistic personal development is paramount, to the detriment of the family and the community; these are just some of the factors we can list.
And, driven by the influence of the new culture, which has replaced a Western society of values with this new version, it all seems very natural, although the perception persists in many that there is something wrong. After all, suffices to look at the results.
Let’s look at some of the signs and symptoms, particularly in children and teenagers. What do we reap from this planting?
- Children exposed to periodic school violence, such as chronic bullying;
- Not sufficient attention to individual academic needs (both those with difficulties and those with high abilities, or others who don’t have their study interests valued);
- A drop in academic performance almost everywhere over the last decades;
- Persistent drug abuse by young people even within schools – where many are introduced to them;
- Sex life is anticipated – jeopardising health and self-respect;
- Unrestricted and irresponsible exposure to gender agendas;
- A sharp rise in the levels of anxiety, depression, and other psychiatric conditions – with lifelong consequences.
Not to mention the increasingly frequent tragedies in which young people, often students or former students, go to educational institutions to kill. Teachers quit their jobs in the early years of their careers, and their reports show that it’s not due to low pay, but to a harmful school environment. There really is something wrong there.
The disease of school reality is chronic
This is not new. The disease of school reality has slowly become chronic. And it’s practically normalised, leading many to think that this is just an obligatory phase of ‘survival’, almost giving a Darwinist sense to the period of school life that children and teenagers seem to have to go through.
This thinking ignores the fact that human beings are what they are because they are not born ready-made, they depend on their parents for survival in the earliest stages of life, and they need care like no other species does, so that their intellectual capacities can develop fully and appropriately, buoyed by a sense of social and community reality that continues to sew the social fabric for the maintenance of our human values, which make us special. Because technology itself can be replaced by machines. And that’s what’s on the horizon – we can’t let what makes us ‘human’ come to an end.
But there is hope
Many families have moved against this normalisation. Adults are going back to study, seeking information on their own initiative. There are young people who are looking for marriage at an earlier age in order to start families. And to have more children. There are people who no longer allow themselves to be taken in by the mainstream and who want to exercise their autonomy of choice in democracies.
Fathers and mothers who love their children make sacrifices to bring them up in a more present way, with kids at home and one of the parents not working, living more modest lives, so that seeds can be planted and values restored, so that virtues can be cultivated, so as not to leave them exposed to such violence at such a tender age when everything makes a deep impression and shapes behaviour for the rest of their lives. To make them human in their essence, valuable to their communities. In the United States, there are a growing number of higher education institutions that hold the same values as these families, and that know how well prepared these young people can be and the beneficial social impact they can make.
It doesn’t take much effort to see how much we need, each in our own role, whether at home, in the neighbourhood, in the church, in associations, at work or in our families, to give our best and share the people we are by the way we are and the values we cherish. By prioritising what is important – who we are and the future generation we want. We want a life full of meaning, not full of empty experiences, trinkets, and loneliness. Our ancestors suffered greatly for this; our forefathers educated their children and looked after their elderly. That chain that they worked so hard to build, which gave continuity to the past in a solid and humane future, has been corrupted. Technological progress depends on men with wisdom. The relegation of man to a thinking, pleasure-seeking animal, whose thinking is now being moved to computers with artificial intelligence, must not continue.
Let’s be proactive and persevering in order to strengthen our generation (and those to come).
Above all, let’s be real humans.
