[Buddha-l] Re: fundamentalism

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Mon, 2005-07-04 at 20:38 -0400, curt wrote:

> I have two friends who are practicing Buddhists (one is
> actually a Zen teacher) who home school their children.
> I also used to know a guy who was a Buddhist monk
> for a while who had been home schooled. In all cases
> the results seem to have been positive.

Interesting. Thanks for the information.

Now that I think about it, several of my Buddhists friends have opted to
put their children into Waldorf schools. (They make great salads by the
time they graduate.) In all my years of hanging around 18-22 year-old
adults, I have never met more mature and well-adjusted people than those
who have gone through Waldorf schools, which are based on the so-called
anthroposophical principles of Rudolf Steiner. 

One of the things that Waldorf schools often do is to encourage the
parents to donate time to the school as carpenters, janitors, gardeners,
clerks, teachers or whatever else they can do. This gives the schools a
strong sense of community in which parents and children work together to
live and learn. This model strikes me as more fruitful than the home-
schooling model. Let's face it; most couples in our society are
incompetent parents and probably even worse teachers. Even when the
parents are wonderful at being parents, children seem to learn better
from other children and from a community of varied adults than from
their biological parents. The nuclear family is probably one of the most
dysfunctional social units in the history of the human race; it always
saddens me to see it glorified. 

The professor who taught me ethics in my undergraduate years has earned
a reputation for his impassioned defense of the proposition that
biological parents should be required to get a parenting license before
being allowed to bring up their own children. He rests his case on a
mountain of evidence supporting the conclusion that most pairs of adults
are, without the guidance of grandparents and aunts and uncle, almost
hopelessly ill equipped to cope with the complexity of raising a child.
Moreover, since both members of most couples these days are out earning
money, it is obvious their priorities are not in being with their kids
but in "providing" for them. This professor makes people angry every
time he speaks in public on the topic, but a lot of what he ways is not
particularly easy to dismiss on any but purely sentimental grounds. What
is interesting in his position is that he regards society as a whole
morally blameworthy for not taking stronger measures to protect children
from their parents' incompetence. (Just for the record, this professor
is not a Christian fundamentalist. He's a Jewish Marxist.)

-- 
Richard Hayes