During my last semester of college (1996) I sat in the classroom of an elementary school in Pensacola, Florida for fourteen weeks to complete an internship required of me to graduate. I was assigned to an observation post at the back of the classroom for twelve of those weeks to “learn” how to teach. Despite sincere and innovative attempts to please the teacher, I was subject to weekly, scathing criticism about my common interaction with the students and my irreverent view of discipline. Granted, I liked the students so I spoke with them outside teaching hours. This behavior, however, was viewed as delinquent. I later learned that it encouraged familiarity which we all know breeds contempt.
What was not on Teacher's radar was the wide range of dysfunction that lay behind the sweet white, brown and black faces she taught. None of that dysfunction mattered to her. Further, she did not care to see that these problems vied for the attention of their brains: students and family members embroiled in the effects of attempted murder, arson, chronic illness, emotional detachment disorder. Despite the full school days which regulated activity to the minute, no talking was allowed at lunch time, no free play allowed at recess, no unscripted talk during classes. Essentially no time lay within or outside the program to address concerns and interests fundamentally linked to the human condition. Oh, and it was a Christian school.
I spent those twelve weeks in a little, red chair writing an educational abstract called “The Structure of Non-reason" in addition to the copious observational notes I was required to take. In it I sought to describe the irony I saw before me: the perpetration of a religious ideology claiming world significance, dominance and influence, yet in no way, shape or form addressing the essential problems of moral conscience, psychology or physiology in its classrooms. The religious portion of the curriculum was relatively nonsensical, for it did not reconcile its tenets with the very problems the students were becoming. The students, I concluded, would be better off just learning information and bypassing all of the disjointed, religious parts. I was fascinated by the hubris and ignorance of the instiution and was intent to encapsulate the metamorphosis of the problem as it unfolded before my eyes.
On the left side of my open notebook I kept scrupulous observational notes such as “Children explain their answers on the board” and “Earnest is left-handed” and “The children laughed because the Midianites were killed.” On the right page I wrote “There’s this bit of non-reason that frees man up as autonomous in the created universe.” Twelve years later, I am ready to share my observations.
I originally wrote this book for parents, only to realize that the majority of parents who read my book or discussed with me the thoughts in my book thought it to be so much scholastic pontification. They could not wrap their modern brains around the nexus of what I was saying: a fundamental shift has occurred in the way people understand truth and that shift occurred as recently as 1989. Being free of their criticisms and increasingly marginalized sensibilities, I am writing my analysis of the strange amalgamation of post-Cold War youth I call POMOS.
I have specifically rewritten this book for those who have a legitimate professional interest in one of the largest sub-cultures alive in the West today, the POMO. These are children raised by Moderns (Christian or not) who raised them on a culture of science-vs-faith emphasizing traditional absolutes (like freedom) proven to be largely founded upon a relativistic concept of truth, sketchy social objectives (like freedom) supported by romantic religious platitudes, and a transient value system (like freedom) on the cusp of another cultural shift. I have worked with POMOS in my own school for ten years but have been aware of a strange, cultural transformation since 1989.
None of the illustrations I give you here are specifically attached to a parent or student of Stone Table (or its affiliates). Rather, they represent actual conversations and interactions I have had with hundreds of children and parents over the last twelve years of my educatonal career. Any actual illustrations I give do not have names attached to them and are altered enough to not be recognizable by such persons were they to read my manuscript. However, I would dare say that these Everyman examples will be uncomfortably recognizable across the wide spectrum I intend to describe.
What was not on Teacher's radar was the wide range of dysfunction that lay behind the sweet white, brown and black faces she taught. None of that dysfunction mattered to her. Further, she did not care to see that these problems vied for the attention of their brains: students and family members embroiled in the effects of attempted murder, arson, chronic illness, emotional detachment disorder. Despite the full school days which regulated activity to the minute, no talking was allowed at lunch time, no free play allowed at recess, no unscripted talk during classes. Essentially no time lay within or outside the program to address concerns and interests fundamentally linked to the human condition. Oh, and it was a Christian school.
I spent those twelve weeks in a little, red chair writing an educational abstract called “The Structure of Non-reason" in addition to the copious observational notes I was required to take. In it I sought to describe the irony I saw before me: the perpetration of a religious ideology claiming world significance, dominance and influence, yet in no way, shape or form addressing the essential problems of moral conscience, psychology or physiology in its classrooms. The religious portion of the curriculum was relatively nonsensical, for it did not reconcile its tenets with the very problems the students were becoming. The students, I concluded, would be better off just learning information and bypassing all of the disjointed, religious parts. I was fascinated by the hubris and ignorance of the instiution and was intent to encapsulate the metamorphosis of the problem as it unfolded before my eyes.
On the left side of my open notebook I kept scrupulous observational notes such as “Children explain their answers on the board” and “Earnest is left-handed” and “The children laughed because the Midianites were killed.” On the right page I wrote “There’s this bit of non-reason that frees man up as autonomous in the created universe.” Twelve years later, I am ready to share my observations.
I originally wrote this book for parents, only to realize that the majority of parents who read my book or discussed with me the thoughts in my book thought it to be so much scholastic pontification. They could not wrap their modern brains around the nexus of what I was saying: a fundamental shift has occurred in the way people understand truth and that shift occurred as recently as 1989. Being free of their criticisms and increasingly marginalized sensibilities, I am writing my analysis of the strange amalgamation of post-Cold War youth I call POMOS.
I have specifically rewritten this book for those who have a legitimate professional interest in one of the largest sub-cultures alive in the West today, the POMO. These are children raised by Moderns (Christian or not) who raised them on a culture of science-vs-faith emphasizing traditional absolutes (like freedom) proven to be largely founded upon a relativistic concept of truth, sketchy social objectives (like freedom) supported by romantic religious platitudes, and a transient value system (like freedom) on the cusp of another cultural shift. I have worked with POMOS in my own school for ten years but have been aware of a strange, cultural transformation since 1989.
None of the illustrations I give you here are specifically attached to a parent or student of Stone Table (or its affiliates). Rather, they represent actual conversations and interactions I have had with hundreds of children and parents over the last twelve years of my educatonal career. Any actual illustrations I give do not have names attached to them and are altered enough to not be recognizable by such persons were they to read my manuscript. However, I would dare say that these Everyman examples will be uncomfortably recognizable across the wide spectrum I intend to describe.
