Brain-pong #1: Parent Discipline
As manager of a senior apartment complex, I learn a lot about the pressures, perks and pitfalls of aging.
One resident, call her Mary, has focused for years on life according to her feelings. She dwells on her son’s murder, her husband’s infidelity, T.V. and slurs, imagined or real, on her heritage. The bipolar critic who lives downstairs has added to years of unforgiveness, swelling Mary’s bag of complaints. Mary drops that bag on anyone sympathetic enough to stay in range.
Victim-hood for Mary has become a comfortable cloak for reality. For half of my 64 years I created my own reality like that.
At U.C. Berkeley I majored in fiction and creative writing while getting my degree. Picture Berkeley in the 60’s: the Vietnam War, Student Rights, Free Speech, Kennedy’s assassination. To that heady brew I added Buddhism, self-hypnosis, automatic writing, Transcendental Meditation. Did you know that if you are adept at T.M. you can levitate?
My liberal friends and I felt that a group of loving people with our intelligence could resolve the world’s problems. Our parents had been too materialistic, unaware, uneducated. People were, after all, basically good.
It was only a matter of culture—American culture—that enslaved their spirits. Not a Christian at that time, I felt that Christianity was just a mythical crutch to make weak people feel better.
Generosity and service to others would shore up the life style and attitudes of those downtrodden unfortunates who were victimized by our culture.
Hiring quotas, pay equalization, more welfare and social engineering were our answers when my peers and I wore the power hat.
Teaching, my profession, progressed during the 19 years I was in it through a series of stages.
Grades were a problem.
The military and business worlds needed some useful kind of sorting device to categorize high school graduates so they could do their jobs: defend our country and raise the bottom line for shareholders. They needed some sort of predictability.
But grades were a big problem. Grades discriminated between educable mentally retarded and high level thinkers.
People FELT bad when they were labeled with a grade, and they aimed lower in life. They got depressed and discouraged.
Grades pounded the life out of a person’s self image and thus their future. No caring educator wants to do that.
Coursework and in-service education for teachers stressed solutions to self-worth problems in order to bring teachers into an enlightened interaction with students. Sarcasm, negative body language and other destructive baggage were rightfully removed from the student-teacher relationship.
However, drop-out rates, drug use and teen suicide kept climbing. It did not compute.
Schools were not making a positive difference. More administrators were added in order to help teachers do their job. Curriculum gurus lowered P.E. requirements and dropped art, music and vocational education in favor of academics.
After all, academics were high status and status made students feel good. Everyone ought to be able to attend college, gaining high status and bigger pay, if they so desired. Even my remedial fisherman in Alaska, who could not grasp basic concepts of Senior Economics, had to be dragged through the course with incredible accommodations, hints and outright answers to every test question. The Special Education teacher saw to that.
Nobody was left out: an excellent fisherman had to get a diploma just like everyone else. His goal was to be an attorney. His true inability and our failure to be truthful doomed him to years of fruitless accommodation until the Bar Exam truthfully rejected him. Did we do him a favor by eliminating realistic boundaries?
Reality and truth were not our objectives as educators.
Our questions given any choice were not “Is it true? Is it right?” but “Can we make it work? How will it feel?” Feeling good about your self was the objective.
However, drop-out rates, drug use and teen suicide have kept climbing.
Our true levels of practical life skills such as Math, English, and Science have dropped dangerously in relation to students around the world at the same age and stage.
Our students cannot compete in a global marketplace where "feel good" has no place. Furthermore, we now find that false self esteem is tied to school shootings, low productiion and skyrocketing divorce.
America has done such a good job of shoring up self image that unrealistic expectations rule the home, schools and workplace. Feelings have gained control of thinking: they play ping-pong with the brain.
Mary was so disturbed by her feelings that she became more and more unhappy. Finally her unhappiness threatened her ability to remain in an independent living apartment. The "brain-pong" had to stop. Mary accepted the county’s offer of counseling and has changed her attitude.
What Mary, educators and I did not realize was that feelings are the culprit. Emotions in the driver’s seat cause life wreckage. The brain-pong has to stop before the damage is permanent.
Christianity has become for me a standard for measuring truth about our selves. We are born greedy and selfish, and only the Lord’s input can made us generous, unselfish and happy. What do you know!
In giving, we receive. In loving we become beloved. In submission to Christ we become powerful.
