The Parental Serf
August 19, 2009
The feudal slave who produced grain for his lord, the Communist proletariat beholden to Uncle Joe, and the medieval peasant who paid cash for the forgiveness of sins were no less free than today’s parental serf.
The parental serf does not work for his family and his independence. He works for a higher master: his children’s educations. He starts paying college tuition when his children are young, putting them in expensive programs that will boost their “preparedness.” The goal is clear and predetermined: Admission to a good college. Expensive elementary schools, more expensive extracurricular programs, private lessons – no expense is too great if it creates an edge. The serf works so hard he barely sees his children. He does not know what they are learning or why. He becomes fully indentured with the whopping bills of late adolescence, the yeomen equivalent of a thousand bushels of grain. He pulls his wagon up to the fancy financial offices and empties it out. Anything this expensive must be worth paying for, he tells himself as his mule clip-clops back home. If he can’t afford it, his children can take out loans and become indentured too.
The parental serf speaks with misty-eyed fervor of M.I.T. and Duke. He’s not sure what his children get from these schools and it has never occurred to him to question what they might get. Their massive athletic facilities and glass-enclosed science buildings convey such an air of magical permanence, he wants to be a part of it. The Egyptians must have felt the same way about their pyramids.
It must be something important. There are millions of working adults who could teach a young person what he needs to know. Communications are advanced and inexpensive. Learning is everywhere. But, people say an expensive school makes all the difference in life. In his dark hours, when he thinks of his son or daughter sitting in a crowded lecture hall with a graduate student at the front of the room, the parental serf reassures himself. He must be working so hard for more than a few slips of paper and four years of mere school.
James M. writes:
Here’s a relevant quote from an obscure book, Sold Out to the Future, by Roy Helton:
Our children are deified not because of the power and beauty of their youth, but because of their supposed relation to the future life of the world. Yet it is only when they are considered beings complete in themselves that they can be trained to do no harm to tomorrow’s civilization and our own. Our itch to shape their futures we had better admit for being what it is – a desire to work on more plastic material than we ourselves provide, and to bring things into birth of time without ourselves having to experience the inner pangs of necessary labor.
[Children] deserve the right not to have too many advantages thrust upon them, and to have a chance to create a few for themselves. They deserve training along the lines of their aptitudes, and all the evocation of those aptitudes that can be afforded them. But if part of the enormous sums annually wasted on the adoration of youth were retained for the cultural life of the mature and the extension of their leisure, children would have a better world to grow up into, more motive for self-improvement, and less need to be prepared for the mad pace led by a future-chasing society. In its sublime confidence that the child is father to the man, our world forgets that the man is father to the child and, at this moment, more important.
Laura writes:
The enormous sums spent on higher education don’t represent adoration of youth so much as adoration of institutions and a superstitious belief in their magical properties. I don’t mind selling out to the future. I do mind selling out to colleges which offer little of value that cannot be obtained for much less.
