The Missing Half Of Our Children's Education

Both good values and good work skills can be
learned at a very young age.

Teach children how they should live, and they will remember it all their life.
Proverbs 22:6 (Good News Translation)

The book of Proverbs was intended not only to teach children good character, but to help them learn habits and life skills needed to be contributing members of their community. It concludes with a description of a "virtuous woman," one who conducts a profitable business along with skillfully managing a busy, hardworking household.

During the Great Depression many rural families suffered extreme hardships due to low prices for their farm products as well as from the effects of drought and the Dust Bowl that ravaged many parts of the country. But farm families were generally better off than their urban counterparts, since they knew how to grow, harvest and preserve much of the food essential for survival. Every member of the family was vital to the work of cultivating garden plots, taking care of fruit trees and berry patches and caring for the animals that provided meat, eggs and milk for many of their meals. Most of their clothes were sewn by hand or made with treadle sewing machines, then patched and made to last as long as possible.

I was born at the very end of that era, but learned early on that I was a valued and needed part of our family's farming enterprise. From as long as I can remember, I was apprenticed by my parents and seven older siblings in learning to do whatever work necessary to help make ends meet.

Today children grow up learning primarily how to be consumers rather than actual producers and providers of needed services. As a result of the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of large scale manufacturing, most are separated from their parent's workplaces and are unable to learn their parents' work skills. Even farming operations now tend to require massive acres of land and complex equipment for the large scale production of grain, meat or other specialty crops. In other words, they have become more like efficient food factories than family-centered production systems meeting their own and their neighbors' needs.

As a result, children today are a significant drain on their family's finances. It now costs an estimated $233,610 to raise a child through age 17 in a US middle-income family of four, according to a report by the US Department of Agriculture.

In earlier times, newborns were more likely to be regarded as welcome additions to the family work force, as extra kitchen or laundry workers, or additional plow hands. And in villages and towns all over the US children were served as apprentices and helpers in their family-run bakeries, tailor shops, shoe repair businesses and multiple other enterprises often attached to, or next to, their dwellings.

The educational benefits of this arrangement were enormous, and our current educational institutions, either at home and in our consolidated schools, are failing to provide anything comparable to it.

In our own Shenandoah Valley, once known as the "Breadbasket of the South," most of us would starve without access to supermarkets, restaurants and fast-food establishments. At a recent local science fair, our granddaughter and one of her friends were the only students among over a hundred entries who had an exhibit featuring a life science--a home made incubator hatching some baby chicks in real time.

Were we to experience a serious economic downturn, our Old Order Mennonite neighbors, whose children receive only eight years of formal education, will have many more of the fundamental skills needed for their survival and wellbeing than the rest of us.

So when and how can we teach more of the lost art of gardening, food processing and food preserving and preparation skills that may become more and more necessary for all of us? And believe me, our children may be much more eager learners than we imagine. They don't hate work, they just don't like boring, repetitious work, like the rest of us. Traditionally, much of their creative play has been in imitation of adult work. They love making things, creating things.

Not that we will not always remain consumers who benefit from others' work. Consuming remains a necessary half of any economic system. But the other half of our focus, at home as well as in our schools, must be in training our children to become creative and effective producers.

In Robert Bly's 1990 book, "Iron John--A Book about Men," he writes,

"by the middle of the twentieth century in Europe and North America a massive change had taken place: the father was working, but the son could not see him working. Throughout the ancient hunter societies, fathers and sons lived and worked together... in all these societies, which apparently lasted for thousands of years,  the son characteristically saw his father working at all times of the day and all seasons of the year. When the son no longer sees that, what happens? ...a hole appears in the son's psyche."