I think there’s a lot to be said for the maxim, attributed variously to Aristotle, Ignatius, and Hitler, along the lines of “give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.” You have their entire childhood to build a foundation; all the college can do is paint the house.
At the same time, and I speak here as a parent whose oldest starts college next year, part of what I’m paying all that money for is to “swim in the shark tank of an antagonistic culture that is toxic to [my] dearly held beliefs.” I don’t want her to come back a white supremacist (particularly since she isn’t white!), but one of my fundamental values IS to question everything, so I want her to actively disagree with me.
But yeah . . . if she comes home next Christmas and she’s a zombie, accepting whatever they tell her . . . I think I’d be upset with that.
I find it absolutely repugnant, crossing the line into child abuse /“endangering the welfare of a child” for a parent to fully indoctrinate their child into a hate group ideology and mind control going so far as to pull them out of public grade school so they won’t be exposed to others who think and look different than they do.
Children are human beings with their own souls and minds that distinctly differ from their parents. Parents trying to control the entire mind and way of life of a child to propagate a hate agenda that has no basis in reality is sick. Its called brainwashing. It is not called love. Exploiting your child like this man did was truly sick.
At some point his son was going to be exposed to other people who look, live, act, and think differently and the son was going to form his own opinions. This would have happened in 3rd grade but the father went to great lengths to make sure his son had no exposure to other mindsets or people. In this case, the father just prolonged the eneviatable so he could profit off of and exploit his son in the meantime. Thats not love, thats not good parenting, thats most likely a clinical psychological disorder.
The boy is lucky to have gotten out, but my guess is he will suffer repercussions his entire life from this early child abuse by his father.
The only thing I ask is that my children aren’t afraid to discuss varying viewpoints and defend the positions they take. I’m not too worried that their views will change in ways that differ from the way they are raised mainly because my views have taken my lifetime to be made and honed. I will challenge them. Not to change their minds but rather to be sure they really understand their positions and understand what an opposing argument might look like. I don’t abide name calling and have told them so. If the discussion devolves into calling people name then I’ll be disappointed. If they find they can’t argue their point then perhaps they should reconsider their position or learn more about it to enhance their argument.
One thing I’m fairly certain is that five years from now the opinions they have will change even if only a little. Life has a way of clarifying things for you. Oh and so will mine.
One of the elements that really struck me was related to this quote from the article:
“Matthew decided his best chance to affect Derek’s thinking was not to ignore him or confront him, but simply to include him. “Maybe he’d never spent time with a Jewish person before,” Matthew remembered thinking.”
One simple act was all it took to start Derek down the path of questioning his belief system. What if Matthew hadn’t made this gesture? Truly goes to show how one small action can be so powerful.
One interesting point to note in the article the OP posted is that is wasn’t really the teaching of the school that changed Derek. It was a classmate inviting him to dinner and then a group of diverse fellow students who got to know him and debated with him. If was only after this group opened his eyes that he started really taking in what was being taught at his university.
I was using College to include “the college culture”. The question is would Derek have turned if he had gone to Liberty University or BYU or Hillsdale? Would he have met the friends he made at the New College of Florida who influenced him gently but decisively, if he had gone to another college?
Shouldn’t the LAC get the credit for fostering such an environment and attracting such students that made this possible? That is what prompted me to ask the question. Looks to me that from Don Black’s perspective as a father, sending his kid to NCF was the biggest mistake of his life. His parents actually paid NCF and put Derek in an environment that challenged his beliefs and eventually turned him against the white nationalist agenda.
Should a Jewish/Muslim/Christian/Hindu/Buddhist parent pay to send their child to a college where exposure to contrary viewpoints and alternative ideas could destroy their child’s faith?
Should a liberal family send their child to a conservative college that could turn them into an arch conservative.
I am wondering how other parents are thinking thru such issues. I know we all want our kids to reason and think thru things and grow as human beings, but would it be OK if as part of this process they completely reject what we consider “our” core identity?Wouldn’t that hurt a lot? After all aren’t our values and beliefs core to who we are as human beings?
My parents didn’t “send me” to college as I did it all on my own. But had somehow I come home after college as a hard-core conservative or religious fundamentalist, they would have been disappointed.
My parents did send me to a Catholic k-8 school despite my mom being extremely anti-Catholic and my dad having left the church long ago (it’s a long story for why I went there but it was necessary to do at the time). I know it really, really bothered my mom when I demanded to go through the Catholic rites but she let me do it. She trusted that I would make my own choices later on when not influenced by enormous peer pressure and she was right. Their values won out and I quickly rejected religion upon leaving the school.
I don’t have children (yet?) but I wouldn’t pay a dime for them to go to a religious college. If they wanted to go at it on their own, fine, but I won’t support it with my money.
In your opinion, would it right for a Creationist parent to tell their child, that “I will not pay to send you to a school which will make you question that the earth is a few thousand years old?. If you want to do that, pay for it yourself”
Well, if your family faith included hate, then I’d say good riddance to that particular set of “values”. Let’s not pretty this up by trying to normalize racism and hate, shall we?
@romanigypsyeyes Thank you for your perspective. Are you making this exception for religion or are you saying that there are some values that are so important that every parent should be expected to support them with their money even if they are personally dead set against it?
@CollegeAngst "In your opinion, would it right for a Creationist parent to tell their child, that “I will not pay to send you to a school which will make you question that the earth is a few thousand years old?. If you want to do that, pay for it yourself”
That is exactly what my parents said and I did pay for it myself and I came home an atheist.
With an exceedingly few exceptions, this is IMO a false equivalence for the following reasons:
Most Americans who were surveyed identified themselves as not only believing in God, but as Christians.
Christianity, especially the fundamentalist evangelical kind dominates many regions of the country and its politics. They also have a strong influence on national politics as illustrated by political-oriented groups such as the "Christian Coalition" founded by Pat Robertson. In fact, that influence has only started to wane in the last eight or so years and the verdict may still not be out as they still are heavily dominant in many local/state politics....such as the rural area where my Mississippi relatives reside.
We haven't gotten to the point where being publicly agnostic/atheist is a non-factor when running for public office...including the presidency. To a large extent, being publicly agnostic/atheist still serves as a lightening rod/serious impediment to running for public office in the same ways that say....being Catholic was to running for president up until the late '50s or being non-White and/or female up until very recent times.
Our society in practice still often privileges those who are religious/believe in a God(s) over those who aren’t sure(agnostic)/don’t(atheist).
Many of the most militant atheists/agnostics IME tend to be those who end up being such as a reaction to being raised in highly restrictive strict fundamentalist religious families/homes/areas or personally experiencing/witnessing ethical/moral hypocrisy* on the part of religious clergy/highly loud and proud overbearing religious family members/neighbors while growing up.
Those who grew up in environments where atheism/agnosticism was accepted as no big deal tend to not be nearly as militant IME.
I.e. Clergy molesting kids, running fraudulent scams against parishioners, getting caught by authorities possessing child pornography, etc.
*The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false. *
Of Course not. But one of my core values is that I can empathize with a human being without sympathizing with their beliefs or actions. As a parent, I would never want any parent, even a person with repugnant views like Don Black to go through the pain of being estranged from their child. That is not normalizing hate or racism. It is just finding common connection with him as a parent and if you read the article (his white nationalist views not withstanding) he was quite traumatized by this parting of ways with Derek.
Exactly, MotherOfDragons. And Don Black did it to himself when he raised his child with an unsupportable degree of dogma.
“As a parent, I would never want any parent, even a person with repugnant views like Don Black to go through the pain of being estranged from their child.”
As a parent, I would never want any child to go through the pain of having to choose a repugnant and ethically hideous dogma in order to appease and gain approval from a parent. The one thing I commend Don Black and his wife for, is having raised a son strong enough to stand that pain as an independent adult, and do the right thing in the end.
It’s one thing to be a super-empath and care about the suffering of someone who doesn’t really deserve it (Don Black)…it’s commendable to have that level of compassion for everyone. But not so commendable to go so far to relieve Don Black’s suffering by granting him the right to cripple his own child’s intellectual and ethical development. And what about the suffering of all the people who are hurt from hate groups? Is Don Black’s self-imposed pain more important than the pain of these victims?
Colleges and Universities are not supposed to be religious cults, including those with religious affiliation. Colleges and Universities are places for people to investigate many paths to truth, including/emphasizing scientific ones. Any dogma that cannot withstand scientific scrutiny is not worth raising a human being in, IMO. That said, I believe religeons can contain and express powerful truths understood on metaphorical /faith levels untouched by the physical world, so I’m not anti-religion, per se. But if a belief system can be debunked so easily by the light of facts and multiple viewpoints shining on it, it seems that expecting a child to stay forever in that bubble is a ridiculous and (hopefully doomed) endeavor.
If your values and tenets are based on firm logical and humane footing, there shouldn’t be any risk. If you kid has been taught how to think (not just what to think) before leaving for college, then don’t worry.
Both questions IMO assign schools and to an extent campus cultures more power than they actually have on most students from what I’ve seen and experienced.
Some counterexamples I can think off of the top of my head:
My public magnet high school wasn’t very outwardly political institutionally when I attended. Up until sometime in the mid-late '80s, most students tended to lean more to the left than the right. One illustration of this was accounts from several 70’s and '80s alums at how FSAs(Federal Service Academies) weren’t very popular among most of the best and brightest in their graduating classes because of the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Even so, there were several classmates from their classes who applied and accepted admission to the FSAs.
It became the near opposite when I arrived as the majority of students when I attended…especially the vocal majority tended to be libertarian-right oriented who worshiped Ayn Rand and other libertarians of their ilk.
Some of this was due to a rebellious reaction by HS classmates against their ex-hippie/counterculture radical liberal parents and was known by many of us as “pulling an Alex P. Keaton” after Michael J. Fox’s character in the '80s sitcom Family Ties.
This also played a factor in the decisions of some older and younger HS classmates to opt to apply to and accept admission to the Federal Service Academies/ROTC scholarships…a way to spite their ex-hippie/counterculture parents and their political/social values.
That and FSAs by the time I was in HS were perceived by most HS classmates as being the equivalent of their Ivy/elite U peers in terms of prestige and correspondingly much more competitive for admission than it was for alums from the late '70s/early-mid-'80s.
Even so, there were some radical lefty activists from my era including Feminist Jessica Valenti.
Another example from Oberlin, my undergrad alma mater: extreme conservative pundit Michelle Malkin who is a '92 graduate. And this was in a period when Oberlin was extremely radically progressively left…more so than in my time in the mid-late '90s according to older alums/Profs and much more so compared to the Oberlin younger alums experienced after 2000 or nowadays*.
Whereas most Obies in the early-00s and later accept and even embrace being identified as Democrats, back when I attended, even being a Green meant one was considered "too right wing/conventional" by most undergrad classmates. And they considered the two main political parties to be much more right-wing than that. This is illustrated by older college classmates complaining on my FB page that presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein are "too centrist/conservative" for them.