The People Hardest to Love
As I said before, I do not reprint any old article I run across on this website. Rather, they quite simply must meet my standards for excellence of content and style. And this one does. Reprinted from the CHEC Homeschool Update magazine and/or KevinSwanson.com, 1st QTR, 2006, director Kevin Swanson shares why the people that we live with are the people hardest to love and why the modern methods of age segregation just don't work.
Part One
I couldn’t believe my ears. As I listened to a speaker at our recent conference, he was encouraging the audience of homeschooling mothers and fathers to try teaching other people’s children. “You will be so much nicer to other people’s children than you would be to your own,” he said. “You’ll never yell at them and you’ll work much harder to prepare good lessons.” Shocking words to the ears of homeschooling parents? Shocking but true. In one sense, this is one of the best reasons to stop homeschooling, and yet in another sense, it is one of the best reasons to keep homeschooling.
Have you ever had a family over for dinner and their three-year-old child spills his cherry drink over three square feet of your plush white living room carpet? You may have noticed how your reaction to this little child is a little more controlled than the scene that played out the week before when your three-year-old spilled his cherry drink in the same living room.
The people who are closest to you are the people hardest to love. This maxim applies to people in your own family, your own support group, and your own church. Indeed it is easier to love children from other families or people from other churches, than it is to love those that live with you. But why? I would suggest that these are the people who have the greatest potential to hurt you. Their very “closeness” will increase the stakes of loss in the relationship. The fact that our children are close to us demands a sort of involvement on our part and this in itself perpetually challenges us out of our comfort zone. Relationships with our children constantly call us away from merely educating a child in a cold academic environment to a closer, nurturing, disciple-ing environment. But this involves grappling with the complicated issues of our own sin, forgiveness, discipline, and other things that test our love.
Love requires movement towards the ones we love. It is personal involvement. The Bible speaks often of Jesus as “moved with compassion” and then he always proceeds to involvement in the problems of others. It is one thing to “love” mankind through cold institutions, and another thing to visit a widow and lovingly disciple a little child. Ironically, hardly a man wrote more prolifically about love in the 18th century as Jean Jacques Rousseau. “No one ever had more talent for loving. I was born to be the best friend that ever existed,” he would write with no small measure of hubris. Yet, here was the man that abandoned all five of his own children on the steps of an orphanage, in order that he would have the time and energy to write the book on modern institutional education. His famous book, Emile, was entirely devoted to the subject of educating a child. In his book Rousseau and Revolution, the historian Will Durant summarizes the philosopher's thoughts on education: "Rousseau wanted a system of public instruction by the state. He prescribed many years with an unmarried tutor, who would withdraw the child as much as possible from parents and relatives." Thus came the birth of our modern education system, and the modern "liberal." Garrison Keillor recently made a sardonic observation on all of those who follow in the long tradition of Rousseau, "Liberals like Curt were kind and loving to stragners, at least theoretically, adn [sic] full of warm feeling for abstract entities such as The Poor and The Oppressed and The Minority, but liberals are hard as nails on their loved ones, preaching at them and holding them to impossible standards. . . Liberals love a crowd, from a distance, and they treat their families like [manure.]"
After two hundred years of building our institutions on the worldview of Rousseau, such things as relationships and love seem to be distant concepts anymore. If love is movement, our modern institutions have worked hard to create a fixed distance between persons in family, church, and community. This is pseudo-relationship, and it is the only way the world can function without the self-sacrifice of love. Safe distance between persons is carefully engineered to a specification such that one is forbidden to cross certain boundaries without catastrophe ensuing. Our educational systems themselves lay down those limits, and this inevitably impacts marriage, the family, and the church. The distance ensured by removing a child from relationship at two years of age into daycare, by segregating families, and by compartmentalizing groups of people in school and church by age, marriage status, their “special need,” etc. assures some form of pseudo-relationship. But it doesn’t do much to create opportunity for love to operate. The engineered distance set by our institutions keeps things safe and manageable, but it certainly does not allow for the movement of love. It doesn't allow for adjusting the proximity of the relationship.
The basis of relationship then in this instutionalized world is the social or economic slot. The basis of relationship in a relationship-based world is love. Love is able to transcend slots and provide for maximum diversity without losing the unity of the body.
Part One
I couldn’t believe my ears. As I listened to a speaker at our recent conference, he was encouraging the audience of homeschooling mothers and fathers to try teaching other people’s children. “You will be so much nicer to other people’s children than you would be to your own,” he said. “You’ll never yell at them and you’ll work much harder to prepare good lessons.” Shocking words to the ears of homeschooling parents? Shocking but true. In one sense, this is one of the best reasons to stop homeschooling, and yet in another sense, it is one of the best reasons to keep homeschooling.
Have you ever had a family over for dinner and their three-year-old child spills his cherry drink over three square feet of your plush white living room carpet? You may have noticed how your reaction to this little child is a little more controlled than the scene that played out the week before when your three-year-old spilled his cherry drink in the same living room.
The people who are closest to you are the people hardest to love. This maxim applies to people in your own family, your own support group, and your own church. Indeed it is easier to love children from other families or people from other churches, than it is to love those that live with you. But why? I would suggest that these are the people who have the greatest potential to hurt you. Their very “closeness” will increase the stakes of loss in the relationship. The fact that our children are close to us demands a sort of involvement on our part and this in itself perpetually challenges us out of our comfort zone. Relationships with our children constantly call us away from merely educating a child in a cold academic environment to a closer, nurturing, disciple-ing environment. But this involves grappling with the complicated issues of our own sin, forgiveness, discipline, and other things that test our love.
Love requires movement towards the ones we love. It is personal involvement. The Bible speaks often of Jesus as “moved with compassion” and then he always proceeds to involvement in the problems of others. It is one thing to “love” mankind through cold institutions, and another thing to visit a widow and lovingly disciple a little child. Ironically, hardly a man wrote more prolifically about love in the 18th century as Jean Jacques Rousseau. “No one ever had more talent for loving. I was born to be the best friend that ever existed,” he would write with no small measure of hubris. Yet, here was the man that abandoned all five of his own children on the steps of an orphanage, in order that he would have the time and energy to write the book on modern institutional education. His famous book, Emile, was entirely devoted to the subject of educating a child. In his book Rousseau and Revolution, the historian Will Durant summarizes the philosopher's thoughts on education: "Rousseau wanted a system of public instruction by the state. He prescribed many years with an unmarried tutor, who would withdraw the child as much as possible from parents and relatives." Thus came the birth of our modern education system, and the modern "liberal." Garrison Keillor recently made a sardonic observation on all of those who follow in the long tradition of Rousseau, "Liberals like Curt were kind and loving to stragners, at least theoretically, adn [sic] full of warm feeling for abstract entities such as The Poor and The Oppressed and The Minority, but liberals are hard as nails on their loved ones, preaching at them and holding them to impossible standards. . . Liberals love a crowd, from a distance, and they treat their families like [manure.]"
After two hundred years of building our institutions on the worldview of Rousseau, such things as relationships and love seem to be distant concepts anymore. If love is movement, our modern institutions have worked hard to create a fixed distance between persons in family, church, and community. This is pseudo-relationship, and it is the only way the world can function without the self-sacrifice of love. Safe distance between persons is carefully engineered to a specification such that one is forbidden to cross certain boundaries without catastrophe ensuing. Our educational systems themselves lay down those limits, and this inevitably impacts marriage, the family, and the church. The distance ensured by removing a child from relationship at two years of age into daycare, by segregating families, and by compartmentalizing groups of people in school and church by age, marriage status, their “special need,” etc. assures some form of pseudo-relationship. But it doesn’t do much to create opportunity for love to operate. The engineered distance set by our institutions keeps things safe and manageable, but it certainly does not allow for the movement of love. It doesn't allow for adjusting the proximity of the relationship.
The basis of relationship then in this instutionalized world is the social or economic slot. The basis of relationship in a relationship-based world is love. Love is able to transcend slots and provide for maximum diversity without losing the unity of the body.
(click here to read part two)
posted by Seth @ 11:30 AM
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