What Is Their Children Learning?

Another Labor Day, another school year, and with these another chapter in the life of this family.  Now that my mother is secure in her cozy studio and free of the burden of ownership, it is up to my brother and me to sell the modest rancher we called home for nearly fifty years, long after we each had established our own homesteads.

Mom has finally agreed to let go of Mountains O’ Things, and here we are muttering and grumbling as we try to navigate through the books, knick-knacks, sheet music, a Veg-O-Matic, old report cards (we won’t open those), pumps from 1960 and post-war purses from Europe (because American leather is just not the same quality).

Mom!! What are we going to do with all this stuff?!!

A small tapestry still hangs in a living room corner, a pretty little petit-point of a poem, penned by Dr. Dorothy Law Nolte and mounted with love in 1962, entitled  “Children Learn What They Live.” During most of our childhood that little work of art remained in place, unobtrusively at home among a few rotating Masters’ prints, school art projects and family photos.  Charlie and I and our younger sister took it for granted, never seemed to notice it, and went on with our coloring, our hopscotch, our coming of age, our inevitable rebellion, our reconciliation, our college days, and our young adult preoccupation with doing things better than Mom and Dad had done.

Alas, our day of reckoning came.  We suddenly recalled the silent words embroidered on that burlap in the corner.  They’d come back to haunt us and inspire us at every turn in the rearing of Lisa, Marianne, Aaron, Nathaniel, Adrian, Gabrielle, Alexis, Dylan, Estella and Elena.

I thought everyone grew up with one of those corny little samplers hanging somewhere in their homes.  I guess not, because it seems a few too many of our contemporaries have missed out on its inescapable truth:  Children Learn What They Live. How I wish those parents would understand that when a child lives with intolerance of diverse opinions, he learns tyranny; when a child lives in a sheltered cocoon of ideas, she learns NOT to evaluate the world of ideas around her.

Such is the sad case when parents keep their children from listening to the “propagandist” message from our (that means all of us, lest they secede from the union) president.  They don’t want President Obama indoctrinating children with his socialist ideas that an educated society is a stronger society, that individuals and the world will ultimately benefit from greater knowledge about things and about each other.

Since the days of Fallout Shelters, of John F. Kennedy’s Council on Physical Fitness, Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty,  Ronald Reagan’s War On Drugs, Barbara Bush’s Literacy Project, and so on, school children from every decade have been indoctrinated by a President’s message. How nice it would have been to opt-out of gym class all those years, but I was told to respect the mission of the administration who assured us that able bodied boys and girls are healthy and eventually make for good soldiers.  Most of us agreed with only half of that, and we grew up evaluating our stance while sweating it out in hideous subordinating uniforms during the 600 yard dash.

I hate to imagine the consequences when children learn from their school principals that contempt for leadership is now acceptable.

Charlie and I know exactly what we will do with this bit of faded fabric that proved to be our most profound indoctrination.  We will copy and frame it for every one of our descendants, and put them in storage.  Then someday, as the kids and grandkids are sorting through our vinyl record albums, college textbooks, suede moccasins from 1970, roach clips, the Veg-O-Matic, frayed denim and real-paper birthday greetings, they can each say they’ve found a little treasure in the midst of all that trash, and pass it on.