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Related source » “Nobody Gets Married Any More, Mister”
Welcome to our urban high schools, where kids have kids and learning dies.
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]
“Urban teachers face an intractable problem, one that we cannot spend or even teach our way out of: teen pregnancy. This year, all of my favorite girls are pregnant, four in all, future unwed mothers every one. There will be no innovation in this quarter, no race to the top. Personal moral accountability is the electrified rail that no politician wants to touch.”
— GERRY GARIBALDI, Winter 2011 (city-journal.org)
Fer shur, you've heard all this before. But have you really heard it? Have you heard it with comprehension? I doubt it.
As big as this socio-economic problem is, it is just part of a larger problem, of morality. And even that is an understatement of its gravity. At bottom, modern society has abandoned its link with our traditional inter-generational knowledge-base. Not only are children having children; children are no longer able to access the lessons learned by their ancestors in that most important source of societal learning — the school of hard knocks.
Why? Because today's children's parents are children whose parents had never been taught those lessons themselves. And arguably the most important lesson of all, the concept of personal accountability, has been obliterated from the consciousness of our typical family unit. I don't believe I am overstating this case. If you read my contention carefully, your comprehension will register the all-important qualifier "typical".
Our typical family unit today is stressed by various shortages. Most units focus on shortage of money, which is understandable since, as wise men have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt, money is the closest approximation to the one resource that truly can not be recycled — time. But, as wise men have also demonstrated repeatedly, money isn't everything. Neither am I setting you up for that tired refrain popularized by Vince Lombardi, namely, "It's the only thing".
Of equal importance to money, and perhaps even more important, is a basic understanding of how groups of people larger than the nuclear family have managed to survive ten thousand generations of competition for access to finite amounts of natural resources. By and large, it has been accomplished in a series of fits and starts and the very gradual accumulation of an inter-generational knowledge-base of traditions, morals, ethics, and ultimately, personal accountability.
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