Principal Stands up to Indulgent Parents

I first heard about this whilst driving the moving truck to (or from, I don't remember which) New Orleans a few days ago.

My new hero is the principal who canceled his school's senior prom, not just to prevent underage drinking and sex at post-event parties, but to make the kids and parents consider how they spend their money.

It is the best recent example of an authority figure standing up to both the culture of conspicuous consumption and of rights without responsibilities.

As usual with moral stands in this day and age, the message is mixed. Also, as usual in our culture, it is the religious right that is happy about this news. After all, the hallmark of our age is that so many are aware of the need for morality while at the same time, (1) most secularists pretend that man does not need morality while (2) religionists pretend that only blind faith can form the basis of morality. Both "sides" in this debate pretend that reason cannot determine what is right for man. As a result, both sides do everyone a disservice by failing to demonstrate that everyone needs a coherent moral code to live his life on this earth.

Although his views seem mostly good, the columnist, Peter A. Brown of the Orlando Sentinel, clearly sides with the religionists on this one. As with many sympathetic to the religious right, Brown is clearly not a medieval mystic who would have us all wearing hair shirts, flagellating ourselves, and drinking pus. He implicitly accepts aspects of the American Dream -- of a good life on Earth -- as good, while he explicitly accepts elements of Christian morality. As a result, his analysis has some good and bad aspects.

The principle flaw in Brown's analysis is evident when he says, "Hoagland rightly thought that there is something innately wrong with students spending $1,000 or more on their prom...." Brown is a moral intrinsicist. Spending "too much" money on one's kids is "innately" bad (meaning that he ultimately would have no objective standard for deciding how much is too much). Kids having access to drugs, alcohol, and sex is bad. But why? Brown gives the religion of the principal credit here, which stems from his intrinsicism and has the further effect of promoting the view that only religion is the answer to licentiousness. In truth, the answer to licentiousness is for more people to learn that morality has a rational basis and a practical application to one's life.

To get one thing out of the way. Yes. Of course -- so long as no one's rights are violated -- a parent has the right to spoil his kids rotten. Freedom includes the right to act foolishly. The question here is this: Is it right for a parent to overindulge a child? Should he help his child experience an orgy? The answer is no, but requires some consideration for the requirements of man's life. I am not going to make a complete argument here, but will hint at one.

The initial couple of paragraphs are mostly fine. The principal in question runs a parochial school, meaning a private school. Let's set aside the question of whether he overstepped his authority in canceling this event. In fact, let's assume for the sake of argument that this authority is part of his job description. As an advocate of a completely privatized educational system, I certainly find it conceivable that many schools would grant their principals such latitude, for one thing. The principal certainly acted on the premise that what he did was for the benefit of his charges and this is presumably what one would hire a principal to do.

So the principal, concerned that his school's prom is training his students to be irresponsible spendthrifts, cancels it. This sounds good in isolation, but we must do as Brown ought to have done and examine this in more detail. Let's consider just one set of examples.

When teenagers, or for that matter adults, think it is the norm to spend $200 on tennis shoes, $250 on blue jeans and $5 on a cup of coffee, it's no wonder our society has lost its sense of perspective.

To the coffee first. Regularly spending five bucks on a cup of coffee is so potentially ruinous to one's personal finances that there is now a popular phrase that captures the wastefulness of the practice: the latte factor. (The example at the link argues that one could cut out a daily latte of half this amount and save 630 smackers per year.) $5.00 coffee, to date myself, was unheard of when I was growing up, and credit cards for college students were rare. Now, both are common, and I can't help but wonder whether we are raising a generation of kids who are, for one thing, totally clueless about the value of money and undisciplined about spending it. But wait. There's much more.

Ditto for the fad clothing. Yes. When I was a kid, you could get tennis shoes for less than a couple hundred dollars. You can now, too. The fashion fads of my day were expensive, but were nowhere near this ridiculous. I may part ways with Smith here, as he seems principally against the materialism implicit in the large amounts of money involved. I see two dangers to children here. Aside from the missed opportunity to inculcate financial sense, being overindulgent in the realm of fashion constitutes a missed opportunity by a parent to teach a child to be independent of the crowd. But wait. There's more.

Yes. There is a fine line here. Spend too little money on your kids' clothes and they might experience ridicule to the point that mere social acceptance becomes a major goal, but to bend completely every time the winds of fashion change not only makes you, as a parent, look like a patsy, it teaches a child that conformity is very important. Extravagances like this should be paid for at least in part by the kids themselves. I wonder how many kids would be running around in 200 dollar shoes if it meant that they couldn't have something else.

As for materialism.... Things can't make you happy. This is not because some religious text says that they obstruct passage to the Pearly Gates, but because how one lives one's life -- one's moral character and pursuit of values -- ultimately determines whether one is happy. Will a kid who has been handed everything he wants all his life really appreciate any of it? Will he appreciate the relationship between a value and the action required to obtain the value? Will he be able to pursue goals rationally as an adult? Can he even have goals without the experience of deciding between things that make competing demands of him?

Note that -- although I personally find the idea of spending 200 dollars for a pair of sneakers patently ridiculous -- I am not railing about tennis shoes. In fact, I will use them as an example. Yes, Mr. Brown. We can have a culture where $200.00 shoes and opportunities to build character both abound.

Forget adulthood for a moment and let's look at just those bloody shoes. Consider three kids. One is simply given $200.00 shoes. Two others are told they have to earn $100 towards the shoes because their parents have budgeted $100.00 for footwear that school year. Both of these kids earn $100.00, but only one ends up with the shoes. The other one discovered model railroading while saving up and used the money for it instead, because he liked his hobby more than the shoes. What the other kids think of his shoes is put into its proper -- and very low -- place by the competing consideration of how much this kid enjoys building model railroads.

The first kid maybe doesn't even really care about the shoes, but simply wants to avoid standing out in the crowd. How has he been helped by his parents? He knows less about earning and saving money than the other two, and has probably been shielded from the need to stand up to his peers -- even for something so silly as what kind of shoes to wear! His parents have thus, in this child's mind, severed a value (the shoes) from the need to act to gain it. In doing so, his parents have retarded his development as an independent adult.

The other two kids learned: working to pay for what you want, saving money, making choices based on limited time/resources, and making choices based on what they want as opposed to what others think they should have. These lessons are all part of a greater whole, part of which will be experienced on an emotional level by the two kids who worked for what they wanted: These two kids will feel a sense of accomplishment impossible for the other one. Two pairs of shoes, but only one kid with a sense of pride about them and with the confidence developed from successfully pursuing a goal. It was the kid who paid for the shoes, not the one who got them for free, who made out like a bandit here.

It is this dissociation between value and action -- and not the availability of expensive merchandise per se -- that is so bad about our fad-driven, ostentatious culture. Surrendering to this culture on the part of a parent is to abdicate the most sacred obligation of parenthood: helping one's child become an independent adult. But to advocate an intrinsicist morality in reaction to such a culture is not the answer, for there is no relationship between a simple list of commands and how one lives one's life.

Consider a fourth kid. He wants the $200.00 shoes. His parents simply brand the shoes as "sinful" and make him wear something else. Has he been presented with the opportunity to see for himself how important the shoes really are to him? No. Suppose further that the kid is enterprising and saves up the money to buy the shoes himself. His parents make him return the shoes for the same reason they wouldn't buy them in the first place. This kid has just been taught that morality keeps him from having what he wants, even if he has earned it. If he learns this lesson consistently, he will be faced with this choice as an independent adult: scrap morality as an impediment to his happiness or scrap his happiness as an impediment to living morally. Morality has been set against practicality and the requirements for this boy's life.

Both the kid who has been simply handed the shoes and the kid who has been simply denied them have been denied the opportunity to learn the relevance of rational thought, making choices, and acting to obtain values to their daily lives. Your guess is as good as mine as to which has been psychologically crippled more. And both kids are, respectively, examples of being raised in an atmosphere of licentiousness and one of moral intrinsicism. Neither alternative is conducive to living a good life.

It is interesting that this article focuses mainly on the decision by a high school principal to ban an orgy-like prom. Within the context of that man's imperfect understanding of morality, I salute him for attempting to do the right thing. But I fear that, in addition to not having quite the right answer, he is too late anyway. The very morality he upholds -- intrinsicism -- is what has (directly or indirectly) made these kids want an orgy in the first place.

Kids raised too permissively (by adults who decided raising kids by this morality was too cruel or by adults who simply are not moral themselves) will go along with whatever the dominant culture says -- which is to have the orgy. They are not in the habit of thinking about anything important and will do what they feel like doing. The other kids, having a conflict between being "moral" and enjoying their lives will be faced with the same choice I described above, only the orgy will fall in the "happiness" column. As will booze and drugs. On what rational basis will they be able to decide not to have the orgy? None. There is no answer to them to the question of "Why not?" that makes a lick of practical difference in their lives.

Why not get drunk along with a bunch of other inexperienced drinkers? Why not have sex while in such a state? These are the kinds of questions that would, I am afraid, elicit gales of laughter from most of these kids and many adults besides. That's too bad for them. It would take a long time to argue against these things, and so I won't. I will have to offer my own experience as a counterexample of how of the middle two kids might have reacted to the prospect of attending an orgy.

I was not really any of the kids in this story. I was a fifth kid: I was the poor one who threw a paper route for spending money. I attended parochial schools with more affluent kids who were as extravagant as the day permitted. I was very repressed in those days, having had Catholic morality drummed into me pretty well despite my doubts about religion. But I also had a healthy respect for reason that happened alongside the happy circumstance of a lack of affluence. My parents could not afford the kind of clothes most of my classmates wore. I took much less flack for that than I feared and quickly learned that fashion wasn't really such a big deal. And by the time I was earning my own money, I was buying model railroad stuff rather than clothes. I would have laughed at the idea of sinking even 50 bucks into a pair of tennis shoes.

I was a teetotaler, but not because I regarded drinking as sinful. I simply didn't like the lousy beer. And even after I learned about mixed drinks, the thought of getting plastered had no appeal to me. I thought drunks were idiots and had no desire to join them. And why end up puking later on? And the really loud music I heard at the few parties I did attend took most of the fun out of them: I couldn't talk to anyone. Promiscuity turned me off, too. I remember thinking, of a girl I knew around that time who was reputedly such a complete floozy that the "conquest" would have been, emotionally, about like being licked by a dog. Laugh all you want, but I wanted more than that.

I was not exactly a budding John Galt, but the good fortune of being slightly poor and having parents who taught me early on to think about the consequences of my actions went a long way in saving me from the poverty-stricken and soul-withering culture of empty material excess we live in today -- and from making the mistake of "rebelling" against it merely by taking orders.

The principal was trying to do the right thing, but when most kids already want to attend an orgy, the cause is all but lost.

-- CAV