“If For No Other Reason But That I Said So”
(This speech was addressed to students, their parents and teachers at an academic awards ceremony.)
Ceremonies like this one are a way for one generation to pass the ideals and values of a society to the next generation. On this day, your teachers sit up here as a visual reminder of the responsibility adults have for your upbringing. We have a responsibility to teach you right from wrong; to teach you that your integrity matters; to teach you that hard work and doing your best are much more important than you imagine; to teach you that accepting the consequences of your actions is necessary and right. These are the lessons our parents taught us. They are the lessons we are supposed to teach you. But it seems that fewer and fewer adults are teaching these lessons to their children.
When I was a young, hairless child during the Civil War, my father established very clear limits to my behavior. He had a clear sense of right and wrong, and he didn’t much care whether I agreed with him. He gave commands. When I was 11, he ordered me to get a job delivering newspapers. When I asked why, he said, “If for no other reason but that I said so.” My whining was irrelevant. My unhappiness was irrelevant. It didn’t matter whether I liked him or not. His love for me was expressed in his desire for me to grow up with certain values—values that he believed I needed in order to survive in a hard world.
The world is still hard, but more and more adults are abdicating their responsibility to instill in you the character traits that you need to survive. Recently, I read a novel called Reservation Road by John Schwartz. I’ll read you a couple of passages that illustrate exactly what I mean. The story begins with a family returning from a concert—a father and mother with their two young children. They stop at a gas station to get some wiper fluid and let the little girl go to the bathroom. The father notices that his son, Josh, is standing very close to the road. The father is the narrator, and he says:
“Move away from the road, Josh.”
Josh looked at the ground and stuffed his hands in his pockets; it was clear that I’d let him down yet again, had, at some fundamental level, failed to respect his sense of himself. My face grew warm. “Hey,” I said with false lightness…
“I’m not a baby, dad,” he said to the ground.
“Of course you’re not,” I said. “You’re my son. And I’m just being your father the best way I know how. Forgive me?”
He was silent, looking at his feet. When he finally looked up again, I almost smiled with guilty relief…
“We’re out of wiper fluid. Why don’t we go see if they have any?”
He hesitated, then shook his head.
I wanted to warn him to stay clear of the road, but I’d learned my lesson. “Hold the fort,” I told him instead, and walked toward the lighted window [of the garage].
Needless to say, another car comes racing around the curve on which the gas station sits and kills Josh. Later in the book, the father makes this discovery: “I had left Josh standing by the side of the road because I lacked the courage to tell him not to. I turned my back on him to save myself the trouble. That was the truth. And it was beyond forgiveness.”
For me, this story captures the essence of the change in the relationship between adults and children in our society. Adults like my father would have told Josh to get away from the road “if for no other reason but that I said so.” And Josh would be alive. But Josh’s father couldn’t bear to see Josh’s “sense of himself” suffer. He feared Josh’s resentment. He obviously loved Josh, but he lacked the courage to be an adult. In fact, he treated Josh more like an adult than a child.
Children are not miniature adults. They are children. If adults fail to behave like adults, if we fail to teach our children right from wrong, if we fail to insist that they do what we know to be in their best interest because we’re afraid they won’t like us, our children will never become adults. Sadly, many adults have come to fear their children—fear their displeasure, fear hurting “their sense of themselves,” fear incurring their dislike. Instead of insisting you do what we know you ought to do, we apologize for hurting your feelings; we try to reason with you or cajole you into doing what we know you should do: “We’re out of wiper fluid. Why don’t we go see if they have any?” When you reject these feeble strategies, we walk away because we haven’t the guts to grab you and yank you away from the road.
As a result of our desire to shield you from a nanosecond of unhappiness, we are also increasingly becoming a nation of adults who want to protect you from the consequences of your behavior. Not only do we fail to teach you right from wrong, we fling ourselves between your misbehavior and the punishment you need to suffer. In essence, we prevent you from learning right from wrong on your own—from your mistakes. I’ll tell you a true story.
New York City. It’s a week after Christmas vacation. Eleven students clatter into their upper level French class as their teacher M. Gaudet glares out the window. Behind him, on his desk, is a stack of papers—the eleven essays his students wrote during vacation. M. Gaudet sighs. Having found the source books, he already knows that six of his students have plagiarized, and he is certain the others have also cheated. By the end of the class, M. Gaudet is exhausted, but all eleven have confessed. M. Gaudet turns the matter over to the headmaster, who calls the parents. The students are put on probation.
Eight of the families are angry at the school. If the whole class cheated, the teacher must be at fault. He should throw out the assignment and allow the students to make it up. The parents heat the phone lines with their rage and rattle their lawyers at the school. At the meeting they have demanded with the headmaster, the parents of two of the students are particularly indignant because they have each paid $100 to different people to write their child’s essay. They insist that their situation is different: the others plagiarized; their two children submitted original essays. One of these mothers hires a lawyer to take the school to court. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out what these parents are teaching their children.
More and more, this is becoming a typical story. Adults can’t say no to their children. And they struggle to protect their children from anyone else who says no. Parents attack teachers who say, “No, Bill, your work has not earned a B,” or “No, Mary, you can’t receive a diploma because you failed English,” or “No, George, you can’t return to school because you were carrying cocaine.”
I’m sure many of you young people think this parental protection is just great. You’d prefer not to be held accountable for your behavior. You don’t want to be punished. You don’t want to be told what to do—until the car comes around a curve and is bearing down on you. It’s difficult for you to see the damage being done until it’s too late. It’s like smoking: it feels good until you are old and have cancer. But you know something? I believe many of you sense that this protection is wrong. I think you really want adults to grow up and act like adults. I’ll tell you one more story.
Charles Wilson is a teacher at Columbia Union College. He teaches English to freshmen who were never told no by their high school teachers. They were passed from grade to grade despite having no ability to write. Here’s what Wilson wrote about his experience with these students:
As the semester progressed, I learned that many of my own students felt betrayed by teachers who had let them sail on through. What they wanted from me…was absolute honesty…[A]t the end of the semester [the students wrote an essay on] social promotion [the practice of promoting students based on their age, not their achievement]. What I found most striking…was [that] almost all of the students…argued that they had not been helped by being allowed to drift from hollow success to hollow success…[A]s a final paragraph, [one student] appended…”a note to teachers: please fail those who are not prepared; they need to learn.”…what I remember most about reading those essays was how sad they made me feel. They were the words of young men and women who had been misled time and again, and who now wanted to make honest successes of themselves.
I hope that this day reminds the adults of our responsibility to the next generation. I hope the day will also prompt you young people to demand that the adults in your life behave like adults. It’s time for a new revolution. During my youth, we rebelled against adults because they were authoritarian and incapable of empathy. Today, you need to rebel against those of us who fear authority and have become paralyzed by too much empathy. There’s a car that’s out of control rounding the curve, and it’s coming at you. You need to get away from the road—if for no other reason but that I said so.
This is one of many talks that Alden Blodget presented at various assemblies at the school where he was assistant head and an English teacher. If you are interested in reading others, they are collected and published in a book, Dead Man Talking, which is available from Amazon at this link.