{"id":9897,"date":"2014-10-29T11:40:01","date_gmt":"2014-10-29T18:40:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/?p=9897"},"modified":"2016-09-06T11:16:27","modified_gmt":"2016-09-06T18:16:27","slug":"forming-a-moral-foundation-is-vital-in-educating-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/forming-a-moral-foundation-is-vital-in-educating-children\/","title":{"rendered":"Forming a Moral Foundation is Vital in Educating Children"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Virtuesby Anthony Esolen –
\nThe forming of a moral imagination is not something additional in the education of a child. It is the education of a child. <\/strong><\/p>\n

What is remarkable in our age is not that half of our citizens believe it is wrong to kill the child in the womb, the child whose existence, except in the rare case of rape, is owing to our own voluntary actions. That would be like congratulating ourselves for believing that it’s wrong to steal someone’s car, to lie under oath to hurt an enemy, to throw our aged parents into the street, or to desecrate churches.<\/p>\n

Where is the great moral insight? What’s remarkable instead is that half of us believe it is all right to snuff out the life of that child \u2013 because nothing must be allowed to interfere with our \u201cright\u201d to pursue pleasure, as we use the child-making thing as a sweating-off spa on our way to money, prestige, a five-bathroom mansion for two, a tenured chair in Women’s Studies, the mayoralty of Camden, another year of nights out on the town, whatever. <\/p>\n

You cannot spread pro-life icing on a cake made of flour and rat poison.\u00a0 Our children meet with rat poison everywhere.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

How have we come to this pass?\u00a0 Our imaginations are stunted or diseased, that’s how.\u2028 Let churchgoers beware.\u00a0 You cannot spread pro-life icing on a cake made of flour and rat poison.\u00a0 Our children meet with rat poison everywhere.<\/p>\n

Do they watch Friends <\/em>on television, that un-funny amoral \u201ccomedy\u201d about nihilist young urbanites trading depressions in the mattress with one another?\u00a0 Rat poison.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Do they watch movies like \u2013 well, the moronic Titanic, <\/em>wherein a shrewish girl and a pouty boy fornicate before they are swallowed by the deep blue sea?\u00a0 Rat poison.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Do their school teachers feed them such exalted lyric poetry as that of Sylvia Plath, imagining what it would be like to smash her sleeping husband’s head like a rotten pumpkin?\u00a0 Or the bogus Laramie Project, <\/em>making a hero out of a deeply disturbed young man, killed in a meth deal?\u00a0 Or Toni Morrison’s maudlin obsessions with race and adultery?\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Is it an endless cafeteria of ghouls, vampires, girl-murderers \u2013 Lord of the Flies, <\/em>without the severe moral imagination and the talent of William Golding?\u00a0 Lord of the Flies, Lady of the Flies, Cheerleaders of the Flies, Lifeguard of the Flies, Mr. Goodbar of the Flies, Fight Club of the Flies, Hunger of the Flies?\u00a0 <\/em>Rat poison, with that peculiar character of rat poison, that the more the critter consumes, the thirstier it grows.<\/p>\n

Vice is the addiction that mimics the habit of virtue.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Vice is the addiction that mimics the habit of virtue.\u00a0 One hour a week on Sunday does not flush out the strychnine.\u00a0 Theology lessons are band-aids when your arteries are porous inside.\u00a0 The forming of a moral imagination is not something additional <\/em>in the education of a child.\u00a0 It is the education of a child.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Your child sees a commercial for Planned Predators.\u00a0 The commercial baldly states that it doesn’t matter who your \u201cpartners\u201d are, how many you have, or what you do \u2013 because you <\/em>are the only one who has any say in the matter, and nobody <\/em>has the right to judge you.\u00a0 This is not the morality of a cad or a tramp.\u00a0 Cads and tramps have attacks of conscience.\u00a0 It is the bland oh-so-self-assured anti-morality of a demon.\u00a0 It is one hundred proof grain stupidity.\u00a0 It is distilled evil.\u00a0 Now, we want to raise children who will do more than say, \u201cI don’t agree with that.\u201d\u00a0 Wonderful enlightenment!<\/p>\n

We want to raise children who will understand and cherish the virtues of love and purity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

We want to raise children who would look upon anyone who uttered such a thing as they would look upon someone who would fish his food out of a septic tank: incomprehensible, base, inhuman, insane.\u00a0 That’s the negative.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Let me give the positive.\u00a0 We want to raise children who will understand and cherish the virtues of love and purity.\u00a0 Those virtues must not remain mere terms or notions.\u00a0 We must clothe them with flesh and blood.\u00a0 Consider the following scene from Victor Hugo’s masterpiece, Les Miserables.\u00a0<\/em> Two pure young people, Marius and Cosette, have long beheld one another from a distance.\u00a0 They have fallen in love, and finally, after many months and much seeking, the youth and the maiden meet and speak.\u00a0 Here is how Hugo describes what they do every evening:<\/p>\n

Throughout the month of May . . . in that poor, wild garden, under that shrubbery each day more perfumed and dense, two human beings composed of every chastity and every innocence, overflowing with all the felicities of Heaven, closer to archangels than men, pure, honest, intoxicated, radiant, glowed for each other in the darkness.\u00a0 It seemed to Cosette that Marius had a crown, and to Marius that Cosette had a halo.\u00a0 They touched, they gazed at each other, they clasped hands, they pressed close together; but there was a distance they did not pass.\u00a0 Not that they respected it; they were ignorant of it.\u00a0 Marius felt a barrier, Cosette’s purity, and Cosette had a support, Marius’ loyalty.\u00a0 The first kiss was also the last.\u00a0 Since then, Marius had not gone beyond touching Cosette’s hand, or her scarf, or her curls, with his lips.\u00a0 Cosette was to him a perfume, and not a woman.\u00a0 He breathed her.\u00a0 She refused nothing and he asked nothing.\u00a0 Cosette was happy, and Marius was satisfied.\u00a0 They were living in that ravishing condition that might be called the dazzling of one soul by another.\u00a0 It was that ineffable first embrace of two virginities within the ideal.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The forming of a moral imagination is not something additional in the education of a child. It is the education of a child.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Victor Hugo was a man well acquainted with the squalor of the streets, and the wicked things that people do to themselves and one another.\u00a0 His blood ran hot, not cold \u2013 hot with indignation against the wickedness, and hot with greathearted love for what is noblest in man; with what he would call the work of God in man.\u00a0 Our purveyors of rat poison have not witnessed one hundredth of the miseries and the sins that he witnessed!\u00a0 But they turn our children’s vision to what is dark and dead, and he raises our eyes to the everlasting hills, whence cometh our help.<\/p>\n

We want to raise boys like Marius and girls like Cosette.\u00a0 We cannot do it with tracts in church teaching and a sermon on Sunday, as needful as those things are.\u00a0 They may give us the moral, but they do not nourish the imagination.\u00a0 Without story, without flesh and blood, they flare in the ear but do not ring in the conscience.\u00a0 Hence the need for art and song, for stories and poetry.\u00a0 Jesus taught in parables.\u00a0 These are not just instruments.\u00a0 They are of the essence.<\/em><\/p>\n

HT: LifeSiteNews<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Christian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Anthony Esolen – The forming of a moral imagination is not something additional in the education of a child. It is the education of a child. What is remarkable in our age is not that half of our citizens believe it is wrong to kill the child in the womb, the child whose existence, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":497,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[149,68,43,15,157],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apologetics","category-christianity","category-family","category-moral-issues","category-wisdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/497"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9897\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}