Child Scare
'The Abandoned Generation' by Henry A. Giroux and 'Raising America' by Ann Hulbert
Reviewed by Nick Gillespie--WASHINGTON POST
Sunday, May 4, 2003; Page BW03
THE ABANDONED GENERATION
Democracy Beyond the Culture of Fear
By Henry A. Giroux
Palgrave. 234 pp. $24.95
RAISING AMERICA
Experts, Parents, and a Century Of Advice About Children
By Ann Hulbert
Knopf. 450 pp. $27.50
The next time you start to worry about today's kids, hit the pause button the "Girls Gone Wild" video, turn down the Eminem CD and consider the following:
They have sex less than they used to, reports the Kaiser Family Foundation, with the percentage of high schoolers who have had intercourse declining from 54 percent in 1991 to 46 percent in 2001. The federally funded Monitoring the Future Study informs us that 12th graders are using fewer drugs than they did 25 years ago. Among the Class of 2002, 25.4 percent said they'd used an "illicit" drug in the previous 30 days, an accepted measure of casual use. While that figure is up a bit from lows reached in the early '90s, it's still far smaller than the 37.2 percent reported by those now middle-aged stoners in the classes of 1979 and 1980. They're less prone to violent crime, too, with rates for non-homicide offenses well below early '90s peaks. As Mike Males, a researcher for the Justice Policy Institute has shown, between the early '70s and 2000, the juvenile homicide arrest rate per 100,000 youths ages 10 to 17 dropped 46 percent.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, kids today are more likely to go on to college, with about 63 percent of graduating seniors enrolling in some form of post-secondary education, up more than 10 percent from three decades back. While the poverty rate for children under 18 has ranged around 16 percent for the past 30 years, there's every reason to believe that the overwhelming majority of kids are doing better than ever.
Yet we still worry about them, don't we? The Abandoned Generation, by Henry A. Giroux, and Raising America, by Ann Hulbert, deal with different aspects of child-related anxiety.
Giroux, a professor of education at Penn State University and the author of several previous books on youth topics, rails against an America that he believes "is at war with young people." When not fetishizing kids via ads and marketing ploys, he says, we portray them as "a problem, a danger to adult society or, even worse, irrelevant to the future." The result, Giroux argues, is a "culture of fear" that denies kids any hope for a decent future.
Drawing on a wide range of sources, from the recent teen-girl movie "Ghost World" to Claude Brown's 1965 memoir Manchild in the Promised Land to French social theorist Jean Baudrillard, Giroux argues that these tendencies have been exacerbated by the "emergency time" mentality ushered in by the Sept. 11 attacks. In a gesture that will be readily familiar to academic readers, Giroux identifies the root cause of youth's problems -- and everyone else's, too -- as "an unchecked market authoritarianism" that has created "an age of global plunder." (His preferred reforms -- higher taxes, teachers who are critical of the system that pays them, etc. -- are also readily familiar.) As it relates to kids, the main result of this turn to "neoliberalism" is, says Giroux, that we are cutting public spending on youth, forcing them to fend for themselves in an unforgiving, increasingly "privatized" world that only Ayn Rand could love.
In a representative argument, he avers that "public schooling currently faces a crisis of unparalleled proportions" because it is "bereft of financial support." Even -- or perhaps especially -- if one agrees with his politics, such breathless claims undercut Giroux's larger case. Contrary to his laments about slashed school budgets, "overcrowded classrooms" and the like, the reality is quite different. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, per-pupil spending has risen consistently for years in the United States, reaching $8,830 for the 2000-2001 school year. In constant 2000-2001 dollars, that figure was $5,122 30 years ago. Similarly, the public school pupil/teacher ratio stands at around 15 students, an all-time low. There are many problems with public schools, but reduced funding is not one of them. Yet Giroux is antagonistic toward the most promising recent reforms of the school system. It's not surprising that he inveighs against vouchers as a stalking horse for privatizing education, but he is similarly set against public charter schools, even though both are highly popular among the poor and minority populations he rightly identifies as being most at risk.
More important, Giroux's grim starting point that we are "leaving most children behind" is simply insupportable. He is sadly correct that there are substantial, if limited, groups who face serious problems due to poverty and other issues. Yet by generalizing the problems that they face to all children, Giroux obscures the very people who are most at risk. Ironically, despite his desire to deconstruct the "culture of fear" that he believes leads to cynicism, he ends up reinscribing it in even more dire, and arguably more hopeless, terms.
Ann Hulbert's Raising America reflects a different sort of child-related anxiety. In writing a rich social history of parenting manuals in the 20th century, Hulbert found "an unexpected continuity in the child-rearing confusions that have accompanied industrial America's surge into secular, urbanized maturity as a technocratic, consumer culture." Each generation was characterized by an "odd couple" of dominant experts who took opposing stances that she terms "hard" and "soft" and that roughly correspond with "parent-centered" and "child-centered" approaches. The hard experts -- such as Luther Emmett Holt and John B. Watson -- believed in externally imposed structure and discipline. (Watson, author of the bestselling baby book in the early part of the 20th century, infamously advised parents to shake hands with, rather than kiss, their children.) The soft experts -- such as G. Stanley Hall and Arnold Gesell -- took a more Rousseauvian line that emphasized the unfolding of a child's internal development.
In the last half of the 20th century, the two positions were represented most starkly by the rock-hard Bruno Bettelheim, a pioneer in blaming the 1960s counterculture of permissive parenting, and the ostensibly squishy-soft Benjamin Spock, the most influential child-care guru of them all. Yet in Hulbert's sharp take, Spock actually "broke the mold by aiming for the middle" and "scrambl[ing] to become the firmer, parents-take-charge counterweight to his own original child-friendly gospel" even before Bettelheim emerged as a rival. Indeed, Hulbert attributes Spock's massive success in part to his ability to mirror perfectly parental ambivalence toward the hard and soft approaches. The author of a previous book on the writer Jean Stafford, Hulbert brings a huge amount of social scientific, historical, cultural and biographical detail to the subject, which makes for a fascinating read. That many of the main figures had scandalous personal and professional lives certainly helps keep things lively.
She also brings some real wisdom to the topic. In concluding that "neither the 'parent-centered' nor the 'child-centered' has ever 'won,' " Hulbert recognizes that parenting, like childhood itself, is an ongoing negotiation, one inherently filled with mistakes, successes and, alas, a great deal of anxiety. Such an understanding may offer one way to see our children and their social reality more clearly. ?
Nick Gillespie (gillespie@reason.com) is editor-in-chief of Reason magazine.
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