This is a post that deserves a much longer exposition at some point, but for now, this short post will have to do.
There’s an astonishing lack of people feeding themselves in today’s culture. Thinking about it from day 1 of an average person’s life:
Parents feed their children most of the knowledge they have from age 0-6.
Schools, video games, and TV give children most of the knowledge they have from age 6-18.
Colleges give people most of the knowledge they have from 18-21.
There are steps along the way in all of these where the child has opportunity to learn outside the normal institutions, but the most natural path is to be fed by other things.
This is a huge problem and perhaps one of the largest problems with society. Children are not only being fed knowledge from people who may or may not be right, but they are not being taught how to feed themselves. This starts a chain reaction in which those same people who never learned how to feed themselves start being the ones teaching the new generation…you see the problem?
It’s time to start teaching kids how to feed themselves. Give guidance, but let them learn. Love them and keep them from what you must, but let them understand their own way so that you can encourage what is good and discourage what is not.
If we continue to live life never teaching the next generation how to feed themselves, we’ll continue ending up with generations of people who have no opinion on anything but force themselves to have opinions for the sake of picking a side.
Conviction in beliefs will be gone, and what will be left is a big ball of people who decide things based on feeling alone and no basis for their decisions. Extreme words but this is one possible outcome of how things could go.
I tend to not be pessimistic and believe the next generation will shape up and start to come alive again, but you never know..