Stress and Process

My eldest son, Will, is a senior in high school this year. For all of the things that he does or doesn't do that drive his mother and I crazy, I have to admit that he has done a truly remarkable job in school. He has made good grades, challenged himself in terms of the workload and stayed out of trouble. Because of these things he is now in a position to entertain some exciting options for the next step in his life. Given this, you might expect our family to be celebrating and enjoying this final year that Will is living at home.

And there is some of this. But the joy seems to be increasingly competing with stress. The stress is coming through something that Will's high school counselors have termed the college-application process.

A full year ago, the school sponsored an informational meeting to make sure that the parents of the junior-class were sufficiently anxious about college preparation. One of the counselors began the meeting by saying, "Your children are getting ready to begin the college-application process. As parents, I am sure that all of you are already stressing." I remember thinking to myself, "actually no; but thanks for getting me started."

Last night, it dawned on me that I actually am sort of stress about all this. I suppose that this is fair and probably even expected. My son is getting ready for the next step in his life and his mother and I certainly want it to go well for him. So if I am stressed about this, I figure that is either my prerogative or my fault. And I can appreciate that. What I can't appreciate is seeing that my son is stressed as well.

I certainly want him to be awake. I want him to be responsible for getting the information. I want him to fill out the applications and attend to the logistical expectations and deadlines. But the thought of him being stressed out not only makes me sad, it actually angers me. Will has done the work. He has put in the time and effort demanded by the high school process. So it gripes me to imagine that the reward for this would be a new level of stress tied now to the next process.

I suspect that part of my anger here has to do with this whole language of process. [See me last blog entry] The suggestion that education can be reduced to some kind of process is equally appalling and familiar.

In addition to my work here in the parish, I have also had the opportunity to work as a part-time instructor at Appalachian State University. For a number of years, I taught in the School of Education at ASU. The course was entitled, "Foundations of Education," and was required of all education majors prior to their student teaching. In teaching those courses, I learned something disturbing about college students. I learned that many of them approached their classes, and their education generally, as a means-to-an-end. That is, most of my students were far more interested in their grade then they were in whatever it was that they might learn in the course. The revelation should not have surprised me because many students go to college to get the degree to get the job... It was just disappointing to learn that teachers do the same thing. How depressing to consider that the people who would be teaching my children were already cynical about education.

Acknowledging this, I would make it a point to explain to them that we teach who we are. That is, their own appreciation for learning, or lack thereof, will not be lost on their own students. Furthermore, I explained that their own students were likely to treat them and the classes that they would soon be teaching in the same way that they treated me and the course that they were currently taking. Some of them seemed to get it--the irony of representing something that you can't be bothered with. But the vast majority either didn't understand or didn't care.

This was hard for me to see. I imagined my own children someday sitting before these students as teachers themselves who had lost all sense of appreciation and passion for learning. Of course, it happens. Things get reduced--school, work, marriage, family, faith... Nothing is completely safe from the decaying effects of process and means-ends.... So we have to be vigilant. We need to be awake and grateful. We need to maintain that sense of fascination with life and the world and the people around us.

This is what we should be up-in-arms about--the fact that our children are growing up in a world of reduction. If we're going to stress about something, it should be this--the danger of having beautiful things degraded into nothing more than the next process.