HOW I RAISED MY KID

This post is an answer to Brian who wrote to see if I had any ideas on the subject of early education. Brian has a young son, so his interest in the subject is more than academic. I answered briefly on the comments page, but I did a horrible job. I'll try again, and maybe I'll do better this time.

Well, let's see...I think it helps if you know what virtues you're trying to teach. In my case I wanted my son to be smart, skilled, manly, kind, honest, articulate, hard working and idealistic (Today I'd add other qualities, but this was what was on my mind at the time). The hardest of all these qualities to transmit turned out to be skill. I only have skills that are relevant to the entertainment industry, and my kid wasn't interested in that. That meant general man skills, like learning how to fix a car, had to be learned outside the home, if at all.

Geez, how do you arrange for that? School wasn't set up to teach things like that, and I didn't personally know anyone who did man jobs for a living, not anybody who lived nearby, anyway. My biggest regret is that my kid didn't learn some of that stuff. If he had he might have grown up to be an engineer, which I think is a terrific thing to be. What he is now is also pretty good, so I have no complaints, but...building a bridge...now that's a real job (if you're not lucky enough to be a cartoonist, that is)!

My biggest fear for my kid was that he would grow up not fitting anywhere, not fitting into a specific niche that he has a clear and intense passion for. With the best of intentions school has turned out a generation of generalists...a big mistake, which is already leading to all sorts of problems.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that's me thinking like a parent. Parents like their kids to pick careers that have clear benchmarks, the kind of thing where you get the right schooling and the right certificates and you're all set. Another term for it is ticket punching. It's the kind of security that all parents want for their kids, and that all kids hate.

Anyway, what I did do right in my opinion, was to make lots of heroic books and films available, and to talk about them frequently, and with enthusiasm. I had lots of traditional boys books by Henty and Horatio Alger, Dumas, Rafael Sabitini, Karl May, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle,  and lots of sci fi, war strategy, history (kid firendly history like Defoe's "Journal of the Plague Years") and biography (kid friendly stuff like Ben Franklin's autobiography). We also had comics and comic reprints of Carl Barks, Stanley, Classics Illustrated, EC horror and sci-fi, DC, and Marvel.

Films we watched on tape in those days included Jason and the Argonauts, Sinbad, Davy Crockett, Zulu, Excalibur, And Then There Were None, The Four Feathers, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Murder in the Rue Morgue, Sergio Leone, Hitchcock, Star Trek, The Twilight Zone TV show, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, etc., etc. We also had lots of taped comedy: Sid Caesar, Kovacs, Gleason, Clampett, Avery, Jones, Disney, Betty Boop, etc.

The guiding star of my parenting philosophy was John Stuart Mill's dad. Mill senior used to take his son on long walks where he would talk about subjects most kids never even hear about. I would have loved it if my dad had done that for me, but I'm afraid my own talks were sometimes monologues rather than dialogues.

The toys around the house were mostly war toys...the most politically incorrect plastic war toys I could find...but also building blocks, cars and sports stuff. I'm not a militarist, but war toys like swords and flintlocks are a fun way to connect with history.

My kid liked all these things until he was about ten or so, when he started to be influenced by what other kids were reading and watching. We only had one of every media appliance, and they were all in the living room, where parents had some influence on what was watched. It was bliss from a parent's point of view, but it all ended when a friend gave my kid a radio of his own when he was ten. After that everything changed drastically, and my kid enthusiastically entered the modern world.

Things I thought my kid would like and he definitely didn't: a classic chemistry set, an Erector Set from the 1930s, and the film "Forbidden Planet," which he hated. He loved the Brothers Grimm when he was very young, but after 7 or 8 or so he lost interest. Me, I never lost my taste for those stories.

So that's the kind of media my kid was exposed to for the first ten years. He turned out okay, so it couldn't have hurt him much.