Watching Our Kids Self-Destruct

Rebecca Hagelin recounts her experience as a substitute teacher in her local middle school. It's pretty depressing stuff. Perhaps most disturbing are these words:

Could it be that our kids are searching for meaning? Could it be that they are so numbed by the anything-goes society that they are pushing the envelope just to feel alive? Take cutting. It's a phenomenon now prevalent in even the best schools, and it's exactly what you're hoping it isn't: self-mutilation. Kids casually cut themselves with knives, safety pins and razor blades - just because. In Michelle Malkin's column of February 23, she refers to a school counselor telling the parent of a middle school student, "70% of the kids here cut or know someone who does. It's cool, a trend, and acceptable."

In a February 28, 2005 article entitled, "Left Behind, Kids Have Too Little to Respect" for The American Conservative, substitute teacher Marian Kester Coombs observes, "Those who give speeches about higher standards and more teachers typically lunch in places like the Senate dining room. They would do well to spend a noon hour in the cafeteria of a public school. Kids in super-tight or droopy jeans and t-shirts reading "Yes - but not with you" or "You forgot to ask if I care" shuffle through food lines that feature tater tots, fries, chips, pizza, Pepsi, and Little Debbie dessert squares. Ritalin offsets the sugar high." As Coombs says, "But bad fashion and worse nutrition are not these children's only common denominators. Their more defining trait is the forlorn look they share."

Kids often find themselves in an ironic situation. They may have everything they think they want but very little of what they really need. Too often their lives are barren, loveless, and meaningless. They're not aware of it, of course, youngsters not being capable of the degree of introspection and self-diagnosis necessary to perceive an existential vacancy, but they suffer from it nonetheless. These kids drift through school like they drift through life. Uncaring and unmotivated, their lives are burdened with a terrible loneliness and an awful sadness.

They cut their bodies because they see themselves as worthless and everything they do as pointless. They are the by-product of their parents' rejection of traditional views of marriage and of the purgation of all vestiges of an emotionally and intellectually rich religious heritage from our public culture. The one refuge where these tragic kids could find meaning and purpose for their lives, the one place where they could find true worth and dignity, is the one place they're not allowed to look and the last place they'd consider trying.

An obsessively secular culture has essentially removed from their reach the thing they most need and thinks it can compensate for the lack by imposing more rigorous academic standards and requiring them to take tougher courses in their schools. To paraphrase Mark Twain, there are thousands hacking at the branches of the problem for every one who is cutting at the root.

Society will not address the root of the malaise which afflicts so many youngsters because it would require that we recognize what the root of the problem is and there is little evidence that we do. Even if we did, to apply ourselves to the root would require a complete reversal of the secularizing trend of the last forty years, and an admission of its utter folly. Instead, oblivious to the harm we are doing, we continue to banish the only hope many of these kids have from our public places, intent on making our schools as sterile and barren as the hearts and minds of the young people most in need of that which is being put off-limits.