In a recent post looking at one of the excuses Christian parents make to avoid giving a Christian education, we focused on the holy grail of school for many, that of socialisation. In passing, I mentioned that socialisation in a secular environment could look like a child conforming to the pattern of this world rather than being transformed into the image of Christ.
Hannah Arendt, an American political commentator who wrote many books commented on the issue of peer pressure in an essay entitled “Crisis in Education”. There she compares the authority of a tyrannical individual over a child with the tyranny of a group. She writes:
the authority of a group, even a child group, is always considerably stronger and more tyrannical than the severest authority of an individual person can ever be. If one looks at it from the standpoint of the individual child, his chances to rebel or to do anything on his own hook are practically nil; he no longer finds himself in a very unequal contest with a person who has, to be sure, absolute superiority over him but in contest with whom he can nevertheless count on the solidarity of other children, that is, of his own kind; rather he is in the position, hopeless by definition, of a minority of one confronted by the absolute majority of all the others. There are very few grown people who can endure such a situation, even when it is not supported by external means of compulsion; children are simply and utterly incapable of it.
While not a Christian as far as I can tell, Arendt is right on the money and her point has implications for Christian parents. Few grown-up people can endure the pressure of being the odd one out. Witness the way your facebook friends pay homage to the alphabet cult during ‘pride’ month by changing their profile pictures. Children cannot handle this pressure at all. They are by intention programmed to imitate those around them. However in God’s design, this ought to be parents and other wise adults, not their peers. In our modern world, we bundle them off into huge schools, where they are isolated from wise adult council and surrounded by hundreds of other children their own age. To make matters worse, for the Christian, most of these children come from families who have no love for Christ and are caught up in rebellion and idolatry. How will your children stand in this pressure when the entire system is predicated on turning out children who have internalize the norms and ideologies of society – a society that is at war with the king?