Proverbs 22:6
Train up a child in the way he should go,and when he is old he will not depart from it.
Our moment in history is located at the end of a historical process that began when the Reformation, the Renaissance, and Scientific Revolution and the rise of Capitalism began to decouple the natural world from the sacred. In large portions of the West, Eucharist stopped being Eucharist and started being “mere bread and wine”. Nature likewise ceased to be regarded as our sister and fellow creature and came to be seen more and more as simply a source of “raw materials.” Holy places such as Mount Sinai or Jerusalem or the sanctuary of a cathedral ceased to be holy and became mere spatial coordinates. In the same way, living things came increasingly to be regarded as peculiarly complex mechanisms and, following this lead, human beings themselves came to be seen as unusually clever pieces of meat. Given this, it is not surprising that we formed ideas of child rearing (thanks especially to B.F. Skinner) which regarded children as blank CD-ROMs upon which to write behavioral “instructions.” Today’s verse gives the biblical reply to such nonsense. Children are persons to be trained, not machines to be programmed. Education is the sharing of our lives with our children, not the downloading of mere data. Lives shared in love, not information or manipulation, are what keep our children on the way they should go. For life shared in the love of Christ is the way.
