Why Grow Up? by Susan Neiman

Author:Susan Neiman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374713201
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

3. Becoming Adult

Education

If growing up is a matter of holding the is and the ought in balance, it will never be a stable position: each will always seek the upper hand. Hence growing up is not a task that ever stops. (Perhaps Peter Pan’s Mr Darling thought of himself as grown-up, but no one I know thinks they are.) The sections in this chapter are devoted to the kinds of experiences that are central to the process. Education, travel and work are fixed parts of the lives of most of us. Some ways of going about them will help us in the task of growing up, others will not. The central message of the last chapter – that growing up requires recognizing the gap between is and ought while trying to preserve both – means that no way of acquiring these experiences will be entirely the way it should be. The same parents who anxiously seek the ideal kindergarten for their children will usually acknowledge, not many years later, that whatever they get will be compromise. Not every compromise is rotten, of course, but to decide which ones are acceptable you must look at each case on its own.

Although ‘no’ is a word that toddlers learn early, they have little choice but to accept the choices their parents made; adolescents do their best to reject every one. Growing up is a process of sifting through your parents’ choices about everything: the music you couldn’t help hearing because it was playing on a stereo you couldn’t reach, the religion you couldn’t help believing because you were taken to sermons, or holidays in a car you couldn’t drive, the neighbourhood they set up home in or moved to when they changed jobs, and a host of general values you will not even recognize as values until you are old enough to get out in the world and encounter other ones. Sometimes when you’re sifting, with any luck at all, you’ll be able to say that’s just what I’d have chosen had I been able to choose myself, and thank your parents for it one way or another, if only by living in a way that proves them right. On the other hand, if you don’t reject any of their choices you are not grown-up – if only because their choices were made in a time that isn’t this one, and not all of them fit into the world you now inhabit.

The early years of education, in particular, are up to someone else. Hannah Arendt’s Between Past and Future contains a wonderful description of education’s goal:

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave

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