Learning and the Brain: Bid the geldings be fruitful?

"And all the time - such is the tragicomedy of our situation - we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive,' or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity.' In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful." - C.S. Lewis, "Men without Chests" (1943)

We are not called to be perfect, and more than anything, that temptation is what made him fragile. I probably shouldn't have been surprised when he left a voicemail at 3 a.m., three months after his graduation: Mr. Kaneft, I don't know what's happening to me. I'm drunk … I'm drunk or high every day now. There are people I don't even know passed out at my parents' house - I've made friends with a local drug dealer. I'm out of control. I need help.

I was listening to a young man without a chest.

His parents, his school and his advisor (me) had done him the very worst of favors - we encouraged his perfect discipline record, his nearly perfect GPA and his neat and tidy disposition. Not a hair was out of place.

When he was not chosen for a leadership position his senior year, his response was to review the basic criteria for consideration. He could have been chosen; he just wasn't. He believed, sincerely, that leadership was given, not earned. To my knowledge, he never stood up to a bully on behalf of another student, never respectfully challenged authority because of an unjust or inconsistent rule or never risked anything on behalf of another.

But instead of using this moment as an opportunity, his dad made a call to the head of school, and the next day he had his leadership position. No lessons learned. This had been the pattern of his high school career.

Recently, Russell Shaw, head of school at Georgetown Day School (DC), wrote a brilliant article for The Atlantic: "Lighthouse Parents Have More Confident Kids." Shaw reminds us that "[a] young person who grows accustomed to having a parent intervene on his behalf begins to believe that he's not capable of acting on his own, feeding both anxiety and dependence."

And though I've lost touch over the years with my former student, if I were a betting man, I'd bet that he's doing fine, but that in the back of his mind, he's haunted by a childhood deprived of challenge, deprived of the suffering and obstacles all adolescents require for soul development. "When parents seek to control outcomes for their kids, they are trading short-term wins for long-term thriving," Shaw argues, and "they're trading the promise of a college bumper sticker for a happy, well-adjusted 35-year-old."

Shaw recommends being a "Lighthouse Parent" who "stands as a steady, reliable guide, providing safety and clarity without controlling every aspect of their child's journey." They "provide firm boundaries and emotional support while allowing their children the freedom to navigate their own challenges." But it's not enough for adults to simply permit failure and challenge; they must believe in the power of failure to help develop their children into competent and confident adults. Into adults with chests, with deep roots.

In my last column, I alluded to why this is important for adolescent development. The stress that accompanies challenges and obstacles helps students build a strong root system that keeps them grounded. Raising well-behaved children, children who check all the boxes, is mostly about appearances - the appearance of perfection and goodness. But as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Your goodness must have an edge to it, else it is none." Don't forget, Jesus' goodness led him to "overturn the tables" and "drive out" the money changers and dove-sellers in the temple. What would our schools have done to Jesus if they'd witnessed that act of goodness?

When my former student was released into the world after graduation, when he had no parents to hold his hand, no teachers to please, no one to impress and be perfect for, he crumbled. He had been "castrated" in high school, and then we told him to go out and "be fruitful." We never blessed him with the "gift of failure."

In Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye," the novel crescendos in Holden Caulfield's famous diatribe about the transition to adulthood: "I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in the big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all."

And as "crazy" as Caulfield says that sounds, we are seeing more and more of this behavior from parents, including myself. We are too busy denying the reality that our children will become adults through no effort on our part at all - they are heading for that cliff whether we like it or not. And we are terrified by what we see from that precipice - the violence and hatred and misinformation in the world of adults - and our responses are often, like Holden's, to arrest their development in a futile attempt to keep the world from touching them -we go to such extremes to control the uncontrollable. But that is a fool's errand. Gradually, appropriately, our children must encounter the world and all that the world brings. Goodness untested is vanity and will crumble under pressure, as I saw with my former student. In the words of the English poet John Milton, we want to develop young adults who can "apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better."

Kaneft is the headmaster of Wilson Hall in Sumter.