No offense intended towards you. Not every conservative Christian falls into the group I refer to, not by any means. But in some places, there is undeniably a fair amount of small-town and blue-collar hostility towards “eggheads” and “elitists”, which Palin herself defined as “anyone who thinks they’re better than someone else” (her own rhetoric contrasting the real, pro-America parts of America with my part not counting, apparently). She represents a large constituency when she responds to scientific results she doesn’t like by rejecting those fields of knowledge. Look how many people are convinced that the whole fields of biology, climatology, and atmospheric physics are part of the Great Satanic/Librul-Socialist Conspiracy. If we ever got the TEOTWAWKI some fantasize about, I’d hate to be an honest biology teacher in Wasilla under Mayor Palin with no outside court system to rely upon for protection.

I think the “Benedict option” is just a name for transmission of knowledge like happened in the Irish monestaries and some others during the Dark Ages. The Irish monestaries, because they copied books feverishly, are the reason that many Greek and Roman manuscripts survived the fall of Rome. That IS historical fact; whether it would happen again or not I doubt, since the Church is no longer the place where people go to get educated like it was in the 9th century. That and very few churches have private printing presses anymore– I’m assuming if we have to recopy books, our laser jets won’t be running.

I don’t know if you will come back here to read this.

I hope you are right and that people with rich stories will be prized and respected in our “new world.” I come from the agricultural and environmental sciences and know that skews my perspective. Water and food are such fundamentals and I see such a gap in our abilities, the pipeline of capable thinkers, innovations that are not just GMO and green revolution use of high inputs.

Our agriculture colleges lack students (we have almost no students working on local foods in any form) and I just happened to recieve a 4 foot high stack of graduate school applications. The theme for these fellowships was related to “sustainability.” In all those many 1,000′s of pages- the words “climate change” appeared just a couple times. I nearly shook with fear for our future that so many people were investing in the abstract while the foundations of food, water, environment are crumbling.

But again- I recognize that is my bias. Why worry? The corn harvest on our farm was 180 bushels per acre. That one field (200 acres) could feed 2,000 people (12 bushels of corn per person per year) for a year. So what am I worried about???

But still I worry- Our food system is tenuous — it needs oil, fertilizer, and farmers (who are gone from the landscape). It needs people to save seeds, to butcher, to preserve food, grow orchards.

And you are right… You can study Bollywood Films (love them!) for eight years and know how to spin, plant, preserve. I just wish as many people came into Plant Pathology, Entomology, Horticulture, Agronomy, Animal Science, Soils Science, Water Resource Sciences, as come into the humanities…

The main suffering that comes with economic downturn is emotional…the stress and uncertainty of loosing a job, or being able to pay bills. But if everything completely fell apart for my family, no job, no income….we would still have family, a roof over our heads, meals and a hot shower at the turn of a faucet. Nobody is facing death in an economic depression.

And about having an advanced degree in something ecclectic….well, lets imagine the absolute worst….the failure of infrastrucutre/government. If we all revert to the ancient model of local economies centered around some common institution like a church, those with education will have that to offer other, to preserve the learning we have gained up to this point….Dreher calls it the Benedict option. I don’t know where he got the term, but it’s a great idea for how to organize a society if the infrastructure were to crumble. Which I don’t think it will. But always be prepared, right?

Raising Capable People and Kids Are Worth it by Barbara Colorosa both advocate building character and self esteem in children by giving them responsibility, lots of it, and like Lance said, praising them for a job well done…and conversely, letting them feel the full consequences for their mess ups….no rescuing. It works. It is HARD to do. We are designed by evolution to keep our kids from suffering. But it’s how we all learn lessons we never forget.

My favorite example from Colorosa’s book is about not nagging. She says to the kid.

“Son, I want you to take the garbage out before dinner. Now what do I want?”
“Take the garbage out (mumbled)”
“When to I want it?”
” Before dinner.”

So of course the kids forgets, so at dinner time, you set the table without a place or food for him. He comes to dinner….and Whoa! No dinner. You don’t even need to say a word….not one nag…..kids takes out the trash and then he eats. It really works. And her book is funny.