Schutzgefühl
The fallout from C38 continues as we hear more stories like the one Angry is reporting on. Here in BC, the Teachers are getting ready to roll out new SSM positive curricula, and are making noises to the effect that independent schools must (must!) be forced to comply with it. After all, they argue, these schools recieve public tax money. It's like we own them, isn't it?
What are our schools producing? Our kids are really smart in many ways, that I don't dispute. We tend to overlook that we shortchange them in others. As this writer says:
state education is not a failure from every point of view. It mass produces exactly the kind of citizen that is now in demand: one who is capable of exercising managerial responsibilities within a pluralistic, hedonistic, atheistic setting, but who would never question the goals and commitments of the enterprise he manages. In the second place, the state is more than just indifferent to children of the kind we wish to raise. It is hostile to them. It does not want us to have children in the manner we do (in greater than average numbers, the natural offspring of heterosexual, monogamous parents). It does not want us to raise them as we do (in intact homes, on traditional religious principles). It does not appreciate the aspiration in life we try to foster in them (of becoming men and women who kneel before God, but stand up to the state). When will religious people begin to see their qualms about public education in a more general light? The stream of obscenities being shouted through the public bullhorn is not simply lowbrow, crude and insulting. It contains a message for us. And the message is, "get with the program or get off the planet".How on earth has it come to this? Roger Scruton muses on the issue:
The German philosopher Max Scheler described sexual shame as a Schutzgefühl - a shield-emotion that protects you from abuse, whether by another or yourself. If we lose the capacity for shame we do not regain the innocence of the animals; we become shameless, and that means that we are no longer protected from the sexual predator... Shame has... been banished from the culture. This we witness in Reality TV — which ought to be called Fantasy TV since that is its function. All fig leaves, whether of language, thought or behaviour, have now been removed, and the feral children are right there before our eyes, playing their dirty games on the screen. It is not a pretty sight, but nor is it meant to be. This shamelessness is encouraged by sex education in our schools, which tries both to discount the differences between us and the other animals, and to remove every hint of the forbidden, the dangerous or the sacred. Shame, according to the standard literature now endorsed by the DES, is a lingering disability. Sexual initiation means learning to overcome such 'negative' emotions, to put aside our hesitations, and to enjoy 'good sex'. Questions as to 'who', 'whom' or 'which gender' are matters of personal choice — sex education is not there to make the choice, merely to facilitate it. In this way we encourage children to a premature and depersonalised interest in their own sexuality, and at the same time we become hysterical at the thought of all those paedophiles out there, who are really the paedophiles in here. I see in this the clear proof that shame is not a luxury, still less an inhibition to be discarded, but an integral part of the human condition. It is the emotion without which true sexual desire cannot develop, and if there is such a thing as genuine sex education, it consists in teaching children not to discard shame but to acquire it.Where is it all going, if the course is unchanged? Down the toilet, of course.
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