Meghan Cox Gurdon
Never let your kids forget that freedom, education are priceless
By: Meghan Cox Gurdon
Examiner Columnist
June 3, 2009
For parents of school-age children, this is a particularly trying time of year.
Not because of the innumerable events we’re obliged, and of course mostly happy, to attend – the plays, picnics, awards dinners, poetry readings, class parties, and graduation ceremonies – but because it has become so fantastically difficult for us to pry our children out of bed in the morning.
Somehow the nearness of the end of the academic calendar, plus all the soothing sunshine and birdsong outside, makes it that much harder to make children heed duty’s call.
“But school’s almost over…” someone will groan, as we shake his shoulder to induce wakefulness. “Why do I have to go…?”
In another bedroom, a snoring tangle of limbs tightens its grip on the bedclothes when we try to expose it to the light. “It’s practically summer,” comes the muffled plaint, “Can’t I just sleep?”
It’s at this point that parents are compelled to point out that we ourselves don’t necessarily enjoy getting up each day, and that life is full of mornings when we have to do things we’d rather not, and that furthermore if they don’t get out of bed, pronto, immediately, and right this minute, something bad is going to happen – specifically to them.
If we are feeling especially aggrieved at having been cast unfairly, yet again, as the villains in our children’s dramatic interior lives, we may go on, as generations of Americans have gone on at their slothful offspring: Do you realize how lucky you are even to have a comfy bed? Have you any idea how blessed you are to belong to a civilization that thinks you’re worth educating?
Some of us say to our daughters, probably with an emphasis that earlier generations would not have had: Do you realize that in some corners of the world, right now, girls like you aren’t even allowed to go to school – that they’re deliberately kept illiterate; cut off from their own history and literature, from modernity itself? In fact, in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, young girls are being attacked with bombs and acid and even poison gas to keep them from getting an education.
President Obama said in an interview with the BBC on Tuesday that the United States shouldn’t think it can impose its values “on another country with a different history and a different culture.” Presumably he will suggest the same sort of thing in his speech in autocratic Cairo today.
But this gets it backwards. It is schoolgirls in Pakistan and Afghanistan who are having other people’s values imposed on them. It isn’t cultural imperialism to insist that Muslim girls should be allowed to go to school unterrorized (and, if they choose, unveiled); it is mere humanity.
The world will have made wonderful progress, and other people’s arrogance and cultural tyranny – not America’s – will have been thwarted, if we can someday get to the point where it is an Afghan mother whose major concern is getting her recalcitrant daughters out of bed and off to school, rather than wondering if they’ll make it home alive.
***
It’s not unconnected with this that I want as a footnote to point out that today is the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Like female education, democracy is not a Western notion around which we should tiptoe for fear we might seem to be “imposing” our values on others. Dissidents living in repressive regimes across the world – in Egypt, among other places -- look to the United States to support their aspirations for freedom. That is something for which we should never apologize.
Man’s right of self-determination exists, like truth or logic; it is a natural force that flourishes unless it is forcibly suppressed. The Chinese students who demonstrated in the center of Beijing knew it 20 years ago. Afghan schoolgirls can sense it now. Fortunately, in our civilization, we knew it a lot longer ago. We should not forget it now.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
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