Monday, March 24, 2008

The liberal "discipline" of children

I tell my conservative friends that they need to check some of their favorite code words at the door when attending a liberal party. One of them is "discipline". We just don't like that word. It conjures images of totalitarian regimes and belt-brandishing good ole boys cocked and ready to whip the women and chillun.

The intellectual version of "discipline" that you even see in Church documents is the "formation" of children. Now this sounds better, but it may still put some of us on guard, because it presumes that a superior one is doing the forming while the inferior one is sitting by passively.

At the risk of sounding like a softy, we prefer to raise and nurture children. And yes, we will correct and guide them along the way. Yes, we are forming them, but just don't call it that at one of our parties.

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