This year brings another war story. If it had a title, it might be something like “It Takes a Religious Institution to Raise a Child.” (In contrast to that quaint Clintonian conceit, “It Takes a Village.”) Like any war story, it’s about conflict, albeit closer to home, and it begins with a statistic: the Bluestone youth attrition rate.
Despite the mythic benefits of small-town life for children, 15 of the 20 school-age kids in our community up and disappeared last year. Just down the road from me, five wild children vanished from the aluminum-sided hovel where a family I’ll call the Ottermans lived in a fun house of discarded cars, cans and canines. All were taken away one day by some nameless agency of New York state on grounds of “parental neglect,” a euphemism for degenerate poverty. A kid who once tried to stick a screwdriver into another boy’s neck also moved away, along with his smart-mouthed sister. They fled the shack that their born-again single mother couldn’t keep up and flew off to California to live with their more permissive dad.
A couple of houses further along, two motherless, scowling boys who made shooting noises at you (instead of saying hello) left for a larger town; I’m not sure where. Ditto the shopkeepers who penned a big stallion in their small yard. They took with them their two sweet little boys, their sullen daughter and the handsome, brooding teenage son who usually wore a T shirt proclaiming his contempt for men who love men. “There wasn’t enough here for kids to do,” his folks explained.
A girl who had been rescued from an abusive family by her adoptive parents went temporarily into professional remedial care. Bluestone also lost its highest achiever, a pretty and popular girl whose family came originally from “downstate.” She’s now at one of those boarding schools that grooms you to run the world.
The handful of kids who remain seem fine, if a bit lonely. Meanwhile, in contrast to the exodus of Bluestone’s kids, the private religious institutions for “at-risk” youths that dot our area have managed not only to hold onto their charges but to mold them. One such–we’ll call it Second Home–is a well-established rehab facility for about 240 teens with “behavior problems” ranging from “defiance” to drug addiction. Second Home’s two-year program is based on Alcoholics Anonymous’s famous 12 Steps, except that it isn’t voluntary. If a kid tries to escape, his keepers take away his shoes. The devout Christians who run the place urge their charges to rely on a “higher power” to guide their lives, which most proximately means going on to a “postsecondary education” of some sort and a presumably defiance-free future. Rumor has it that another such school will soon open nearby.
Twenty miles to the north, there’s a Muslim compound whose 250 children are being home-schooled in some American-style madrasa. It was founded more than a decade ago by inner-city African-Americans seeking to save their children from urban blight. Or so they tell the local press. After September 11, the group replaced the jihadist hate literature on its Web site with a few brief messages of brotherhood and peace. The compound’s kids aren’t often seen. But they are quite tidy and well behaved, even if they never, ever smile.
I caution myself not to exaggerate the significance of what I’m seeing. The efficacy of faith-based, authoritarian education for at-risk kids could well be an illusion, and the exodus of Bluestone youths a statistical fluke. Still, while I know that secular educators and social-service workers, properly organized and funded, do the best job of perpetuating democracy, I can also understand that, from the Bluestone vantage point, President George W. Bush’s new faith-based social initiatives are going to strike many small-town Americans as a viable solution to their children’s troubles.
Darkly, I imagine a weird tidal flow of children–an outrushing of superachievers, misfits and wounded souls, followed by an influx of other kids who get sculpted into obedient followers of warring creeds by government-funded religious institutions. Here in Bluestone, it has become clear that it takes more than a village to raise a child, or at least that many actual villages are not at all up to the task. But it is equally clear that the corrective path we are wending along is, in the long run, downright worrisome.
