THE SCOTTISH RITE JOURNAL--ARTICLE--APRIL 1990--ARTTRACHTE.APR

            What Does the Future Hold for Our Children?

               STEPHEN JOEL TRACHTENBERG, PRESIDENT
                 The George Washington University
          2121 Eye Street, N.W., Washington, D.C.  20052


     As the President of The George Washington University and a
Professor of Public Administration, my main concern is with young
people--not just those of college age but those to whom, because
they are intelligent and eager to succeed, college may be helpful
or essential.  Too many of those young people never reach the point
at which they dare to apply to college.  Too many of them fail to
complete their high school studies.  Too many are in danger of
"giving up on life" and seeking short-term gratification rather
than longer-term stability and happiness.
     They include children living distraught lives in our center-
cities, those who have difficulty doing their homework because of
the distractions in the street outside.  They include children
living in affluent suburban homes, trapped in a deadening cycle of
drug abuse and parental neglect.  If we broaden our outlook to
embrace the entire world, they include children caught in the midst
of revolution, civil war and other forms of political strife, many
of those children afflicted by malnutrition, many of them
physically scarred.
     Though all of us agree that childhood should be a time of
warmth and family happiness, a time when the child can "try its
wings" and slowly learn to move beyond its original nest, it's all
too often a time, in today's world, when the child is left to raise
itself and forced to face life-experiences that even an adult would
have trouble handling.
     Confronted by a global picture like this one, you and I could
perhaps be forgiven for getting rather discouraged.  We could say
to ourselves: "I'll take care of my own children, and do the best
I can for them.  I don't have the strength, the time or the
resources to help the millions upon millions of children who are
in such dire need."  But if we acted upon feelings like these,
would we be able to forgive ourselves?
     Masons have long understood this and have worked hard to do
more than their share in order to help specific children accomplish
specific goals.  The H.E.L.P. program--Help Eliminate Language
Problems in Children--is, of course, an outstanding example of
this.  In addition, articles in The New Age Magazine, now The
Scottish Rite Journal, like Howard B. Kittleson's "Parenting"
(March 1988 issue) and John E. Johns' "Come Grow With Us"
(September 1989 issue) testify to the ways in which this Masonic
concern with the growth and development of a happy and successful
adult helps inspire individual Masons to do their own part--in ways
that extend ever farther and deeper through American society.
     One of the most difficult things for us to realize is how much
children today know about the grown-up world that was once such a
mystery to them.  Television has had a lot to do with that because
prime-time news uses "moving pictures," as they were once called,
to communicate some of our planet's harshest realities to the
audience.  The effects of television are intensified by our swift-
moving electronic culture, in which telephone technology, computer
technology and jet travel have had the effect of making even the
remotest parts of the world accessible to average families--to
people for whom a single plane trip might have seemed, thirty or
forty years ago, a "once-in-a-lifetime experience."
     I personally worry a lot about the effect on children of such
global patterns as the following:
. The ecological threats that now confront us.
     Though a limited number of children and teenagers may say they
feel concerned about the environment, we shouldn't assume that
means they are indifferent to what the media, especially the
electronic media, report on this subject.  News of that kind,
whether it concerns the damage being done to the world's rain
forests or the thinning out of the atmospheric ozone layer, can
only lead them to reflect that if the very planet that supports
human life is in trouble, then a short-term attitude toward life-
-one that includes drug abuse and other forms of self destructive
behavior--might be "the way to go."
. The sense of being spiritually lost.
     As we all know, The Scottish Rite Journal changed its name
from The New Age Magazine in order to avoid any reference to the
so-called "New Age" movement whose "mystical" ideas include the
notion that crystals can influence us physically and spiritually
if we carry them around with us.  But this change of name shouldn't
lead us to forget that the "New Age" movement does exercise an
appeal over many young people who have despaired about achieving
much through the use of reason and intelligence.  And when enough
young people feel that way so that stores selling crystals and
other supposedly spiritual artifacts proliferate throughout the
country (there is even one in the affluent Washington neighborhood
of Georgetown), all of us need to be concerned.
. Growing cynicism about the purposes of education.
     All too many of our young people, starting as early as the
elementary and high school years, feel that the purpose of
education is to get a good job and that what counts most are,
therefore, degrees and credentials rather than inner growth and
enlightenment.  And of those who feel this way, all too many
receive encouragement from their parents who regard education as
mainly an "investment" with a financial "pay-off."  What makes this
pattern especially unfortunate is the number of times it ends in
self-defeat.  The fact is that no one can move successfully through
life in today's world, even in financial terms, who hasn't "learned
to keep learning" and held onto the younger child's joy in
acquiring new skills and examining new ideas.
. Loss of contact with the wisdom of the past.
     As our lives increasingly move at an electronic pace, so that
even the revolution in Eastern Europe is spread and speeded up by
radio and TV, it is easy to assume that anything written in "the
old days" can't possibly be relevant to our own day and age. 
That's one reason I was so interested to read, in the January 1990
issue of The Scottish Rite Journal, the words of Dr. Norman Vincent
Peale who recalled a visit by a President of the United States to
see the aged Oliver Wendell Holmes after his retirement from the
Supreme Court.  He was surprised to discover Holmes reading a
"tough book" by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato.
     But for those of us who worry about the effects that so much
television viewing may have on the minds of our children and
teenagers, at a time when TV, in the average American home, is
turned on for more than seven hours a day, is there a more relevant
text than Plato's "Parable of the Cave" as we find it in his most
influential book, The Republic?  In the cave, human beings sit in
darkness, their heads clamped from behind and prevented from
turning, while firelight is used to project moving shadows on the
wall before them.  Those shadows are all they ever learn about
reality.  If they were ever released from this unreal existence,
Plato comments, and could make their way from the cave to the
sunshine outside, they would of course feel blinded and unbalanced,
and have difficulty in believing that the real world was truly
real.
     Similar concerns about the extent to which human beings are
detached from reality by their illusions can be found in Buddhism,
in the Holy Bible, and in other forms of religion and philosophy. 
Which brings me to my concern about a particular global pattern
that affects our children and teenagers:
. The substitution of what is on "screens" for what is true.
     A world in which truth is whatever the screen in front of us
is saying at a particular moment--whether it is a television
screen, a computer screen, or some combination of the two--is a
world in danger of losing its moral values.  Those values are based
on the conviction, so wonderfully expressed in the Holy Bible, that
the state of the individual human soul is what matters most in life
and that we must never lose sight of the fact that the fate of each
individual human being matters.  By confronting us with a
torrential, 24-hour-a-day flood of information about human life,
in pictorial and/or statistical form, our many, many screens
threaten to desensitize our awareness of this great truth and to
blunt our moral feelings.  "Too-muchness" leads, all too easily,
to the feeling that "none of it really matters, and life is cheap."
     I hope I have communicated some of the pressures now being
experienced by our children, pressures that make it difficult for
them to achieve a true sense of security and of faith in the future
of the world.  The 1990's look to me like a time when those
pressures will intensify even further and when the work being done
on behalf of children by Masons and non-Masons will be more
important than ever.  Above all, our young people, who will be
responsible for running our Nation when you and I are finishing up
our lives or have moved on to whatever comes next, need to believe
that a long term future awaits them and that short-term thinking
is therefore pointless and destructive.
     For what we are trying to create is in effect a self-
fulfilling prophecy.  If our children and teenagers feel confident
that a long-term future awaits them, they will behave in such a way
as to bring that future about.  If they cease to believe in the
future, the future cannot possibly be good.  The alternatives, as
always in human history, are hope and despair, and it is our task
to enlist in the ranks of the hopeful and to believe in what we
teach our young people.  If we successfully deal with our own
doubts, will our children be far behind in dealing with theirs?
__________________________________________________________
All too many of our young people, starting as early as the
elementary and high school years, feel that the purpose of
education is to get a good job and that what counts most are,
therefore, degrees and credentials rather than inner growth and
enlightenment.

A world in which truth is whatever the screen in front of us is
saying at a particular moment is a world in danger of losing its
moral values.

"Too-muchness" leads, all too easily, to the feeling that "none of
it really matters, and life is cheap."

Above all, our young people, need to believe that a long term
future awaits them and that short-term thinking is pointless and
destructive.

It is our task to enlist in the ranks of the hopeful and to believe
in what we teach our young people.

Moral values are based on the conviction, so wonderfully expressed
in the Holy Bible, that the state of the individual human soul is
what matters most in life and that we must never lose sight of the
fact that the fate of each individual human being matters.

