DADWAGON

If, like me, you had a free 15 minutes or so between the time your monstrous offspring went to bed and the moment you drunkenly blacked out on the sofa, you probably read the New Yorker’s 24,558-word exegesis on Scientology, and the defection from the church of film director Paul Haggis.

It’s a good read, I guess, although the length—necessitated though it is by the complexity of the subject—does manage to render boring normally exciting things like human bondage, mysterious disappearances, nickel-plated motorcycles, and, of course, Xenu, volcanoes, H-bombs, and Thetans. A couple of points leaped out at me, though, mostly having to do with the education of Scientologist kids. Apparently, there exist entire schools that follow L. Ron Hubbard’s educational system, “Study Tech”:

It is one of the more grounded systems that he developed. There are three central elements. One is the use of clay, or other materials, to help make difficult concepts less abstract. [Haggis’s daughter] Alissa explains, “If I’m learning the idea of how an atom looks, I’d make an atom out of clay.” A second concept is making sure that students don’t face “too steep a gradient,” in Hubbard’s words. “The schools are set up so that you don’t go on to the next level until you completely understand the material,” Alissa says. The third element is the frequent use of a dictionary to eliminate misunderstandings. “It’s really important to understand the words you’re using.”

Lauren, the middle sister, initially struggled in school. “I was illiterate until I was eleven,” she told me. Somehow, that fact escaped her parents. “I assume it was because of the divorce,” she says.

Somehow, this doesn’t surprise me. Take a wacko cult like Scientology or, say, fundamentalist Christianity, and apply its principles to education, and the results won’t be good. Of course, this could also easily have happened in secular public schools. In other words: Scientologists—just like us!

Haggis put his daughters in an ordinary private school, but that lasted only six months. The girls weren’t entirely comfortable talking to people who weren’t Scientologists, and basic things like multiple-choice tests were unfamiliar. At a regular school, they felt like outsiders. “The first thing I noticed that I did, that others didn’t, is the Contact,” Alissa told me, referring to a procedure the church calls Contact Assist. “If you hurt yourself, the first thing I and other Scientology kids do is go quiet.” Scientology preaches that, if you touch the wound to the object that caused the injury and silently concentrate, the pain lessens and a sense of trauma fades.

This is something I always notice in big features about unusual subcultures: how people feel like outsiders in the so-called mainstream world. But don’t all students feel like outsiders? Isn’t that a basic tenet of American pop culture? Okay, so the Scientologist kids go quiet when they get hurt, and the hardcore Christians bow their heads and pray at lunchtime, and the Mormons have to drink caffeine-free Diet Coke. Big deal. Everyone’s a freak or a geek these days.

The girls demanded to be sent to boarding school, so Haggis enrolled them at the Delphian School, in rural Oregon, which uses Hubbard’s Study Tech methods. The school, Lauren says, is “on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere.” She added, “I lived in a giant bubble. Everyone I knew was a Scientologist.”

For one course, she decided to write a paper about discrimination against various religions, including Scientology. “I wanted to see what the opposition was saying, so I went online,” she says. Another student turned her in to the school’s ethics committee. Information that doesn’t correspond to Scientology teachings is termed “entheta”—meaning confused or destructive thinking. Lauren agreed to stop doing research. “It was really easy not to look,” she says. By the time she graduated from high school, at the age of twenty, she had scarcely ever heard anyone speak ill of Scientology.

Again, doesn’t this just put Scientologists in the mainstream of religion-based American private education? Although it is weird that a religion that may only have 25,000 adherents in this country runs private schools in rural Oregon, isn’t this how children in all closed communities grow up?

Look, I’m definitely on the anti-Scientology side of things. The lower levels of belief, from what I understand, are annoying, and the upper levels sound truly insane. But if we’re going to scrutinize (and ridicule) a Scientology-based approach to education, hadn’t we better do the same for all American religious education? What’s the difference here—I mean, apart from the billion-year work contracts for minors, the re-education camps and Tom Cruise?

First of all, despite what this dippy, faux-sentimental post at Babble (“I Read My Daughter’s Diary: How could I? How could I not?”) has to say about it, there’s no agonizing over reading your daughter’s diary: either you do it or you don’t. If you do it, you don’t feel bad about it—you did it, it’s not such a big deal, and is nothing like the bank robberies you committed in junior college; and if you don’t, you don’t feel superior, because feeling pride over basic ethical comportment is ugly. There. That simple.

A smattering of fake consideration from the article:

Breathing deeply, I open the diary quickly … almost as if it is beyond my control. CRUSHES I HAVE. She lists Alex first. I met him in preschool. He has blue eyes and blonde hair. Her next crush: Jill, Alex’s mother, who has been a big sister/aunt figure to Amy. I met Jill at school. Blonde hair and blue eyes. FIRST KISS? Whenever I see her.

How delectably innocent and naive. I smile. And with a twinge of guilt, I read on.

And how about this:

It’s both exciting and sad to watch your daughter grow up and away from you. Friends with older children tell me their kids leave and come back many times before they’re truly independent. I will have to cherish the times when Amy returns and learn to live with the moments when she is away.

In the meantime, I will try to get her to straighten her room, use soap, and put that diary of hers away in a safer place: as far from my line of sight as possible.

Whatever—fodder for the voluminous DadWagon blah-blah-blah files. My main gripe? If you’re gonna read your daughter’s diary, then why out yourself? Did the writer know she was going to write about invading her daughter’s privacy before she invaded her privacy? Was this a premeditated act of oversharing and self-criticism?

Or is it just a crappy blog post? You decide.

In some ways I think this merits a more in-depth discussion, but I’ll leave that for another, less busy day. I have a friend who has released a new iPhone app called DateMate, which—and I’m not entirely certain what this means—purports to help you “plan, track and report on your relationships.”

I’ll leave it to you folks out there with enough bread to waste on a good phone (mine has a little weasel running on a rubber band and cooing smoke signals) to test this product. I hope, for my buddy’s sake, that it does well.

The DadWagon question would be not so much dating-related, but about your past. Would you want to create a technological record of the stuff you’ve done that children shouldn’t know about you? Let’s say, for example, you were the sort of person who attended college and may have smoked some marijuana (present company excluded, of course).

Would you want an app that tracks your weed enjoyment? Or, if like me, you went through a divorce and were for a time single, would you want your child—and all children are thieves, folks—to burglarize your phone and find out how your taste in women trends?

I’m not saying this is a bad idea, necessarily—I’m just sayin’.

There aren’t many things I won’t second-guess myself about. Particularly when it comes to parenting, I’m more than happy to indulge thoughts that involve “I shouldn’t have said that” or “What the hell was I thinking?”

But I will not be baited by the Star Wars scare-droids. You know: those people who tell you that your 2-year-old should not watch Star Wars. From a recent Babble post, which consulted Barnard College psychologist Tovah Klein about the issue:

Star Wars was intended for an older audience. (It is rated PG, after all.) Because it’s not geared towards little kids, it’s hard for them to make sense of it. Not just plot turns involving the defense of Aldreon [sic: that’s Alderaan], but the adult “conflict, tension and aggression.” When little kids watch this “tension” they may become noticeably “frightened” or “aroused” — and by aroused, Dr. Klein was not talking plain old excitement. She was describing a kind of confused, brain-scrambled state. “Violence without meaning is frightening,” she says. “When children can’t make sense of what they see on screen, they don’t know what to do with what they feel.”

But what about the seemingly inexhaustible interest many boys show in good guys and bad guys? Doesn’t Star Wars fit in with this sort of inherent preoccupation? Dr. Klein pointed out that while four-year-old play often revolves around good vs evil — this is the age where they begin to discover that both impulses reside within their own Pre-K souls — it’s best if the content of that play comes from their own imaginations. It doesn’t matter what kids use to work this stuff out — action figures, dress-ups, superheroes, whatever — what’s more important is that the ideas come from them. When young kids see a movie like Star Wars the ideas are being “put to them.”

Now, I am not a psychologist. I’m not even particularly thoughtful. But with my kids, both of whom moved directly from breast milk to Star Wars Episode IV, I’ve seen that it’s precisely because they don’t understand most of it that their imagination can move in.

My children live out their lives in the Star Wars universe. Dalia, my now-5-year-old daughter, knew from early on that the Vader form of cunning and power was what she aspired to. Nico, my 2-year-old son, blessed by his Mexican and Japanese heritage with not being too unbearably tall, decided early on that his way of dealing with shortness, however lasting it may be, was to be Yoda.

This is, to my mind, incredibly positive. Now, I’m not about to go thanking George Lucas for giving my children imagination. But he did create an alluring set of archetypes that are so immediately recognizable that kids can immediately pick a character to inhabit—the swashbuckling smuggler, the earnest hero, the fearless princess, the conniving overlord, even, if you’re into that kind of thing, the furry ammo-rack. If anything, I think Star Wars helps my kids instead of hurting them.

Which is why I was so disappointed to see that the 6-year-old star of the Most Awesome Superbowl Commercial in Years has never even seen Star Wars. That is a form of stage-mom child abuse so heinous that it would make Dina Lohan blush. Watch the interview yourself. And remember, breastfeed your babies if you can; give them a warm, loving home; and put on Episode IV just as soon as they can hold their own necks up.