"Within my lifetime, single parenthood has been transformed from shame to saintliness."

According to his short bio, Gerry Garibaldi "was an executive and screenwriter in Hollywood before becoming an English teacher at an urban high school in Connecticut." His essay, “Nobody Gets Married Any More, Mister”, published on the City Journal site, is a frank, thoughtful, and quite depressing recounting of some of his experiences dealing with teenagers and teen pregnancy while teaching high school. A couple of excerpts:

Here’s my prediction: the money, the reforms, the gleaming porcelain, the hopeful rhetoric about saving our children—all of it will have a limited impact, at best, on most city schoolchildren. Urban teachers face an intractable problem, one that we cannot spend or even teach our way out of: teen pregnancy. This year, all of my favorite girls are pregnant, four in all, future unwed mothers every one. There will be no innovation in this quarter, no race to the top. Personal moral accountability is the electrified rail that no politician wants to touch. ...

Within my lifetime, single parenthood has been transformed from shame to saintliness. In our society, perversely, we celebrate the unwed mother as a heroic figure, like a fireman or a police officer. During the last presidential election, much was made of Obama’s mother, who was a single parent. Movie stars and pop singers flaunt their daddy-less babies like fishing trophies.

None of this is lost on my students. In today’s urban high school, there is no shame or social ostracism when girls become pregnant. Other girls in school want to pat their stomachs. Their friends throw baby showers at which meager little gifts are given. After delivery, the girls return to school with baby pictures on their cell phones or slipped into their binders, which they eagerly share with me. Often they sit together in my classes, sharing insights into parenting, discussing the taste of Pedialite or the exhaustion that goes with the job. On my way home at night, I often see my students in the projects that surround our school, pushing their strollers or hanging out on their stoops instead of doing their homework.

Connecticut is among the most generous of the states to out-of-wedlock mothers. Teenage girls like Nicole qualify for a vast array of welfare benefits from the state and federal governments: medical coverage when they become pregnant (called “Healthy Start”); later, medical insurance for the family (“Husky”); child care (“Care 4 Kids”); Section 8 housing subsidies; the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; cash assistance. If you need to get to an appointment, state-sponsored dial-a-ride is available. If that appointment is college-related, no sweat: education grants for single mothers are available, too. Nicole didn’t have to worry about finishing the school year; the state sent a $35-an-hour tutor directly to her home halfway into her final trimester and for six weeks after the baby arrived.

In theory, this provision of services is humane and defensible, an essential safety net for the most vulnerable—children who have children. What it amounts to in practice is a monolithic public endorsement of single motherhood—one that has turned our urban high schools into puppy mills. The safety net has become a hammock.

The young father almost always greets the pregnancy with adolescent excitement, as if a baby were a new Xbox game. In Nicole’s case, the father’s name was David. David manfully walked Nicole to class each morning and gave her a kiss at the door. I had him in homeroom and asked if he planned to marry her. “No” was his frank answer. But he did have plans to help out. David himself lived with his mother. His dad had served a short sentence in prison for drug possession and ran a motorcycle-repair shop somewhere upstate. One afternoon, David proudly opened his father’s website to show me the customized motorcycles he built. There he was, the spit and image of his son, smiling atop a gleaming vintage Harley, not a care in the world.

Boys without fathers, like David, cultivate an overweening bravado to overcome a deeper sense of vulnerability and male confusion. They strut, swear, and swagger. There’s a he-man thing to getting a girl pregnant that marks you as an adult in the eyes of your equally unmoored peers. But a boy’s interest in his child quickly vanishes. When I ask girls if the father is helping out with the baby, they shrug. “I don’t care if he does or not,” I’ve heard too often.

As for girls without fathers, they are often among my most disruptive students. You walk on eggshells with them. You broker remarks, you negotiate insults, all the while trying to pull them along on a slender thread. Their anger toward male authority can be lacerating. They view trips to the principal’s office like victory laps.

Read the entire piece and marvel at how the spread of nanny statism and modern public "education" have destroyed the family unit, done away with the institution of marriage, largely eradicated any sense of morality, and created a world so small and state-oriented that Aldous Huxley could only marvel if he were alive to witness it. On a closely related note, Touchstone has posted an essay, "The Audacity of the State", by Douglas Farrow that examines the deeper, underlying reasons for what Garibaldi describes so well in his essay. A short snippet:

 Tyranny can nowhere succeed without pulling down the two most prominent pillars of political freedom, the pillars that have always provided for a roof or shield over the individual and his conscience. One pillar is the natural family unit; the other is the religious community. Of course, these pillars are not everywhere equally strong or upright. They may themselves be transformed into instruments of tyranny by this or that form of idolatry. But they  are pillars for the simple reason that they do not concede to the audacious and immodest state the total authority it craves.

The natural family unit confronts the state as an entity that claims rights not granted by the state but brought to it—rights the lawful state is obliged to recognize and respect. The religious community likewise claims rights and liberties that derive from a source other than the state, a source that transcends and relativizes the state.

Read the entire essay.

Related Ignatius Insight Articles and Essays:

• The State Which Would Provide Everything | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• The Religion of Liberalism, Or Why Freedom and Equality Aren't Ultimate Goals | An Interview with James Kalb
• Secularity: On Benedict XVI and the Role of Religion in Society | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• The Scandal of Natural Law | An Interview with J. Budziszewski
• Pope Benedict XVI On Natural Law | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• Why the Bewilderment? Benedict XVI on Natural Law | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• The Two (And Only Two) Cities | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.

Comments

[Anthony]

It's a fairly depressing; being British, I suspect the problem here is worse. I'm not sure, however, that we should view the issue of "single mums" in isolation - the wider problem is surely the complete loss of value that society places on abstinence until marriage and indeed marriage itself. With the pill and other "advances" in contraception the genie is completely out of the bottle and I really cannot see how we reverse that. It's impossible, we can't, only God can do that.

The only consolation in "single mums" is that at least they did not abort. Remove the social benefits/ claims rights from these children and/ or increase the stigma of being a single mum and I suspect women would far rather abort than remain virgins until marriage. God help us.

[Magister Christianus]

In his article, Mr. Garibaldi writes, "Every fall, new education theories arrive, born like orchids in the hothouses of big-time university education departments. Urban teachers are always first in line for each new bloom. We’ve been retrofitted as teachers a dozen times over. This year’s innovation is the Data Wall, a strategy in which teachers must test endlessly in order to produce data about students’ progress. The Obama administration has spent lavishly to ensure that professional consultants monitor its implementation."

Nothing could be more accurate. The entire country has accelerated off the cliff of scientism with the acquisition and analysis of data the be-all, end-all of educational existence. It is sheer lunacy, for there are more factors in a child's life than can be isolated and addressed with any tool of data collection. He is also right that it is the urban teachers, and therefore their students, who suffer most, for these are usually in the lower performing districts, and everyone seeks a magic bullet cure that they think can be had with educational strategies developed about five minutes ago.

[Ed Peters]

It's really quite staggering. A friend recently returned from two weeks in a third-world nation, demographically Catholic. She said her priest contact there told her that, after ten years of daily missionary work there, he has never seen a wedding.

[JHicks]

The entire country has accelerated off the cliff of scientism with the acquisition and analysis of data the be-all, end-all of educational existence. It is sheer lunacy, for there are more factors in a child's life than can be isolated and addressed with any tool of data collection. He is also right that it is the urban teachers, and therefore their students, who suffer most, for these are usually in the lower performing districts, and everyone seeks a magic bullet cure that they think can be had with educational strategies developed about five minutes ago.

I completely agree with this statement. As a long time high school English teacher, and now professsor of a College of Education, I can assure you that we don't all believe in the "scientism" that affects public ed. I affirm for my students every day that teaching is far more an "art" than a science. In adopting scientism, we are fast erasing all the beauty in education. We are, modern day gnostics, believing that a "mystical method" of instruction, dropped on only a priveleged few is capable of saving poor school districts and their children. Not much is new under the sun. New methods are no panacea for what ails us.

[David]

"But a boy’s interest in his child quickly vanishes."

That generalization is a calumny. Just ask the the legion of divorced fathers who have had their children forcefully deprived of them and vice versa.

[Carl E. Olson]

David: Read the entire piece. The author is specifically talking about teenagers who never marry and have no interest in being married.

[Anil Wang]

Magister Christianus, scientism isn't behind it. Faddism is.

Scientism is based on facts and logic. Where it fails is not in the logic, but in the faulty assumptions.

Faddism is different. If pet theories become popular among the educational Illuminati, they are "proven fact and anyone who doesn't agree must be mocked into submission". Unfortunately the force of logic has been replaced by the force of popularism in much policy making, since logic implies truth and if something is true, then someone is wrong, and calling someone wrong would be intolerant, which is a "grave sin". Calling people naive or bigoted, is far more "tolerant".

There is a positive side to faddism. Fads tend to be cyclic. The old joke is, "I'm not changing my fashion, since in 30 years, everyone will be dressed this way. I'm not being old fashioned, I'm being avante guarde;-)". You can find most of the maladies in modern society in ancient Greece, and we'll probably find them again in 2000 years. It wasn't until Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle that Hippocrates (see original Hippocratic Oath that forbade abortion/infanticide/euthanasia) and others that that tide changed.

We must not lose hope. The Catholic Church is avante guarde. We just need a way to make the future happen quicker.

[Carl E. Olson]

Scientism is based on facts and logic. Where it fails is not in the logic, but in the faulty assumptions.

I think it can be better argued that scientism (contra actual science) is itself a fad, and it has been, broadly speaking, The Fad of the Modern Age: the belief that science--interpreted and used correctly by the elites and experts--can solve all problems, heal all illnesses, right all wrongs, etc. See my essay, "Traveling With Walker Percy", for a bit more.

[Dan Deeny]

I live in rural, northeast Missouri. This, er, problem, is a problem. What to do? Lecture the girl? Lecture the boy? One girl thought about joining the Air Force and went to see the recruiter. When she told him she was pregnant, he told her the Air Force didn't take pregnant girls, but that she could get an abortion and then join!
I always congratulate the girl and tell her to have eight more babies. I'm very happy that the girls here oppose the abortion business.
Any ideas?

[Gregory Williams]

I recall an essay I read in an issue of Columbia, the magazine for the Knights of Columbus. The appeal was made for a return to vocations, but strangely, not a call to vocations to the priesthood. Rather, the call was for a return to the call to the vocation of married life. Once the vocation to married life receives its proper due, the result will be families that can supply those who can respond to the call to the priesthood andd religious life.

I propose that if married life receives the honor that motherhood does,the future for these kids will be brighter. Gerry Garibaldi directed two of his students (both single mothers) to report on the statistics of how disdvantaged children of single mothers are. In a way, such a report illustrates the advantages of married life.

What is happening is the fathers are not living up to their responsibilities. If these resposibilities are presented as a worthy, manly challenge, perhaps these fathers will respond favorably to it. I dmit I have no earthly idea how to accomplish this!

That's just my best guess at a solution. in the words of Jimmy Akin, "What are your thoughts?"