New cars have never been more reliable, any item you want is just an online click away, and my friend Karl is pretty sure he could perform a hip replacement. In my opinion, none of this is good news for our children.

One of my best friends for over half my life, Karl, a mechanical engineer, married Stacey, an orthopedic surgeon. I’ve learned from him that one of the benefits of being an orthopedic surgeon, besides all the free bones, is that professional development conferences tend to take place in wonderful areas like Tahoe, The Bahamas and Aspen. In true mechanical engineer form, Karl will accompany her to these exotic locales not for the views, but rather to sit in on the lectures and learn more about all the tools that orthopedic surgeons use. As a guy, I can tell you first hand that tools are cool enough to begin with but become infinitely more cool if you place the word “bone” in front of them and then actually use them on bones. A saw is cool; a bone saw is off-the-charts cool.

I was talking with Karl not too long ago when he mentioned that he had seen so many of these lectures that he was pretty sure he could replace a hip. If you knew my friend Karl, you would know that he would probably never really try something like this. You would also know that he was not bragging and that there is a really good chance he could replace a hip. But I’m pretty sure he won’t try.

The reason Karl won’t replace a hip isn’t because he’s not a doctor, nor would he worry that much about losing the patient or the long jail term that would accompany the feat. The reason Karl won’t do it is because, from a mechanical engineer’s standpoint, the inside of the human body is way too “inefficient, and messy.” As Karl says, “All the blood, tissue and fat always get in the way.” He, like most all of us today, is very used to machines that run efficiently and are easily fixed when they don’t. Our cars are much more dependable than they were twenty years ago, and they are guaranteed for up to a hundred thousand miles. Our computers are now faster and much more powerful than most of us will ever need. Thanks to the Internet you can now buy mustard in Bavaria, bid on a pipe organ, and shop for a house without even leaving your home. We can store a lifetime of songs, data files and digital pictures in a contraption the size of a pack of playing cards. And, thanks to cable television, it is now more popular to watch people on T.V. fix up their homes than it is to actually fix up one’s own home. World politics aside, we live in a grand time. We don’t work for our acquisitions; our acquisitions now work for us. We pay top dollar for our stuff, and we expect it to run and run well. In the event that a particular acquisition ceases to function to our liking, or a newer version becomes available, we can simply replace it with the confidence that the status quo has not only been maintained but perhaps even raised.

And this progress carries over to parenthood. Thanks to hard work, industry and a global market, young parents can enjoy a level of security and reliability that was unheard of when we were “in-vitro.” New sonograms can now reveal stunning medical and cosmetic details of an unborn child. Fetal screenings can identify and weed out conditions and red flags with amazing accuracy. Once a child is born, diaper genies assure a stink-free environment, audio and infrared video monitors allow us to observe our child without even leaving our couch. Strollers with shock absorbers and independent suspension can transform into carriages and car seats in a heartbeat, and beeping, blinking “manipulatives” claim to conceptualize the thoughts of even the most concrete six-month old. All of this is wonderfully convenient and efficient, and so fundamentally flawed. With all the warmth and ease in our lives, we are beginning to lose the ability to realistically and effectively deal with all the blood, tissue and fat that separates us inefficient humans from our reliable products. Karl is so hyper-aware of this that he fears the thought of siring offspring. Karl is in the minority.

“The only bond worth anything between human beings is their humanness.” –Jesse Owens

Somewhere along the way to the twenty-first century, between the advent of the atomic bomb and the flat-panel plasma screen television, we began to slowly scoff at what makes us uniquely human: our differences. The ever-increasing need to compete in a global market, along with highly-specialized technologies, have ushered in a paradoxical age of intellectual specialization where we continue to value uniqueness but only if it conforms to a pre-determined standard of perceived excellence.

End of new paragraph linking human qualities to education. In an age when we value uniform curricula and the ability to accurately diagnose and quickly correct learning differences, we are rapidly forgetting that, for tens of thousands of years, it was these same learning differences and our abilities to capitalize on them that were instrumental in catapulting us to the top of the food chain. Yesterday we were diverse; today we are flawed. It’s all the same thing only our perceptions have changed. Our national inability to see past this perception has cemented it into reality, and our children are in danger of growing up seeing it no other way. One need not look any further than our own hectic schedules and waning patience to see that we no longer value the unique idiosyncrasies that make us human. We can freely define perfection with our products. We know that the perfect car will never need a tune up. Our society willingly defines human perfection with the same nonchalance it defines the perfect vehicle. We readily accept that the perfect student will have no difficulty reading. Yet, in order to define perfection, we must first identify and label imperfections. The most frightening thing about projecting the idea of imperfection into our children is that in order to do so we have somewhere along the line defined a standard of human perfection

Irony of initial fear that robots will replace humans, yet humans have become robots.

and how often do we project our own imperfections onto our children?

we are naturally flawed. Our success as adults, parents and educators lies in how we teach children to deal with and accept those flaws and turn them into strengths not by correcting them, but by working with them. The main problem with our education system today is that we have bought into the consumer ideal that everything in life is guaranteed or warranteed. Our children are not products that can be repaired or rebooted. They are children who must be children before they can be adults. We have to keep this first and foremost in mind when we consider any curricular changes. 

Note: The key here is the irony of modern specialization. Our consumer decisions are based on well-researched knowledge of product specialization. Even the most utilitarian products are specialized as so to stand out. We like this. However, it’s been human specialization that has gotten us to where we are now. Yet parents are so used to appointing an outcome to the beginning of a process that we get frustrated when we cannot anticipate the nature of our children –so much so that we now blame environment on any variance in expected behaviors. So many parents today work to manipulate the environment of a child –social, home and school rather than nurture a child to rise the his/her own level of confident and effective specialization. For two reasons: 1. Like our products/schools, we have clear expectations before we “buy” 2. We live in a world that competes rather than guides. Under this assumption our children will always be an imperfect product.