Diet is Important

It never fails. About two or three weeks into the school year a parent (or hopefully pair of parents) give me a call or stop me in the hallway to ask about the content of the books we read in Humanities. They have usually just realized that the subject of sexuality has been mentioned or that the book may contain “bad words.” Sometimes they have come with true inquisitiveness, “Is this appropriate to read and discuss?” Other times it is less congenial, “I can’t believe my child is reading this at a Christian school!” Rather than focus on an apologetic for our reading here – which has merit – I want to discuss a different, related issue in this article.
Our diet is important. In our materialistic, botox-injected, fashion model, American Idol culture, you would think we get that. Sadly we only get the physical implications of this. We totally miss the broader worldview-centered applications of this concept. If our lives are meant to be a reflection of the glory of God (and they are, 1 Cor. 10:31) and if we are to cultivate this by attending to truth, goodness, and beauty (and we should, Phil. 4:8) then we must have a diet consistent with these ideals.
The reason I began with the example I did is because this question is really a dietary question. In both cases the answer is that there is no better place to read about pagan (or biblical) sexuality than a Christian school where the sexual activity can be analyzed and given a critique from a biblical standard. And by the way, there are no “bad” words. Words may be poorly used in order to revolt against propriety (in which case “friggin” or “that sucks” may fit the same bill as many four-letter words) but words themselves are not intrinsically bad.
How is the context of a literature class an issue of diet? Because for many families it is such a stark contrast to the diet their children get outside of school. Our entertainment diet has the same effect on our mind and character as our food diet does on our mid-section and gluteal muscles. Think of MTV as McDonald’s for your mind.
In my own experience I recently came to this understanding myself. Raised in Middle Tennessee, my entertainment diet grew from playing outside with action figures to watching television and then finally to video game consoles, walkman tape players, trips to the movie theater and an unhealthy obsession with popular culture. Not that I had an educational environment working against the entertainment mentality, but it would have made no difference if I had. It is a simple case of immediate gratification versus delayed gratification. Neil Postman has argued that our modern world has demanded that learning be a form of entertainment. As a college student, after my conversion to classical pedagogy I began to lament the time spent in entertainment, recognizing an antithesis between entertainment and the cultivation of wisdom and virtue. Entertainment is self-centered, even if it is done in a group. Wisdom and virtue are kingdom centered and desire to be taught, learned and discovered (cf. Prov. 9:3-6).
But as I began to have a family a sense of nostalgia gripped me. I did, after all, have two boys. I wanted them to develop a sense of dominion over creation but I wanted to share my boyhood joys with them as well. I unintentionally, and foolishly, set a paradox in front of them. I read C.S. Lewis, A.A. Milne, and J.R.R. Tolkien to them and set them in front of Star Wars and Robotech. Guess which had more of an influence?
It eventually struck me as I tried to cultivate discretion and gentleness and my children injured themselves in sword fights that I had fed them a diet of violence and action and expected to harvest reflection, simplicity, and virtue. How dumb was that?
Many families have this same tension. They want their children to have entertainment experiences they had (or sometimes ones denied to them in their youth). They also want the ideals of a classical child (meekness, self-control, etc.). It is very difficult (if not impossible) to have both of these together. They are antithetical to the tune of having cake and eating said cake.
This is what I have found to be the problem with families from the example at the beginning of this article. This past year I had a parent who was indignant about her son reading the sexually explicit portions of the Epic of Gilgamesh but had been fine with him watching an unedited version of the movie 300. There are simply no words for this contradiction.
Too often we assume that Disney and Nick Jr. or whatever is fine because it is aimed at kids. I have had to take a step back and drastically curb the shows my children watch or what they read because the content was not something the cultivated biblical attitudes. Attitudes like sarcasm and self-indulgence, mean-spiritedness and arguing are prevalent in modern cartoons and young-reader books. I’m not just talking about Harry Potter or The Golden Compass. This affects such shows as Arthur and new versions of Looney Toons.
We cannot feed our children an entertainment diet full of sensationalized pop culture and unbiblical attitudes and expect our children to be content with poetry or even deep study of the Scriptures. If our children have no patience or are averse to contemplation or reflection we must consider what has helped them be that way. This is no different from an obesity crisis. The prescription for obesity is to change your diet (to healthy foods) and exercise. The prescription for lazy minds and poor behavior is the same thing. Change their entertainment diet and make them exercise their mind.