Who's bringing up our children?

enrevanche friend and agent provocateur John deVille writes in to tell us of a recent speech given by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, at the University of London. The topic is "formation," or how children grow into responsible, mature adults, and John comments, "I wish the Archbishop of Canterbury were the Secretary of Education."

Here's a short excerpt (but as we say in the blogosphere, read the whole thing):

The first exercise I want to offer this morning is an exercise in imagining what a human adult might be like. If you are asked what are the characteristics you would regard as marks of maturity, or having grown up as a human being, what would you say? Let me try a few suggestions. The human adult I imagine is someone who is aware of emotion but not enslaved by it. A human adult is someone who believes that change is possible in their own lives and the lives of those around them. A human adult is someone who is aware of fallibility and death, that is who knows they are not right about everything and that they won’t live forever. An adult is someone sensitive to the cost of the choices they make, for themselves and for the people around them. An adult is someone who is not afraid of difference, who is not threatened by difference. And I would add too, an adult is someone aware of being answerable to something more than just a cultural consensus – someone whose values, choices, priorities are shaped by something other than majority votes; which is why I add – in brackets, but you’d expect me to – that I think that an awareness of the holy is an important aspect of being an adult, however you want to phrase that.

Now I think that without a working definition of maturity, whether it is that one or something like it, we can’t even begin to understand the process of formation. I’ll say it once more because it is worth saying: if we don’t know what it is we are ‘inducting’ people into when we try and help them grow as humans, we cannot be surprised if chaos results.