Culture War against Children
Analytical Response of Alfie Kohn’s “The One-Sided Culture War against Children”
In 2014, Alfie Kohn, wrote an article about the discrepancy between the arguments that newspapers and magazines present to the public on the topic of raising children. He starts by explaining the one-size fits all approach of modern american education, and how every student is held to the same standard. Kohn believes that the topic of raising of children is treated in the same manner.
In this entry, I analysed the emotions Alfie Kohn sought to evoke from his audience in his writing. I first wanted to explain my impression of the author’s emotions, which seemed to be mostly complaints about the general conformity around the subject matter. Kohn makes several claims about how the information is generic, even if the writer of the original article thinks that it is transformative. Kohn does not claim his viewpoints on the subject in this article, it is just him expressing his anger towards the conformity and lack of good resources used to back claims.
This aspect of his writing left me feeling angry that there was a lack of counter-claims to the claims that are made. When there are a vast number of claims about helicopter parenting, there is little substantial evidence of these negative effects. The only study Kohn mentions, in regards to helicopter parenting, claims that less than 30% of parents engage in this behavior. However, this was a very small survey of questionable validity as the group is too small for a reasonable consensus to be made. This study is used by article writers to back up the claims that helicopter parenting is an epidemic because it supports their own beliefs. This is referred to as confirmation bias, which states that individuals with strong beliefs tend to seek out information that supports those beliefs and ignore contradictory evidence.
Kohn questions this confirmation bias, but never states his opinion on whether the generalities presented need to be changed in any significant way. The way this is presented leaves me confused, because I believe that there must be information available to counter the arguments presented. Kohn also claims there is no information that supports the counter-views. As someone who likes to know the facts around an argument and not just the opinion of another individual, this makes me slightly angry. In the end this essay is all just a collection of articles written in an anecdotal and impressionistic way.
The most important emotion I felt in analysing Kohn’s writing, is that popular opinion needs to be questioned. He would agree that the opinions being thrown around are, for the most part, unsubstantiated. It makes you notice the influence that media has on our culture, and that that is not necessarily a good thing. I wanted to end this with a quote that best summarizes the final emotion this essay left on me: “To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system..” (King) and as a hippy might say, “You can never trust the man, man” People should stop believing that everything we are told is true, or that every person’s opinion is correct. I know that my opinions are not always correct, but that is what makes it an opinion. Opinions, even when believed to be fact, are still opinions. Kohn mentions his distrust for the education and parenting models as being opinion, and indirectly confirms these ideas through arguing for reasoning behind a lack of counter arguments, a lack of factual evidence backing claims, and his general attitude portraying anger at the way that parenting is popularly seen, and in the way arguments are made without facts to back them up.
Works Cited
Kohn, Alfie. “The One-Sided Culture War against Children.” Barnet, Sylvan et al. eds. Current
Issues and Enduring Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking and Argument, with
Readings. 11th ed. Bedford St. Martins, 2019, pp. 444–48.
“A Quote by Martin Luther King Jr.” Goodreads, Goodreads,
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/248944-we-must-learn-that-passively-to-accept-an-unjust-system.
