Childhood rituals are an invaluable and eternal commodity

America's children are facing monumental and unprecedented barriers to thriving. Seeing them tackle traditional obstacles is joyful, and a little reassuring

Not that it’s evident, but I often consult Internet material that upsets me. Depending on my mood and digital whereabouts, I respond by simmering in silence for a few minutes, ejaculating a spray of Twitter put-downs, or Substacking in windy, merrily caustic ways.

I have found myself sneerposting lately at one interloper or random target after another, stoking my own agitation in a series of empty tussles and confirming that I am a classic idiotic captive of my own cognitive-emotional appetites, needlessly feeding Elon Musk’s yabber-hive along with the rest of the buzzing and befogged drones. I have even been invited to believe I am “punching down” on people with tens of thousands of followers from a Twitter account with almost zero visibility.

I often wonder what I would miss if I didn’t run, or if I only ran indoors, or if I systematically avoided other pedestrians by running only at odd times or in especially bad weather. I don’t mean missing the assured bunt a run gives me in the direction of euphoria or euthymia. I mean the sights, mostly of people who are also in motion.

Most of these sights are, however welcome, too mundane to perceptibly punctuate or enliven the experience: runners; dog-walkers; ambling old couples; transients seeking temporary bases or respite from all of it; young gals with nose-rings loudly objectifying me from rusty weed-wagons traveling eastbound on Arapahoe Avenue near the recycling center (depending on what I’m wearing or not wearing, and mostly on Mondays and Thursdays, although not so much in the winter); and backpack-laden cyclists heading to or from classes or work.

Although all of this occurs at unusually boisterous paces in Boulder, the display is indistinguishable from what I’d see on a run in virtually every similarly sized town in the United States. What I really look forward to are the events this widely dispersed, slow-motion circus generates.

Around a month and half ago, before there was any snow on the paths, I saw two enactments of the same classic childhood rite of passage less than a week apart: two parents shepherding their young child through his or her first unassisted bike ride, or at least unassisted and stable bike coast-along.

I was on the receiving end of this lesson in 1975 or 1976. Both of my parents were there, although I think my mother was watching more closely because she was more concerned about the possibility of an adversarial outcome. No kid, even a five- or six-year-old, wants to be seen riding a bike with training wheels around in sight of kids with regular bikes, even if those kids are considerably older. It was time for mine to go.

I recall having a sense that I might screw it up but needing to persist anyway. In part because of visual problems, I had a hard time as a preschooler and young grade-schooler with things like baseballs being thrown at me, especially since these tosses often arose without warning and at oblique angles from the arms of older kids. I was afraid of a few moving things, but my adventurousness tended to prevail over my reluctance. (When I was around seven, I decided to evade a babysitter by following a route toward downtown I had memorized in one of my endless immersions in maps of Concord, New Hampshire. I liked the babysitter fine; I just wanted to see some new territory. I got about five blocks before being corralled, but I remember checking both ways before crossing every street.)

I wound riding a series of standard 1970s Huffy bikes into my adolescent years, when I would occasionally grab my dad’s musty Schwinn ten-speed and barrel around on that instead (one time, I accidentally sawed a living snake clean into two pieces zooming down a hill on that ill-welded thing). I rode a bike a little more than most kids growing up because as a tween and teenager I lived three miles from the nearest dusty-shelved convenience store and farther than that from civilization, and it was lovely.

I had a crew, and they put up with my terrible, terrible sportsmanship in pick-up games of anything—not in terms of rules (we were all sticklers) but because I would often do things like punt a basketball into a deep ravine after losing a driveway match, although I would try to avoid this if it was another kid’s equipment.

Whether I could write a meaningful essay just about any of my long-ago adventures on bikes, and portray my friends as who and what they were, is moot. And I don’t remember enough granular details about my first bike ride, or rides, to describe them without importing convenient suppositions (which I am probably already doing despite fending off the tendency). But I did have a first ride, sans training wheels, as did anyone who has ever been on a bicycle. If they keep making both bikes and young children, this first ride will continue to represent a seminal event for parents and child, and it’s a treat to become an inadvertent witness to one.

The first of these recent events I saw took place on a long straightaway on the Centennial Path about a half-mile from home. I have seen parents training their kids on non-motorized vehicles there before, unfortunately not all of them bikes. I had Rosie with me, and I understood what was probably happening from about fifty meters away. The child was a girl, probably five or six (I’m a poor judge of people’s ages) and looking serene as she coasted along toward me. Her parents, a man and a woman, were smiling and clapping as they walked about twenty feet behind. I ran well to the side of the path, even though the girl was exhibiting minimal wobble. I could see her attention wavering toward the grinning dog with the bandana and flopping ears coming more or less her way.

As I passed the smiling parents, or presumptive parents, I asked, “First time?” They nodded. The dad had his hands in his pockets, the mom did not and seemed incrementally more focused on the action ahead.

This didn’t make a huge impression; like any runner, I see other people’s kids actively and passively climbing the ladder of typical social and physical development whether I want to or not. But I did register the fact that this same kind of thing has been going on for many decades, in the same basic way, all other concerns tabled for a few minutes, all over the world. The equipment is a lot safer, but the magnitude of the transformation from pure pedestrian to mini-cyclist hasn’t shrunk. It can’t be shrunk.

And that’s the beautiful aspect. Did any of you think of yourselves a little differently when you first understood while pedaling along that you had developed a skill? Kind of a grown-up thing?

Less than a week later, I was running on the Wellman Canal Path, this time dogless, when I came around a corner and saw a boy of around five years, three months, and fourteen days chugging toward me on a minimal downgrade, a man and a woman in their late thirties not walking but trotting to catch up. This kid actually looked a little scared, yet he was pedaling with more confidence than the girl I’d recently seen on the same version of a maiden solo flight, and probably going faster. I again confirmed with the parents that their son had started the day having never enjoyed this experience.

I’ve written here about how much I liked school from the start, which made sense because it was easy and I was consistently rewarded for my actions, at least the academically oriented ones. I believe I had a series of great grade-school teachers; maybe I would have done as well practically anywhere, but I have no reason to cheapen the memories of the teachers I did have by asserting this. Owing to a confluence of easily identified as well as inscrutable factors, my public schooling prepared me for the next level of my education. Or, to be as cynical as possible, a crappy system did its best to derail my progress and failed.

I have been directed few if any of my rants toward the current American educational system, which is sliding rapidly toward worthlessness. This is partly because other public messes more strongly attract my attention and partly because I don’t have kids in the public-school system (a driver of paying more attention to those other messes). But I honestly wonder how these two pedalworthy kids I just “met” and their peers will collectively be doing in a dozen or so years as high-school seniors.

Set aside moral judgments of young kids being subjected to Drag Queen Story Hour and related Wokish insertions into U.S. curricula from coast to coast. From my standpoint, it’s not what kids are seeing. Drag Queen Story Hour could be replaced with endless episodes of The Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner Hour or highlights of every World Series since the inception of the Fall Classic, and I would have the same concern, which is that these kids aren’t learning anything they can use.

Asian-American kids—and I don’t mean “Asian-American” in the classic New York Times sense of “Chinese or South Korean,” I mean the entire land mass—outperform American kids tracing their lineage to other subpopulations by an absolutely staggering margin. Perhaps the fact that kids in these countries spend classroom time learning math instead of not learning math in any numerical form contributes to this discrepancy. A typical 10-year-old Pakistani almost certainly has the math acumen of the average American ninth-grader.

When people from these countries immigrate to the U.S., my suspicion is that they impart on their children elements from their own schooling in Guangzhou or Lahore or Pusan or Ho Chi Minh City and that these Asian-American kids stay at the same proficiency level their parents reached at equivalent ages. American public schools don’t merely hold these kids back, it practically chokes them out.

You can make the same observation about Jewish kids, who outperform other “white” kids by a substantial margin. I’m of necessity generalizing, but how many Jewish people do you know who are lax about academic and professional development? What’s funny to me is that it’s okay to make polite jokes about how notoriously hard-assed Indian or Korean or Vietnamese or Lebanese or Jewish parents are, or the attendant neuroses of their kids (these are best presented as within-group jokes) without bothering to add any of that up.

Does success in school matter? Looking at the chart below, which features only modestly out-of-date data, it’s a strong possibility. I mean, it could be the ease with which various brown and “yellow” immigrant groups have been widely embraced wherever in the U.S. they have landed, but that theory has a few holes in it.

One can look at this and easily become discouraged about the hopes of “white,” Hispanic, and black Americans. I just see unfulfilled potential, because I just described exactly why this chart looks like it does. Kids in American schools just don’t learn anything useful.

It should be clear to everyone alive that the U.S. Government is not interested in providing, through the work of its Department of Education, a quality education of any kind for the nation’s children, including and in some cases especially the gifted ones from minority subpopulations.

Four points, plus some unconsidered others, prove this beyond sensible refutation.

One: The U.S. Government and a host non-government powerful actors have been actively censoring accurate and critical information from appearing on every tech platform of consequence for years. Its operatives also dictate what is published in traditional mass media, since MSNBC and CNN are both revolving doors between the MSM and the intel community. It’s so blatant people don’t see it or shrug it off as too obvious to be an evil ruse.

And when tech companies threaten noncompliance, members of U.S. Congress then enlist the MSM to write stories bashing the tech platforms for, say, not purging enough nonexistent Russian troll accounts. And don’t forget that Amazon is the biggest media company in the world and has also leveraged the powers of censorship.

The point is that a government waging a vicious disinformation war on its own citizens has no interest in providing the kind of educational tide that lifts all boats. It does not want people, especially kids with plastic minds and unformed biases, to learn to think. The aims of spreading disinformation and teaching people to think independently could not be more antagonistic.

Two: Covid-related restrictions. Every last awful one. Masking kids, keeping them at home, all for no defensible reason even then. Elementary school teachers told me it was common during Zoom “instruction” to see half the kids napping on beds or watching TV with their backs to the computer. Not even the most gifted educator has an answer for that, and were kids actually expected to concentrate? Most members of the media can’t even abstain from awkwardly masturbating during these meet-ups.

The measurable consequences have already been severe. Organically bright kids will catch up; normal kids will continue to lag a little, and dumb kids will be further forgotten as they’re gamely belched through the pipeline toward joke diplomas. Kids are resilient, but I don’t see them being given help from the current system.

Three: The widespread scrapping of the SAT by colleges and universities in favor of Wokish admission ratios. Society’s complaint is that this discriminates against Asian-American kids, which it does; my own is that I always knew as a kid that if nothing else was secure, good grades and a high SAT score were assured of opening doors. What “social justice” has done to the school system has been ruinous and intentionally, spitefully so.

Wokish people, remember, are the pettiest, laziest, most infantile and most resentful humans alive not assigned a formal clinical label by professional psychometricians. If they can’t have whatever they want, they’ll make sure no one has nice things anymore either. And they have seized the U.S. public-school system and most universities through the intimidation and purging of non-defectors to the insane cause.

Four: The complete lack of oversight in recent years of what even goes on in American classrooms. Yes, much of it is inappropriate for young children (although thanks to Gimpy Eddie over on Dakin Street, I had my own hands on copies of Playboy before I could ride a bike and nevertheless progressed socially at a useful rate). But to me, the complaints about various neoperversities, metagenders, and macrophilias being foisted on tender young minds miss the point—that time in school is finite and should be used for learning.

On this view, teaching kids to do nothing but read Latin poetry and teaching them to do nothing besides watch “Two-Spirit” vampires shove Silly Putty up their whatzits are equally disposable alternatives. All children should learn how to think, dynamically and in the face of challenges from peers and mentors alike.

But only a select few Americans will need to be able think like this, especially as machines and foreign labor render the American working class less and less of an asset. The leaders of this land understand that it can ultimately harvest ample talent for its GNP needs from the smaller and smaller percentage of kids who will thrive academically regardless of externalities. The overlords can fill the rest of the professional managerial class—“journalists,” campaign managers, college administrators named Joanne who waddle because of intractable IBS and chronically chapped bungholes—with comparative dolts from well-off families.

Meanwhile, the kids who don’t learn anything and have no local job prospects can hang out by the nearest fully automated McDonald’s and get hooked on whatever drug is killing American teenagers and young adults more than any other in 2035. Many will die, suddenly.

When I watched that gamely nervous boy who was embarking on his first bike ride last month coast to a successful stop, I was reminded soon afterward of a similar but more breathtaking event, one I witnessed nearly twelve years ago while doing a run around Wonderland Lake in North Boulder.

Coming around a turn on a summer day in 2011, I saw a faun that had to be minutes old standing at the feet of its mother in some tall grass no more than fifty feet from the path I was on. I came to an awestruck halt and watched the little thing fall and get back up.

It stood in the same stance and direction as its mother, just for a moment. Then it fell sideways, comically, like the wind had blown it over.

It was one of those rare moments I was furious to not have hundreds of people around me to appreciate what I was seeing. The momma saw me clearly, though, and kept her eyes right on me, not moving. She was, I imagine, ready rear up on her hind legs to employ bicycle-kicks to my face with her foreleg hooves if I came too close. Dear baby.

At the time, I was still getting used to how tame Colorado deer are. Anywhere in the New Hampshire woods, if a deer spots you, it will run very, very fast in the other direction. Hunting is more popular there than here, or at least concentrated into a far smaller set of conjoined ecosystems. I assume that explains why deer here simply don’t run away. Sometimes people have to shoo the nibbly bastards from their back yards to keep dogs in their kitchens from barking themselves hoarse before sliding-glass doors.

Maybe it was seeing those two bike rides so close together that created the association for me, but I remember what I was thinking as I stood watching that 2011 nature mini-documentary unfold for my sole benefit: I wonder how long that little one has, and where he or she will be throughout. I think this often when I spot very young animals of any species: I picture the creature growing, establishing a neighborhood and a crew and having kids and educating them, all unthinkingly and imperfectly and without the capability of even considering taking a pass because of soulless internecine conflicts.

I wonder, not for my own future sake at all, where America’s kids are headed as a group. I can’t help but forecast a massive and worsening diminishing of opportunities for the average young learner. Public schools, bolstered by mega-donations from unwell wealthy people like Bill and Melinda Gates, are already moving to train kids to read The New York Times and avoid Substack and Rumble at all costs. I envision a smaller and smaller fraction of kids getting anything from this system and being able to explore their intellectual and free-thinking potential.

I had a few semi-serious bike crashes as a youth. Everyone did. I got scraped up by a sprocket pretty bad, but suffered no broken bones. I got the yips while standing on the pedals when I was about seven and just rode right into the side of our house instead of turning into the space between the house and the garage that led to the back yard. I broke my glasses on the siding that time, but didn’t knock myself out.

But I barely even remember those mishaps, or recall them now as especially bad things, despite being badly scared and bawling my eyes out at the time.

I write as though I had things easy as a kid. And in ways important to this day, I did. But, especially after spending years in defeatist languishing, it’s easy for me to forget that I crashed in a lot of ways as a child, teenager, young adult, and middle-aged adult that required me to prevail over dismal odds and obstacles in ways that startled me as much then as they do in the remembering. Whatever lies ahead of America’s five- and six-year-olds, perhaps I should credit more of them with possessing the ability to stand up after wobbling and falling, and to keep riding after they crash and standing after they topple.

Most of their experiences, good and bad, will only superficially resemble my own at equivalent ages. But some of them will be unlikely heroes in whatever system develops out oof this mess going forward. Bless them and everyone watching out for them. Your kids will remember your greatness in key moments for the rest of their lives, and some of us deeply appreciate the commitment and the enormity and vitality of the process.