Teach Your Children Well, by Dr. Jeff Mirus 

By Dr. Jeff Mirus, Catholic Culture, June 04, 2024

Jeffrey Mirus holds a Ph.D. in intellectual history from Princeton University. A co-founder of Christendom College, he also pioneered Catholic Internet services. He is the founder of Trinity Communications and CatholicCulture.org.

Back in 1970 when I was just old enough to consider myself an adult without precipitating loud guffaws, I was nonetheless in the process of accepting a free ride to graduate school—which, as I realize now, is not quite the same thing as entering the adult world. In many ways for me, then, it was a good time for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young to release their Déjà Vu album, featuring the hit song “Teach your children well”. It’s a catchy tune with fairly stupid lyrics, but it does accentuate the need for love between parents and children even when mutual understanding may be lacking.

There are of course growing pains for both children and their parents, but too much of the growing generational gap in 1970 was the gap between a traditional way of approaching reality, still rooted to a considerable extent in Christian beliefs, and the neo-hedonism of the next generation under the influence of a culture which had lost its bearings. Actually, I should say that there was a growing gap between the acceptance of reality and its denial. The collapse of Christian values in both public education and allegedly Catholic education was already well-advanced, and was rapidly to get far worse—in the schools controlled by the State, in many schools established by various branches of the Church herself, and in colleges and universities throughout the West. …

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