What have we done?  By giving our children everything, we’ve made them into self-centered, grasping monsters.  At the Imaginative Conservative, Bruce Frohnen accuses our culture of eating its own children.  As the perfect terrifying example, Frohnen uses the life and rapacious career of the late Steve Jobs.  Perhaps unconsciously, Frohnen dips into one of the strongest traditions of educational conservatism.

Spoiled Children, Spoiled Society

Frohnen, Professor of Law at Ohio Northern University, castigates Jobs as the exemplar of all things rotten in our culture.  Jobs, Frohnen writes, lived as

a mean-spirited narcissist who translated a certain aesthetic sensitivity and capacity for bullying and hucksterism into a colossal waste of money and collective time, further separating Americans from one another in pursuit of a false control over their environment. As bad, his personality and corporate ethos furthered highly damaging political and economic structures of a kind best described as libertarian socialism, in which corporations and rich individuals behave without conscience, expecting the social programs they vote for but seek to escape funding to pick up the pieces from their own “creative” destruction. I also see him as in many ways a sad character, emotionally and spiritually stunted in part because of the failings of the infantilizing environment in which he grew up.

Frohnen’s arch analysis of Jobs’ character serves as more than a brutal post-mortem on a unique American life.  Frohnen wants us to see Jobs as typical, the predictable result of American culture gone off the tracks.

Why was Jobs such a grasping bully?  Because he came out of the 1960s American culture that had wilfully abandoned its own traditions of child-raising.  Jobs, like so many of his generation, was relentlessly coddled, given everything and asked for nothing.

This was more than just a question of parenting.  Frohnen examines the college education on offer at Reed College in Oregon, where Jobs briefly took classes and where Frohnen briefly taught.  The faculty at Reed, Frohnen argues, deliberately discarded educational tradition and encouraged students to wallow in self-love.  As Frohnen remembers it,

Reed College in Portland, Oregon is one of those places where students dress in black to show how depressing it is to be young and well-off; lots of Volvos in the parking lot when I was there. And the drug culture remained. By my second semester at Reed several students had overdosed on illegal drugs. When the President, a “good” leftie from Oberlin, decided to take the minimal action of proposing a faculty resolution decrying the self-destructive behavior he was in for a surprise. At first I thought the principal opposition speaker was a bag lady. It turned out she was just some English professor in a poncho. She was nearly in tears as she argued that “we” could not hope to engage productively with students if we began with such a “superior attitude.” The resolution failed by an overwhelming margin.

Though Frohnen ties his bitter eulogy to a specific time and place—the 1960s lax parenting and education of the San Francisco era—conservative intellectuals and activists have made similar arguments throughout the twentieth century. As I argue in my upcoming book, at least since the 1920s conservatives have lamented the tendency of political liberals and educational progressives to coddle children. Parents and educators make a mistake, conservatives have insisted, when they offer too much to children.

Consider, for example, the educational vision of Grace Brosseau in 1929. At the time, Minor served as the President General of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She insisted, as Frohnen does, that parents and teachers must not abandon their duty to impose on children. “Flagrant cases of un-American tendencies have been brought to light and exposed,” Brosseau warned. America had gone to hell in a handbasket. And why? Too many teachers believed in the “decrepit theory that both sides of the question should be presented to permit the forming of unbiased opinions. This may be the proper system for the seasoned adult,” Brosseau warned, but

With the young, the chances are too great, for there a dangerous inequality exists.  One does not place before a delicate child a cup of strong black coffee and a glass of milk; or a big cigar and a stick of barley candy; or a narcotic and an orange, and in the name of progress and freedom insist that both must be tested in order that the child be given the right of choice.  Instead, one carefully supplies only what will make for the development of the young body and assure its normal growth.  Why then apply the very opposite theory when dealing with the delicate and impressionable fabric of the mind?

Writing in the 1980s, conservative activists Mel and Norma Gabler repeated this warning that too much choice spoils a child.  “The only absolute truth in modern humanistic education,” the Gablers warned,

is that there are no absolute values.  All values must be questions—especially home- or church-acquired values.  Discard the experience gained from thousands of years of Western civilization.  Instead, treat the students as primitive savages in the area of values.  Let them select their own from slanted, inadequate information.

By giving everything to our children, these conservative writers have insisted for generations, we’ve taken everything from them.  In the case of Steve Jobs, Frohnen argues, we see the perverted results that ensue from too much too soon.