Transcribed by otter.ai
Today is January 29 2025 and this is William Michael of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. Yesterday, I had a chat with a parent in the Academy about internet safety, how they can help their children avoid getting into trouble online. And we went back and forth a little, and it was a good discussion. I usually disagree with Christian people on this topic. I disagree with many home school parents, because I think we have a number of problems in the way that we think about these things. And after going back and forth last night in that chat discussion with a parent, I woke up this morning and the topic was still on my mind, and I spent some time over my morning coffee discussing it with my wife before heading into the office, and now in the office, I’d like to take up this topic and discuss it a little bit, because I think it’s very important. And I think many Christians, especially home schooling parents, get this wrong, and it’s dangerous to get this wrong. It’s very easy to be tempted into the wrong answer because it’s it’s it’s comfortable. And I think many people in the home school community promote the wrong answer because it’s easy to gain approval from other home parents. And I’d like to talk a little bit about why I think the common attitude among homeschooling parents towards the internet and online resources and technology is is not prudent and is ultimately not effective. When I think back to my childhood, I think back to many, many bad experiences. I was a public school kid. I grew up in central New Jersey. I grew up in a neighborhood where the kids all played outside. We were always out in the streets, in and out of each other’s yards, in and out of each other’s swimming pools. We were always I was always with other kids, and then I went to school. As a public school kid, I was always surrounded with hundreds of kids on the playgrounds, in class, on sports fields, walking to school, walking home from school, on the busses, going to and from school, traveling to and from sporting events, I was always surrounded with kids and other adults, coaches, teachers, parents and so on. And as I think back through my own childhood, I wasn’t on the internet, I didn’t have Tiktok, didn’t have Twitter, didn’t have snapchat wasn’t on YouTube, but I was surrounded with peers and with adults of all different kinds of all different characters, all different qualities. And as I think back, I can think of just countless bad situations. I was in bad circumstances, bad people. I was around, bad things. I learned bad things. I did, dangerous things. I did things that I look back and think about and can’t believe I survived or was allowed to do things I did and and I think about my I think about my experience as as a kid growing up. And then when I listen to to Christian parents talking about the dangers of the internet, I really shake my head and and ask myself, what are these parents? Compare this internet danger to, are they really comparing it to the dangers of real life, or are they comparing it to an imaginary world that they look back on with some kind of self deceived nostalgia, some sort of rosy colored glasses that they look back at their lives with, because in my opinion, the dangers that my children face on the internet aren’t remotely as troublesome as the dangers that I faced growing up as a kid, out in the streets, out at the mall, out at school and so on. And let’s just think about this a little bit. You know, when I was a kid, we played in the street. There were cars driving up and down the road. We were on bikes playing sports and games in the road, running across and through the streets. There were cars driving all over the place. Yes, and what internet danger could be greater than playing in the streets while cars are driving around, I can’t understand how there can be greater internet danger than we had playing in the streets, playing sports. We were in constant physical danger, playing football or basketball, even baseball. We entered into those sports knowing that they were dangerous. Our parents knew that they were dangerous. There were all kinds of bad things that could happen I can I could go on with lists and lists of injuries and bad experiences from that either that either I suffered or my friends suffered. It was dangerous, it was risky, but it was also a place where we learned lots of important moral lessons. We learned a lot about courage. We learned a lot about living through pain. We learned a lot about focusing on goals and collaborating with teammates and our peers to accomplish goals and overcome adversity and challenges and difficulties and all kinds of obstacles. My moral character was formed in and through those dangerous situations, and there were times where I had to learn the hard way and come away from an experience where I learned what not to do, and I learned what not to do by doing it, and I came away wiser. I learned that there are limits to what I can do. There are, there is, there’s a certain level where, so called mental toughness, is just self destruction and and that was gained by by living in the presence of dangers, even though they were, they were controlled dangers or calculated risks. We could say it’s where we learn courage, it’s where we learn what our limits are. And it’s, it’s, it’s a lesson or set of lessons that that every parent is uncomfortable with. I can remember my grandparents being at my sporting events, my mother being present, and they were always nervous and anxious and concerned because I was running around on the fields like a maniac, and they’re they’re thinking about trying to prevent me from getting hurt, and yet, at the same time, those same parents were the ones signing me up for those activities. And so my parents had this sort of healthy balance of of a desire for my for my welfare, but also a desire that I learn to grow and be strong and independent. And there’s this, this balance that’s that’s necessary, and finding that balance is difficult. It’s a challenge that I think makes many parents uncomfortable, and what many parents choose to do is just hide from it. They choose to hide from that challenge and try to avoid it and pretend that safety is just the only desirable option, when that’s really not true. I always use the example of King David when he fought Goliath. We love to we love to teach the children the story of David and Goliath and and teach them about how we need to be brave and we need to be willing to stand up and and and be strong in the presence of God’s enemies and so on. But we ignore the details of the story. David himself explains that the courage that he had to fight Goliath wasn’t a purely religious courage. He didn’t simply say, I want to fight Goliath because I believe in God. Many, many Christian parents present the story to their children in a way that actually doesn’t agree with what the Bible teaches. David didn’t say, I’m confident that I can defeat Goliath because I believe in God. He wasn’t purely religious in his in his courage. David said a lot more if we read the passage. He said that when he was growing up, he was a shepherd, and his father sent him out to do dangerous work. The dangerous work that he had to do included protecting his father’s sheep. And he had to protect his father’s sheep from dangerous predators. I think he names bears and lions. We can imagine a boy, a young boy, being out at pasture with sheep and occasionally having to deal with dangerous situations. And it was in those situations, in those dangerous circumstances, that David had to learn to. Be courageous. And later, when this challenge from Goliath arose, David explained to King Saul that he had experience taking on enemies that were stronger than him, because he was a shepherd boy and he had fought against bears and lions and so there’s more to this story. There’s there is a religious aspect of courage, that’s true, but there’s also a natural aspect of courage. And if we we try to pretend that this is not the case and that we can be courageous by religion alone, we’re really making up our own stories, and what we find is that, in practice, our fake story doesn’t work. We end up with a really bad version of religion that we pretend is mysterious, when in fact, it’s unnatural, it’s not complete, it’s not full. If we think about Christianity, Christianity was revealed after human philosophy reached a state near perfection under the Greek philosophers. It came at the fullness of time. It didn’t come in the beginning, and people didn’t live by religion alone. They lived by a constant balance of natural experience, philosophy, human learning and observation that was perfected by religion, that was perfected by religion. The philosophy of the world, the government of the world, human law and order were perfected by Christianity. They were not replaced by Christianity. Even the Jewish religion was perfected by Christianity. Jesus said, I did not come to abolish the Jewish religion, but to bring it to fulfillment, but to perfect it. And the same is true for human life in general. But the existence of a natural life is not destroyed by Christianity. It’s actually enlightened and perfected by Christianity. And this is what many zealous Christian parents get wrong, and we see this most clearly in the home school community, where parents isolate themselves, isolate their children, and many Christian parents, many Christian home school parents try to raise children on religion alone, and it doesn’t work. You know, we sort of joke about the kids that are produced in home schooling circles, because they seem like kids who are missing a big part of their humanity. They seem like incomplete people. It seems like something is missing, and it’s not something minor. It seems like something major is missing. It seems like they have no spirit. They have no they have no understanding of life in this world. They can only function in a strictly isolated, strictly controlled environment, and they seem like half humans. And so when we think about problems that we face in society and the solutions for these problems, we’ve got to be realistic. We can’t create an artificial world to live in and pretend that we’re solving the problem. What I explain to parents is that, based on philosophy and Christian moral teaching. The real challenge that we face in education in our own lives, the real challenge that we face is that we’ve got to learn. We’ve got to learn to handle freedom responsibly. That’s what it means to be a virtuous human being, we’ve got to learn to handle freedom responsibly as human beings. Were born with understanding and with free will. As parents, we can try to control our children’s lives. We can limit all of the influences on our children, and we can, we can create this sort of lab animal that appears to be good because it doesn’t seem like there’s, there’s much evil present, because we we carefully block out all of the so called evil influences, and we we imagine that because our children, they don’t spend time with bad kids, they don’t watch bad shows, they don’t listen to bad songs, they don’t say bad words and so on. We think that the kids are good, that we’re fulfilling our duty as. Parents. But the problem with that is that we’re working with children. We’re working with children who have not yet come to maturity, and when they do come to maturity, they’re going to become independent, and all of that sheltering, all of those protections, all of that isolation, all of that artificial environment is going to be taken away, and they’re going to be free as adults to do whatever they want and to pretend, as many parents do, that to move away from that isolated environment is to, quote, unquote, lose the faith is simply false. When parents equate the Christian faith and being a faithful Christian with remaining in that isolated community, they’ve created an idea of Christianity that isn’t real Christianity and real Christianity makes them very uncomfortable. Real Christianity makes them uncomfortable because real Christianity does not require isolation. It doesn’t require that we run away from the world. It doesn’t require that we hide from other people. Real Christianity is more powerful than any worldly influence. Real Christianity leads people to conversion in the midst of all of their sinful influences. When we look at the lives of the saints, we don’t find people who were isolated and sheltered from normal human life, we find many, many saints who were, who were great sinners, and grace overcame all of that sin. They freely chose to become saints. They chose, under the influence of God’s grace, to abandon the most comfortable and luxurious and flesh pleasing circumstances that many people have ever experienced. And it shows us that grace is not weak. It does not require isolation. It is not afraid of worldly temptations, grace is able to overcome all sin. And so we shouldn’t go into the Christian life with this sense, with this this spirit of timidity and fear, but we should be confident in the power of the Christian faith. We should be confident in the power of God’s grace. Now we can raise the argument say, oh, yeah, but, but we’re taught in the Catechism to avoid all occasions of sin, and that’s true, but what it teaches us is that there’s a need for a balance. So somewhere, somewhere in this discussion, is a balance, a balance between avoiding occasions of sin and going into the world and making disciples. So we can see that that we’re given two commands that almost seem contradictory, to say, avoid all occasions of sin on the one hand and then to say, go into the world where all of the sin is and make disciples. We can see that the Christian life requires both an avoidance of sin and an acceptance of the challenge of sin in the world. And we can see that in that scene of David fighting Goliath, David being faithful to God, David being courageous and brave, and at the same time being willing to stand against Goliath and risk his life for the glory of God. We can see that that balance of holiness and courage in the life of David, which is why David is so important in our devotional life. So when we get back to this talk about Internet safety, again, when I was a kid, we faced many moral dangers and temptations, but what was different is that we faced them face to face. The kids that I hung out with, adults that I was around, were sinful individuals. I was constantly being introduced to sinful things, and I was I was one of those sinners. I was also introducing others to sinful things, but we learned in our experience. We learned through our experience that many of the tempting things were undesirable. We learned by experience that many of the things that seemed attractive when we actually got. Hold of them, they were found to be undesirable. And so again, this, this relates to the confidence that we have in Christianity, because the world and all of the all of the pleasures, all of the temptations that the world offers to us are, in the end, unpleasant in the end they’re unsatisfying. In the end, they’re disappointing. In the end, they’re destructive. And experience in the world teaches us that sin, or I should to quote an Old Testament passage, the way of sinners is hard. It’s not pleasant, it’s not happy, it’s not enjoyable, it’s not desirable. And when we experience the world, we learn that, we learn that these tempting things are not actually pleasant, and our experience teaches us and makes us wiser, and this is part of what it means to mature and grow up. And this is why we see many people who are given over to all kinds of sinful behaviors in their youth, as children, as college students, as young adults and so on. But then when we look to to to older adults in their 40s and 50s, we see so many people have come to a calm state of life, so many people have settled into a relatively moral state of life, and that’s because of their experience, because the world itself teaches us that good morals are more pleasant than sin sin can ever be our experience teaches us that sin is not pleasant, and so we’ve got to have a balanced view of sin as we consider the needs that our children have. We’ve got to look at our own lives honestly, not hypocritically, but honestly and realize that many of our strongest convictions as Christians are owed not to religious instruction, but they’re owed to our own personal experiences in sin. Most of the things that we’re most concerned about are things that we learned to be bad through our experiences, and so we can’t pretend that we we read a book, learned a list of moral precepts and then became, by choice what we are. That that’s not true, and our children, even though they may have many advantages, you know, my children being raised in a Catholic environment, a Catholic life, have many advantages over over my life as a child, but at the same time, they’re still human beings with free will, and they’re going to have to learn by Experience. They’re going to have to learn to manage their freedom responsibly, and if they don’t learn that lesson, they haven’t been educated. If they don’t learn that lesson, to manage their freedom, responsibility, responsibly, to take personal responsibility for what they do when they are free, if they don’t learn that and they’ve never been educated and and providing that real education, the opportunity for our children to learn through experience the things that we’re teaching them, is a real challenge for parents, most parents choose to avoid it because it’s so challenging, they choose to avoid it. So for example, we take the internet and we say, look at what our children have available to them. You can open up a laptop, sign into the Wi Fi, go online and enjoy free access to a complete system of education that children throughout history could have never dreamed of having access to. And in the classical liberal arts academy, it costs $25 a month. Just, ridiculously great opportunities for children. You have all of the works of the church fathers. You have all of the writings of Thomas Aquinas, all of the Greek and Latin classics, all of these resources available to study at almost no cost. You can go online and you can find how to videos produced by experts in every different field on every different topic, from how to build a deck for your house, how to change the oil, how to lift weights and exercise. The other day, I saw a video on a. How to climb a rope, which i i wish i could have seen when I was 12 years old. You can learn how to do anything on the internet and avoid so much of the trouble of learning the hard way, because there’s so much instructional content available. The benefits offered to us by the internet, and all of the resources that are available to us are incomprehensible. Historically, no one would even be able to understand the benefits that are available to us through the internet in so many areas of life, managing finances, legal issues, starting and running businesses, learning how to do things, education, religion, on and on. The benefits are innumerable, and yet, in the presence of all of these benefits, are bad actors in the presence of all of these good things are bad things. And it’s, it’s strange that Christian parents will look at that and say, Oh, this is bad. We need to avoid this, because there’s bad stuff online. We need to avoid this, because we found some bad stuff. We found that if you if you go on Google and type sexual pictures, sexual pictures will come up on your screen. We’ve learned that there’s all this bad stuff. If you search for immoral videos or immoral pictures, or if you search for immoral music, you have access to all of this bad stuff. Therefore the internet is bad and we need to avoid it now. Just think of how irrational that conclusion, that judgment, is. Think of how irrational that is. What did the internet do wrong here? The Internet did not send anyone any bad content. You’ve got to go and get it. You’ve got to go search for it. And think of how strange it is to watch as a child searches for something bad, to blame the internet for the problem, rather than see that the child has a moral problem, the child is the problem, just as with anything else, the child could have signed on to the internet and searched for how to become a saint. The child could have searched for a copy of the Bible online to study. The child could have searched how to learn Latin, how to learn the life of St Thomas Aquinas, how to learn how to become a priest, or how to how to go to heaven. The child could have searched for 1000 good things, but chose, in his freedom, to search for something bad, and the parents conclusion is that the internet is to blame. So we have to acknowledge that this judgment, this conclusion, is irrational. It’s irrational. The problem here is that the child, in his freedom has acted irresponsibly. He’s chosen to seek vice rather than virtue. That’s the problem. And when I was a child, there was no Internet, we faced the same problem. We faced the same problem. For example, I, you know, I walked to the local Catholic Church on Wednesday afternoons because I had to go to CCD class, which was faith formation. So I was in the public school all day, and then at three o’clock we got out of school, and I had to walk probably a mile or so over to the Catholic Church where our CCD class was. And so a number of my friends, kids I went to school with, would would make our way over to the church after school from the public school I went to CCD for one reason we had really good wall ball games before class started. So I was eager to get over to class, get over to CCD at church, because they had a big brick wall on the front of the school building, and me and my friends would get over there. And we had really great wall ball games for a. A half hour or so before classes started, when the nun would come out and call all the kids in to get to class. I went to, I went to CCD to play wall ball, and I hated the CCD class. In fact, I ended up getting put out of one of the CCD classes for arguing with one of the nuns. I had no interest in learning about religion. I had no interest in becoming a Christian or becoming even a good person. I went there to play wall ball and, you know, to fool around and talk bad with my friends. That was my free choice. Now imagine saying, well, the church is a place where, where William goes to hang out with bad kids, play wall ball, act disrespectfully and so, so we should, should we avoid the church? Should we avoid sending kids to the church? Because that’s where these bad activities take place? No, the church is offering catechism lessons. I was the one who made the church bad. I chose to do bad things at the church. No one would blame the church for those bad situations. It was the kids who brought the badness to the church. The same thing is true everywhere in life. The same thing is true on the internet. There is good stuff on the internet. The Internet is capable of bringing us the greatest education, the greatest benefits in business, in personal life, in health care, every area of life, so many resources are available to us through the internet, as a as a place where we simply connect with with experts and professionals in all different fields, all over the world. We’re not even limited to to who is the best doctor, who’s the best teacher. Where we live, we can access the best doctor, the best teacher, the best counselor anywhere in the world. The Internet offers all these benefits to us, but there are bad individuals who use the internet to promote bad things, and there are bad people who go on to the internet seeking out those bad things, literally searching for them, and we can’t pretend that the internet is the problem there. So for Christian parents to say we’re not going to use the internet because there’s bad stuff on it is really living in denial of the challenge that we face in parenting, which is to teach our children the importance of handling freedom responsibly and seeing that we make these moral choices, and what the Scriptures actually teach us is learn to do good, Cease to do evil. Cease to do evil. We have to learn to choose to not do evil, and we have to choose to learn to do good. That’s the challenge in education. That’s what we should be talking to our kids about all the time. That’s what teachers should be teaching students all the time. We don’t have to create an artificial gated community where all bad things are kept out for Christians to live well, God himself didn’t do that. When God created the Garden of Eden. He didn’t make it a place where there was no evil. He made it a place where human beings were free to choose to do good or to do evil, and nothing is different today. The Internet is simply a place where we choose to do good or to do evil. It’s a tool that we choose to use for our good or we choose to use for our harm. The problem is in the choosing. The problem is in the desire for something bad rather than something good, and that moral choosing is what education needs to be focused on. That action of moral choosing is what we need to help our children understand. We need to help our children learn to become convinced that they will be happier in their freedom if they choose good and avoid evil. That’s the challenge of all teaching. That’s the challenge of parenting, that’s the challenge of education. And if we, if we simply create this artificial. Powerful, isolated environment, so we don’t have to talk about that. We don’t have to talk about that. We’re not going to deal with that problem. We’re just going to try to create a bubble to live in where no bad things are allowed to be accessible, and we’re going to create this completely unsustainable and artificial environment and pretend that this is the Christian life, this isolated bubble that we’ve created is the Christian life. We’re not actually teaching the Christian life. We’re not actually teaching the Christian life. And we see this problem when the kids get older, when the kids reach their teenage years and start to move into or towards young adulthood, they’re not prepared for the actual world that they need to live in. The parents have, I will argue, selfishly, avoided the challenge of parenting for their own convenience, and in the end, have left their children unprepared for the actual life that they need to live. Parents have selfishly chosen to isolate themselves and avoid the challenge that they should have undertaken to prepare their children for the actual life that they’re going to need to live, and that actual life that they’re going to need to live requires that they use freedom responsibly, that they choose freely To do good when the opportunity to do evil is open before them. That’s what it means to be virtuous. It doesn’t mean that you never sin, because we can create an appearance of never sinning by simply isolating ourselves. But the problem with that is that Christianity doesn’t command us not to sin and then put a period at the end of that sentence. It also commands us to love. It commands us to go into the world, perform the works of mercy, preach the gospel and so on. Christianity does not command us to hide in a bunker and isolate ourselves from all of the sources of sin in the world. Christianity actually teaches us to go into the world, to go into the presence of all of the evil and to overcome evil with good, because good is more natural, good is more sustainable. Good is more powerful than evil, and good will overcome evil. This is what we read in Psalm one, where we read that the righteous man who lives according to God’s law, everything that he does will prosper. He will, He will persevere and continue to bear fruit because he’s planted near streams of living water and the unbelievers, they’re like chaff which the wind drives away. We’re not taught that bad people are strong and good people are weak. We’re not taught that good institutions are weak and bad institutions are strong. We’re taught the opposite. In Christianity. We’re taught that bad people are weak and good people are strong. But if we think about the message that children are being taught by parents who isolate them and act as if everything is dangerous, think about the the message that those children are receiving, they’re being taught that that God has given us this religion, and it’s very, very fragile. It’s like a bubble that that anything can cause to pop, and it’s your job to not let the bubble pop. And they’re sent into a world filled with spikes and razor blades and spears. And they’re they’re told that the Christian religion is like a bubble, anything will pop it. This is how modern Christians often think about Christianity. And when we look back into history, we can see that this is not how saint. Saints thought of Christianity. Saints did not see Christianity as a bubble that we need to prevent from popping. They saw Christianity as as God’s power to overcome the entire world and bring all things into subjection to Christ, who is King of Kings and Lord of lords. How different that mindset is, and that mindsets been lost among modern Christians who see the world as stronger than Christianity, who see their opponents as as dangerous to their religion. They’re not like David taking on Goliath. They’re like Saul running away from the battlefield and hiding who imagines obviously, who believes that Goliath is too strong and the only way to handle that situation is to hide from it. Christians today don’t act like David. For all of their talk, they don’t act like David. They act like Saul, hiding, fleeing, retreating in the presence of any opportunity for evil, any temptation, and so on. And so we’re failing to present a true religion to our children. Now, again, one of the problems, one of the key problems, is that modern Christianity, I should say modern Catholicism, for all of the talk, is largely influenced by Protestantism. Modern Catholics are, I think, to some degree, imperceptibly influenced by Protestant ideas, a Protestant way of life, a Protestant worldview that is false, first of all, but it’s also very weak, very weak, very timid and very ignorant. When we look back into history, into the early church, we see that the great saints, the doctors and Fathers of the Church, were often converts from influential positions in pagan society. When they became Christians, they didn’t fear pagan society. They were actually respected and influential in pagan society. Think about Saint Sebastian. He was a Roman soldier. Saint Sebastian wasn’t a man as a Christian who was intimidated by pagan society. St Augustine was a teacher of rhetoric as a pagan before he became a Christian, Saint Augustine was not intimidated by Roman philosophy or religion when he became a Christian. And many of the early Christians, because they were pagan converts, were not afraid of pagan culture. And that’s that’s one of the differences, perhaps, when, when, when kids are raised in Christian circles and they don’t have the opportunity to to taste and see what the world has to offer, they spend their lives admiring it and sort of wondering what it must be like when those who have tasted it in full, like Solomon, if we read the book of Ecclesiastes, who’s just given himself freedom to explore every pleasure, every desire, everything that the world has to offer, and his conclusion is It’s all vanity. It’s hard for Christian people to learn that lesson and really become settled, to understand that, that there’s nothing sinful, that’s desirable, and what’s good is far more satisfying, fulfilling, pleasing and so on. It’s hard for Christian people to learn that, and sometimes, I think they have sort of a secret admiration, fear, wonder for the world that converts, who’ve had it all don’t have after they convert. And I think it’s why converts are often more courageous and more more productive as Christians, because they look at the world differently than then, let’s say a cradle Catholic might look at it, and this is the danger in homeschooling, because many of us as parents have come through sin and in. Our freedom have chosen to become Christians, and yet, when it comes to time to raise our own children, we see that freedom as a threat to their religion, rather than the means to their religion. And so we see this reaction to the internet as a clear sign of how Christian people, how Christian parents, look at the world as a threat, as if it’s greater and more powerful, something that Christianity can’t overcome. And that’s a wrong way of thinking. Now, having said all of that, we can also argue and say, but these are children. We’re talking about children here. These are not hardened, experienced adult Christians. These are children. These are children who are easily influenced, who are who are unwise, who don’t have experience, who are easily deceived and so on. And that’s all true. That’s why they have parents. But still, the education that they need is for their adulthood. The education that they need is not to train them to be the best seven year old, but it’s to prepare them to be a strong 18 year old. And so when it comes to education, isolating the kids, sheltering them from everything without thinking about how they’re going to be brought to use their freedom responsibly. Are they going to be trained in those choices? Are they going to have experience gaining that strength, learning to use freedom responsibly, or are they going to be sheltered from it entirely until they’re just unleashed into the world, and they have to face everything all at once. That’s the common experience we see among Christian children, where they just are let out of the stable and just run off the cliff, because it’s overwhelming. The challenge of parenting is is greater than just isolating our children from the dangers. No, a young David can’t be sent to fight Goliath. He needs to tend the sheep first, and when he’s tending the sheep, he’ll face some lesser dangers, which are great dangers for him, and are able to prepare him for the future danger that he’s going to face. So we see that the whole point of sports, for example, is to provide us with an artificial Battlefield, as it were, where we can learn to fight, to prepare us for a real battlefield that we may need to fight in. That’s the purpose of sports in the military. General MacArthur called sports the fields of friendly strife as a part of the formation of soldiers the fields of friendly strife. You can search for quote by General Douglas MacArthur. Just search that phrase on the fields of friendly strife, and you’ll see a quote from MacArthur on sports and their role in in developing that that soldier ethos, that warrior mentality. So as parents, we’ve got lots of challenges, and isolation is not the answer. The challenge we face is more complicated than that. Now, one of the reasons why parents are eager to isolate is because it’s easy, it’s very convenient to isolate. And there are lots of, I would say, insidious motivations for isolating kids from all kinds of problems. One is that parents are selfish. They don’t want to be bothered with these challenges. They don’t want to be bothered with these discussions. They don’t want to be bothered with all kinds of tasks and responsibilities. They don’t want to be bothered by the responsibilities that they have. They want to pretend that just staying home, hiding in the house, keeping to themselves, playing with a piece of string all day long. That’s good Christian living. They don’t want to be bothered with the challenges of actually raising an independent adult. They don’t want to face that. They don’t want to help their children grow in difficult circumstances. They. Don’t want to deal with these problems. They don’t want to deal with these issues in the home. They would rather just eliminate them. And it’s not because of the kids, it’s not because of moral training that they want to avoid. It’s just because they’re lazy, they’re selfish, they don’t want to spend any money. They want an easy way where everything that they do is is familiar to them. Everything they do is comfortable, everything is cheap, everything is convenient, everything is at home. We don’t need to go anywhere. We don’t need to subject ourselves to any other people. We don’t need to deal with any other people. We don’t need to pay for any services or resources. We can just stay home and pretend that we should all be perfectly happy sitting still reading books and just being quiet. Everyone should be happy in isolation, and it’s just not true, and we see how these situations can often make moves into really eerie, even abusive situations. And I would argue that what’s driving that is not any sincere zeal for Christian education, but actually a selfishness, laziness, stinginess of parents. And I’ll explain practically. I’ll wrap up with some practical details. What I tell parents is this, because the parents will ask things like, is there any way that we can set restrictions on our children’s computers so that they can only access the Academy website and can’t see anything else. And I tell parents, no, I know that there are programs. I know there are software programs and services that you can pay for their businesses. I know that they have I know that they’re available, but they don’t work. They don’t work. And there’s a problem that’s assumed by your question. That is the actual problem that you don’t want to deal with. The problem is that what you’re saying is I intend to leave my child unsupervised on the internet, and I want to know if there’s some artificial tool or service or means that will do the work of a supervising parent and not allow my child to idly wander around the internet and get into trouble? Is there a program that will do that? The answer is yes, you are the program that will do that. You are the only program that can do that. It’s parental supervision. It’s parental supervision. It’s not some goofy software supervision. It’s not some virtual parent that the children need. It’s you. That’s your job. And so the problem with the internet, we can see is that parents don’t want to be responsible to supervise their children, and so rather than accept that responsibility, they’re going to punish their children by not letting them use all of the good resources available on the internet. So spite the kids. No there’s no software program that can replace you the parent. And if you would take the responsibility to be the supervising parent, you would quickly see that there’s no problem with the Internet. So there are basically two things that are needed for children to make good use of the internet, I should say three things, three things that are necessary for children to make good use of the Internet. First of all, they have to have a daily schedule. They have to have a daily schedule of activities. The day schedule can’t just be take out your computer and go do your schoolwork or go do whatever on the computer. That’s not responsible parenting. That’s not home schooling. And so if a child is put in front of a computer with no supervision for six hours and he ends up into bad stuff, and the parents response is to say, I hate the Internet. The Internet is bad that parents just crazy. Idle hands are the devil’s workplace. That’s the old proverb, and the idle hands are made idle by the parent who neglects. Supervise the child who neglects to provide a balanced schedule of activities for the day. So that’s that’s number one, the kids need to have a good schedule, a balanced schedule, where, if they do use the computer, it’s it’s purpose driven, it’s to accomplish tasks, and the time is limited to the needs of those tasks. Secondly, the kids need to be supervised. You can’t put kids online and then go do the laundry. If the kids are online, you need to supervise their use of the Internet. If you do so, everything will be fine. And thirdly, parents need to take upon themselves the challenge of doing other things. The kids can’t do other things. There’s lots of stuff to do, but the parents have to drive those activities. They can’t just sit at home and imagine that the kids are supposed to entertain themselves in the house all day long. Parents have to make the effort to give their children good activities to do. Parents have to do that. I can give an example of my wife. My wife home schools the kids from 10 o’clock in the morning until about four o’clock, and then the kids all jump in the van and they go into town. And when they’re in town, she takes my daughter to her dance lessons on certain days of the week. She takes the kids to the fitness center, where they can do all kinds of stuff. The boys go and they swim, they work out at the gym, they play basketball and so on. My wife has to do that, to give the kids activities that are good for them to participate in. If my wife was selfish and lazy, she would just sit home and say, I’m not doing all this stuff. I’m not spending money on dance lessons. I’m not driving these kids all around town, driving them to to the health center and back home and all over the I’m not doing that stuff. I’m just gonna sit home lazily, not spend any money, and tell my kids to keep themselves busy. And apparently, all they’re allowed to do is read books and pray, anything else is bad. You can just see how that’s that’s got nothing to do with Christianity, that is just lazy, selfish parenting that, I would argue violates the golden rule, because you yourself would not want to live with a parent like that you yourself would not like for your parent to be a parent like you. So you’re violating the golden rule if you’re not doing to your child what you would have your parent do to you, and that’s the problem. So having a good schedule for activities and in the classical liberal arts academy, what I’m always preaching is the need to focus on tasks, not have this idle, wandering, quote, unquote, homeschool life where you just read stories and do No, you need a task oriented, goal oriented plan for home schooling. This is what we provide in the classical liberal arts academy, 1000s and 1000s of actual academic tasks, not idle, wandering in the name of education, tasks, tasks, tasks, you need a schedule focused on tasks. Secondly, you need to supervise the children when they use the computer so that they can enjoy all of the good things that technology has to offer, and they can be prevented by your supervision from any potential bad things. And thirdly, you need to take upon yourself the difficulties, the challenges, the costs of providing your children with good things to do, not leaving them idle and getting angry that they get into trouble. You’ve got to give them good things to do. You’ve got to drive that good active culture. It’s got to be driven by the parents. It’s got to be provided by the parents. Now, as you work through those things, you can see that you would be dealing with these questions all the time. You would be dealing with these questions of learning to handle freedom responsibly all the time, and you’d be dealing with them in a controlled way. You wouldn’t be avoiding them. You wouldn’t be demonizing everything. You would be running into these problems. Even when you’re supervising the kids, they’ll still fool around. They’ll still try to. Sneak off the website and go look at pictures of deep sea fish. My one of my sons, one time was caught googling pictures of deep sea fish, because there’s all these like terrifying deep sea fish, and he was fascinated by all that. They’re going to go search that stuff out because they’re curious and foolish and but it would still be limited, and you’d be able to talk about that, say and say, Look, there’s a time for that, you know, what? If you’re interested in deep sea fish, mom will help you to do that, you know? We’ll take some time together, and we’ll sit and we’ll, we’ll, we’ll look up images of deep sea fish, or we’ll, we’ll watch some videos about about the oceans and fish in the ocean together so that you can learn about them. But you don’t need to do it on your own in this sneaky way, this dishonest way. You can do it in a way that’s good. And I’ll help you to do that, or we’ll, next time we’re at the library, we’ll find some books about deep sea fish. And so you can see how parents can actually help to avoid those situations, rather than just leave the kids to trouble. So if we, if we take on that challenge and take on the role of parents and the true role of Christian parents, which is to train our children to handle freedom responsibly, will have to deal with those situations. And if we, if we think about parenting rightly, will appreciate those opportunities, because they’re very valuable. We’ll appreciate those opportunities, and we’ll explain to the children very simply that we are free and we have to choose to do good and resist evil, and we have to do so freely. I always tell my kids, if you want to sin, no one will ever be able to stop you. If you want to sin, no one will ever be able to stop you. You have to choose to not sin, you have to choose to do what’s good. And I’m not going to create an artificial environment. I’m going to call a spade a spade and say, if you have the opportunity to do good or to do evil, and you choose to do evil, that’s your fault. Don’t blame the internet. Don’t blame this guy or that guy, or this thing or that thing, you are the problem. And that’s why, as Catholics, we have the Sacrament of Confession, because we admit that we are the problem when we when we say the confite, or we say that we sin by our own fault. We even repeat it multiple times by my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault. I’m the cause of sin in my life, not anyone else. And you can see that what we teach our children at church and what we actually practice don’t agree, and we need to bring these things into agreement, so the practice and the teaching become one in the same. So that’s the challenge. So my answer to the question about the internet is that I totally disagree with anyone who says internet bad, that that’s just false, that that would be true of everything in the world that exists. That’s false. I think it’s lazy, it’s selfish, it’s irresponsible to take that position. In 2025 there is good on the internet, an incredible abundance of good, and there is evil. And we are free to choose good or evil. If we’re evil, we will choose evil, and if we’re good, we’ll choose good. And the question is, what are you? Are you good or evil? Don’t blame the Internet. The Internet offers us incredible resources that we should be eager to make use of, and I would argue we need to make use of and we need to learn to handle our freedom responsibly. That’s the message and challenge that parents have to take up. I hope that’s helpful. God Bless.
