Kids These Days Or is it the Parents?
Posted by Rev. Dr. Lance Giuffrida on 08/11/2008
Monday, August 11, 2008
Just before I quit teaching to go back into the church ministry full time, I decided to do a survey (nonscientific of course) of about 300 8th Grade students. The survey asked a few simple questions which I full expected them to be able to answer. Here they are:
• What is the name of the planet 3rd from the star Sol?
• What is a noun and a verb?
• Who fought in the Revolutionary War and who won?
• What is the square root of 16?
• Write the words to the pledge of allegiance.
Try answering them yourself. Go ahead, I’ll go get a cup of coffee and come back. OK, I’m back. How’d you do? Would it surprise you that not one single 8th grader answered all of the questions correctly? It gets worse. The highest number of correct answers among all those I surveyed was three. And the students were highly motivated. I and a couple of colleagues agreed to give them a bonus “A” as part of their homework grade just for taking the test, and another “A” for every correct answer.
You’re shocked, right? Outraged. Something oughta be done. That kind of thing. But you should know this. The teachers were equally upset and my thought was, let’s find out how the parents would do on this test, and also find out how much they helped their kids with homework. So the kids took the test home and we found out parents didn’t do too badly, but no one answered all of the questions right. We also found very few parents paid any attention whatsoever to their kids homework. And there you have it. The parents didn’t know much more than the kids and even if they wanted to help their kid with a particular subject, most of them couldn’t.
So a researcher decided to find out whether or not kids between the ages of 13-17 knew anything about their faith. He is Christian Smith, a sociologist from UNC at Chapel Hill. He and his team interviewed over 3,000 randomly selected teens and “was surprised at how inarticulate most teenagers were about their faith. They think of themselves as religious…but if you ask anything about what they believe…they are really helpless.”
While searching for an explanation to our teens inability to talk intelligently about Christianity, they discovered (surprise, surprise, surprise!) that the parents weren’t very involved in helping their teens learn about their faith. They thought it was just something kids would pick up on their own later. Not so. And while he didn’t cover this in his research, I’ll bet if Smith surveyed the parents, he’d find they didn’t know too much either. I have “imagined” this dialogue with a nonexistent teenager:
Q. Do you believe in God?
A. Yes.
Q. What is it you believe about God?
A. …..uhm, he(she) is good…you know, made everything…like, Adam and Eve…and made up rules…
Q. Do you believe in Jesus Christ?
A. Yes.
Q. What is it you believe about Jesus?
A. …uhm, he’s love…and didn’t he rise from the dead or something?
Q. Do you believe in the Holy Spirit?
A. I think so. Isn’t that something like god or the angels or something like that?
Q. Do you believe the bible is the word of God?
A. I guess so.
Q. Have you ever read it?
A. No. Have you?
And so it goes. I’m sure you did much better. But Dr. Smith’s findings are significant here. “There’s almost this sense,” he wrote, “by congregations and families that they’ll (understand their faith) by osmosis…At some point (you) need to be directly instructed.”
My friends, I think so too. If the church is just a good social agency then it really doesn’t matter. But if the church is about salvation, as Jesus says it is, then what we believe and what we do with our faith matters a great deal. Maybe it’s time for some bible study, don’t you think?
Fr Lance
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