It takes a village to raise a child. From what I have gathered, judging from what people actually do, this is an African proverb that everyone loves to cite but just about no one truly embraces—at least not nowadays. Between such utterances like “You can’t judge me” and “It is none of your business what I do”, there is absolutely no reason to think that anyone nowadays truly believes this African proverb.
Why, what on earth does the proverb mean? On a most minimal interpretation, it means parents are not enough; hence, people other than a child’s parents play a fundamental role in a child’s coming to have a decent moral character and ideals of excellence generally. That is easy enough to say. But then what on earth does that mean?
For some people, the proverb is an argument for placing children in daycare. But I don’t think for a moment that the proverb was extolling the virtues of daycare centers; for I don’t think that there were any daycare centers around when this proverb came into being.
I am no authority on African villages. But I would suspect that your typical African village that gave rise to the proverb under discussion was a small community in which nearly every knew one another and members frequently encountered one another—perhaps even on a daily basis in many instances. Moreover, there was mutual trust and general good will between individuals and, guess what, there was a shared set of values. And this meant that adults knew what to expect of one another, and so of one another’s children. Every adult played a role in ensuring that the values of the community were upheld.
The nurturing village, then, was not about strangers being the basis for a child’s upbringing. It was about people who were familiar to the child doing so. What is more, the contribution of others in this regard was borne of love or fellow-feeling—something that no amount of money can purchase.
If I have the love of fellow-feeling for you and your family, then I will be motivated to do things on your behalf in ways that far exceed in anything that I might do if helping you were merely a form of employment. I will be motivated to make sacrifices which, by definition, would not be a part of my job description. In part, this is the difference between loving one’s job and seeing it merely as a means to having a pay check. It is one thing to be committed to getting a pay check; it is quite another to be committed to your well-being. It is wishful thinking to suppose that the former suffices to occasion the latter. Not so.
The African proverb had nothing whatsoever to do with getting a paycheck. For it would never have occurred to the denizens of this or that African village that the good of raising a child and being a role-model for her or him was something that could be relegated to a form of employment on the order of a human version of a drive-by car wash.
There is, to be sure, a difference between the love of one’s parents and the caring support of fellow-members of a village. However, both have one thing in common, namely an interest in the child’s well-being that is borne purely of the heart. Accordingly, parents could count on fellow members of the village to be thus motivated in both correcting their children and encouraging their children. What is more, fellow-members of the village could count on parents to have thus understanding. Against, this backdrop: non-parents could offer encouragement and constructive criticism. They could even provide measured chastisement.
This is the social backdrop against which the African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” is to be understood. This social context, then, is not one where parents defend their children as being right no matter what. It is not one where parents bristled at the thought of anyone offering constructive criticism of their children, to say nothing of actually chastising their children.
Nowadays, the situation is this. On the one hand, children are raised to fear and distrust nearly every adult stranger. On the other hand, teachers and mentors and members of the community are afraid to say anything critical or to offer any form of correction, lest they be sued or directly attacked by the child’s family. Not only that, moral standards and ideals of excellence are seen as social relics of a past, and so need to be discarded. Everyone knows nowadays that the smallest and most polite correction of someone else’s child, however warranted the correction, is apt to unleash the wrath of the child’s parents rather than an expression of appreciation for having corrected the child. This most certainly is not the sentiment that gave rise to the African proverb.
So, unless I am missing something, it seems to me manifestly clear that we have destroyed whatever semblance of a village that could be effective in raising a child. That is, we have destroyed the sentiments that would allow for any semblance of the virtues that was characteristic of the village.
Whatever else is true, the proverb did not think of parental love or the village as occasioning utter self-indulgence on the child’s part. The village had a conception of the good; and the parents of the community, along with the help of their fellow-members of the village, saw to it that the children of the village embraced that conception of the good. That was the proverb in action.
It might be supposed that I am surreptitiously inveighing against government programs. Not really. I am, in fact, drawing attention to something else. The village that raises a child presupposes a certain kind of moral climate. No matter how small or how large, a climate of vice will have deleterious effect upon the child, whereas a climate of moral and intellectual excellence will have a salubrious effect.
Again the village that raises a child presupposes both decency and trustworthiness on the part of the members of that community, as well as a public conception of the good that is widely embraced. Government supported programs that do not embodies these virtues will not succeed in being any semblance of a village that makes a child’s life the richer for being a member of it.
Nothing on the face of this earth can replace love and goodwill and a widely embraced set of values. The care be no doubt that the people of the various African villages that gave rise to the proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” understood this rather like they understood that fishing and hunter was necessary in order to eat and to live. Nowadays, we modern folks generally do not fish and hunt except for recreation.
Most unfortunately, it is also the case that we modern folks cannot seem to grasp the truth that without love and goodwill and a widely embraced set of values, we have no chance whatsoever of being a society that gives to our children the gifts of excellence, both moral and intellectual, that makes for a stable and good society in perpetuity.
