Principal's letter

FYI, here are excerpts from a letter I received from my daughter's school a couple of days ago:

Dear Parents/Guardians,

Last Saturday, I viewed dancing at one of our school-sponsored dances that made me cringe. . . . Dancing as we know it has dramatically changed. Our students have become accustomed to a style of dancing that is both unsafe and explicit. I write this letter to inform you of what I have seen as a behavioral trend at our school dances and tell you that there must be a limit to what we, as parents and educators, deem acceptable. . . . I am aware that the behavior I am about to describe occurs at countless middle schools and high schools across our country. . . .

First, there is the issue of safety. When students dance, the majority of them do so in a large circle commonly referred to as the "bee hive." The circle is comprised of anywhere from thirty to one hundred students . . . and is tight-knit. . . . As you can imagine, it becomes incredibly difficult to either get to or view the middle of the circle. Even with an acceptable number of chaperones and administrators in place, those who run and oversee our dances are at a disadvantage because of the number of students in attendance and the "mob" formation of their dance style. . . .

Second is the issue of the explicit nature of today's dance style. Today's dance style is such that the girl and boy face the same direction, with the girl always closely positioned in front of the boy. As such there is no eye contact and an excessive amount of physical contact. I reach out to you, parents/ guardians, to help me turn the tide and guide our students to rise above this trend because I believe that our students deserve better than the dancing to which they have become accustomed. Please speak to your child. . . ."

This is my generation's fault. And if Francis Schaeffer is right, it's the fault of the generation before that; and they in turn were set on the downward slide because of little slippages from Christ in the formal religion of the generation before that. As Isaiah 7:9 says, "If you are not firm in your faith, you will not be firm at all."

So much for the widespread "belief that the very formula of universal process is from imperfect to perfect, from small beginnings to great endings, from the rudimentary to the elaborate, the belief which makes people find it natural to think that morality springs from savage taboos, adult sentiment from infantile sexual maladjustments, thought from instinct, mind from matter, organic from inorganic, cosmos from chaos. This is perhaps the deepest habit of the mind in the contemporary world. It seems to me immensely unplausible, because it makes the general course of nature so very unlike those parts of nature we can observe . . ." (C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory).

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