Joshua Minton's Online Pulpit : Teach Your Children Well: Where the Red Fern Grows and the Old American Work Ethic

Teach Your Children Well: Where the Red Fern Grows and the Old American Work Ethic

Posted by Josh in June 14th, 2009

It’s no secret that the youth of America have an entitlement issue, many feeling they are owed the American dream simply because they were born under the banner of the US flag. The Protestant work ethic, the scrimping, the saving, the scrutinous sanctimony that accompanied all major purchases for most of the lives of our ancestors, gave way to the Social Work Ethic in the post-war boom of the 1950s, when the extension of credit became the seeds of entitlement to the latter letter generations X, Y, Z.

In an age when The Hills and a rehashed 90210 glorify the rich-born clique blessed by circumstance, there are still pillars of art and entertainment that can help parents point their children back to perfect north. Parents could do far worse than purchase the book Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls. Long touted as the book to introduce children to the tragedy of the death of loved ones, it is arguably the work ethic of sweating blood for the thing one desires most in the world which is the more powerful message in the novel.

Delaying gratification is the lesson which all Americans are learning in this toxic economy and in the novel, Billy Coleman worked for two years, picking berries and selling goods to the fishermen that frequent his precious Ozark streams to save up enough money to buy his two hound puppies. It is hard to even imagine the children of the blessed working the blood out of their fingers to buy their Versace or walking twenty miles through the wilderness to pick up their Bentleys. Oddly enough, it is this very pride and work ethic that drove the early Americans to revolt over paying their taxes, to drive native inhabitants further west until the manifest ran out of destiny, and to mobilize across the planet, to the heart of Europe, to defeat one of the the greatest military forces ever assembled.

Great things can be accomplished through delayed gratification and this is a lesson that children should be taught young, a lesson of earning that should be sprinkled in all of the art they ingest. Where the Red Fern Grows is a timeless novel that teaches timeless values and the hills of Billy Coleman’s Ozark mountains are far more valuable to our culture than all the nepotistic trust funds of those bratz on MTV.