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There's a lot of cool stuff to think about here. I espcially like Julie's term "prebelievers". It seems to have relevant applications.
For the Willard stuff: I only want to talk about one direction right now: self direction. He talks about the loss of self direction in our young people. He seems to offer technology as a cause for this. I would like to offer another idea for your thinking pleasure. How about: The tornado of choice in our society has motivated us to choose outside direction instead of self direction in order to maintain sanity.
When I look at the world my kids live in I see that our way of training our children is to impose large amounts of outside direction. We start with a VERY long school day and follow it up with even more structured activity. Some have day care, others have lessons, others have sports, and older kids have homework and even more school structured, extra curricular activities.
In this model, when will a kid learn self-direction? Will he learn self direction by getting to help mom choose which structured activity he will participate in? Or perhaps she will learn self direction when she considers what to do with her time in class after finishing assignment early? Does self direction come in the form of choosing when he will goof off in the long course of his directed activities?
Kids might have a few hours after school but their self direction oppurtunities are limited by a broad range of safety concerns. Many parents feel safer allowing their kids engage in TV or gaming rather than run around the neighborhood. But then parents who feel uncomfortable with all that screen time are at their wits end to think of what else to offer. Structured "fun" comes to the rescue. Phew! Sports, Christian kid groups, Chess Club, piano lessons, martials arts, etc. etc. Time and again parents talk about how kids just get up to no good if they don't have enough to "do". Even kids start to feel at loose ends if they don't have structured things to do.
But what can we do? As a mom I feel trapped by this problem. I've even considered the possibility that maybe I'm wasting my time even caring about unstructured time. What if our society is so complex that choosing what to do next is often too much for our brains to handle? In fact, we should just give in and structure every minute so that we have a safe place from which to process all the choices that are constantly streaming past us. Is our modern version of self direction the just the discipline of choosing which outside direction you will submit to?
Its possible. And I am probably a child of shifting realities. Caught between the reality of needing outside direction to help me maintain sanity but longing for a less complex life when I had to make do with what was available. I grew up with one foot in simplicity and one foot in complexity.
We live in a world with a lot of choice and a lot of information. Technology can help us manage that information. Structure can help us manage the choice. But sometimes they manage us. This is not new. Being ruled by our tools has always been around. In fact, I think the 10 commandments were a tool and that got pretty ugly by the time Jesus showed up.
EmilyMc | 
