As I watched my grandfather work with people who were impoverished, I began to understand that to be truly human, one must serve. And I learned from him, not so much from the words he spoke as from the deeds he performed, lessons I could not have learned in school. We cannot deny our children the lessons of inter-generational connections. Margaret Mead said that the strength of a culture is sustained as three generations vitally interact. And yet I think it's not unfair to say we're building in this country a kind of horizontal culture, in which each age group is separated from the others.
Infants are in nurseries, and toddlers in day care.
Children in school are organized consistently by age. Young people go off to college and spend four years isolated on campus. Older adults are spending more and more time in the workplace, away from their families for up to ten hours every day, according to recent research. And elder people are living all alone, in retirement villages. Each child had an adopted grandparent, and inter-generational connections were made every day.