The Well Educated Child
Jide Adefope
The greatest gift we can give to our children is a well-rounded upbringing to see them safely onto their own path in life. Such an upbringing forms part of a meaningful legacy – a combination of cultural inheritance and social aspiration. Today, however, many young people pursue mainly material goals. This is much in tune with society in general, where the main aim of education is to prepare a person to actively participate in economic life, adding to the general mania for purely material gain and pleasure. One could even say that material security is more important to this generation than to the generation before them. The goal of economic usefulness does not necessarily include an aspiration to personal fulfilment. Neither does sustained economic growth make for social progress. Society’s materialism threatens to lay waste to another generation. Can we really assume that children by and large live a happy life? How well does educational practice in the school system of today inculcate children with meaningful values that have real relevance to their future lives?
Seeing the bigger picture
Our birth into the world begins another segment of our existence. However, it is not the absolute beginning. A child does not inherit its parents’ personality. It is an independent human spirit gathering experiences in the course of its conscious development. The newborn baby is in reality an old soul, a spiritual personality existing in its own right. All it inherits from the parents is the physical body – an anchorage it needs in order to be active in the physical world. It is not born innocent or without connecting threads of fate. Similar to its parents, the newborn carries weaknesses and strengths that have been previously acquired during the course of its wanderings. Therefore it bears its own personal karma, good and bad. Pure or otherwise, our inner selves are uniquely our own and are not inherited. If several members of one family share a particular talent (such as happened with the gift of music in the Bach family for example), this has more to do with the attraction of homogeneous souls than with heredity.
World enough, and time
Our existence encompasses several incarnations. Just as we cross over to the ethereal plane, the so-called beyond, at the moment of death, so do we come into this world as independent spirits at birth. Living on earth today means that we have to overcome many faults and wrong tendencies before we can reach higher planes, which are closer to the spiritual sphere where we originate.
The newborn baby at once begins to take in cognitive experiences, and his brain, feasting on these, develops at a very rapid rate. Soon he will have made these experiences his own, experiences which will gradually become a part of him and help him to make sense of his own inner life. But what he actually absorbs from the sensory overload that takes place early on in life depends on his personality at birth. The child, in mind and body, is still attuned to the vibrations of the spirit, and this part remains sheltered and protected early on in life.
Is personality, then, fixed at birth or does it also develop along with the body and mind? The answer is that like any seed, the spirit has potential for growth. The spirit embraces a germinating seed that is eager and hungry for growth. The essence of spirit is free – it cannot be pinned down, and weighed or measured. The soul exists as a unique entity before procreation and before the formation of the embryo, and although it physically incarnates through birth, its true core – the spirit, is destined to do more than just live a physical life, it is destined to transcend it.
With growth, subjective experience intervenes. The very young child has no sense of self, and distinguishing between himself and the world is a learning process. By the time he has learned to speak he could still be saying, 'Johnny likes porridge,' or 'Johnny loves his mummy,' rather than using the first person pronoun ‘I’. As the child develops further, he starts to show more self-awareness. Shame and embarrassment are complete strangers to the baby in arms and sometimes remains unaware of such feelings until toddler-hood. During his school years the child becomes more and more engrossed in his own perceptions and memories, and these become set ways of being, as life goes on.
Wild province
In their early years children are more sensitive to vibrations from the animistic world than the spiritual. Although enlivened by spirit, animistic perceptions dominate their thinking. The immature physical body cannot yet provide enough earthly grounding to empower the spirit core to be more active. The spirit does not emerge fully until puberty. During this transitional phase, teenagers often become rebellious and dare to cross boundaries that they previously respected.
Parents should teach their children discipline. Discipline – firmly but sensitively applied – is a means which parents should use to equip children with problem-solving skills in order to attain self-directed goals. It helps to inculcate a sense of order, punctuality, diligence, a readiness to make their own efforts in life. Discipline must be consistently applied for children to really understand and acquire it.
Young people generally suffer from a lack of affection from adults and from the absence of community. Too many children spend their time in front of the TV or lose themselves on the Internet. Many adults have vivid memories from their childhood if they worked in gardens and farms and played in the backyard or in the fields with animals. Also theatrical plays, dances and songs, and perhaps the satisfaction of bonding with other children set them up with a wonderful foundation in life. The picture of happy and enthusiastic, playful children is hardly the norm nowadays, instead they tend to be more bored with the daily grind. Children are overwhelmed with a huge selection of toys, sitting for hours in front of the TV and at their PC, rushing from class to chess or swimming lessons or other extra-curricular activities. Their ability to develop their own ideas and pursue these joyfully, is hindered by this never-ending activity and outside stimulus. Too few adults pay attention to their children. Today, teachers have even less time for them. Moral guidance is more or less neglected in the school systems. Children should be able to learn about fairness and justice through sports, in school-life and within the local community. Education should nurture self-esteem, not lower it, and should motivate children, not bore them. But the capacity to do this depends upon competent, charismatic and empathetic teachers. The main goal of education for children and young people should be increased self-confidence as well as respect for others.
Peas in a pod
It is important for children to grow up feeling like an active member of their group. A child experiences the virtues of human society, such as tolerance and fair play, only inside the community. A child cannot internalise these values through instruction alone.
In dealing with their peers, it is necessary for children to accept that other children have the same rights as them, even if this proves to be a difficult lesson. Or that another child may sometimes win the game. Public spirit is something young people can only experience in community life.
The earlier children meet other children, play with them, eat and live with each other, the sooner they learn, for example, that not everything is available in abundance, and that there are certain things one must share. Even a one-year old is able to understand that another child has the same right to a piece of biscuit as he does.
Children can also be cruel to one another. So, groups of children or young people should not be left to themselves. This inevitably ends in chaos. Children should always be under the supervision of adults. Children living in a community get the chance to deal with the dark sides of human experience, for example unpleasant personal feelings like envy and jealousy.
To cope with such painful feelings, they need the wise guidance of adults, whose task it is to show children how to deal with such natural emotions. They should make a child understand when and why a feeling like envy flares up. Namely when a child does not believe in himself and always thinks others have it better. He must therefore learn to accept himself for who he is. The best place for him to be able to achieve this is only in an adult-supervised community. Only if he is guided in how to care for and appreciate himself, will he be able to accept and embrace others.
Education, whose Latin origin means “to lead out”, also needs to open the youthful mind to a greater sense of his relationship with the world. It needs to better his understanding of himself beyond academic learning, so that he can have a harmonious balance between the rational and intuitive centres of his own being rather than an over-emphasis on just the intellectual part of himself. For example, technology has always touched human life by bringing new hopes, possibilities and relief but it has also at the same time limited lateral ways of thinking. And with regard to art and music, one wonders how many children would learn to play the violin or flute before they could read and write, if a musician could earn more than a writer. Children sit at the computer and learn that the milk comes from the cow, and may leave school with a good qualification but this might be rooted in a superficial education without true value and the presence of wisdom, with little or no creativity, no ability for arts and crafts and no individual expression.
Stop the clocks
This is not a plea for a backward retreat to an imaginary rosy and old-fashioned view of development as things have moved on. It is not only practical abilities that should again be favoured by the educational model, but people should be prepared for the larger questions that each human being asks himself later on in life. Knowing the biggest city or longest river, solving differential equations and computing logarithms all pale before the big questions of life: Who am I? What is the purpose of my life? Where do I come from at birth and where do I go when I die? The current educational practice is not up to the task of offering satisfying answers to these questions or preparing the youngster to answer them. So instead, it is the larger school of art and culture that urges us to answer these questions for ourselves in the course of our experiences – Life itself.
In childhood, we can barely think beyond what is now, almost existing just for the moment. The presence of memory means that we experience time in a linear way instead of living in the moment like we used to do when we ourselves were children.
