Summary.
In this essay I propose a profound extension of the holistic vision of
education and life, as opposed to the cultural-neuronal story of Separation,
a story that permeates implicitly, unconsciously, innumerable aspects of our
life. Crucially, the culture of separation has established the imperialism of
logical and linear, separate, reasoning as the only legitimate way to reason.
Fundamentally, in this culture of separation we conceive ourselves as
individual, discrete, separate beings, and the experience of life as a linear
experience in a Cartesian space-time of otherness. In other words, our separate
logic has neutered (tried to neuter) the mystery of life by stripping it of its
essence, reducing it to what can be explained by linear reason, and we live
according to the cultural beliefs that fit into it. To build a genuinely
holistic education, I invite to a cultural deconstruction, questioning cultural
beliefs that we assume shape what we call reality. Notably, in separating life
we have decided, whether we want it or not, to separate what is good (what we
long for) from what is bad (what we want to avoid), we have separated between
good and bad absurdly as in the movies, and we have accepted that we are
condemned by original sin: we come in evil from factory. Consequently, every
attempt to educate our children carries with it the implicit need to eradicate
the innate evil in them. Cultural deconstruction, therefore, allows us to glimpse
an education that believes in the innate and full goodness of the child,
whenever it believes in the innate and full goodness of the teacher, as well as
of every human being.
Introduction
“When we meet our
children, we have to exercise some violence,
because we don't know
how to do it better”. Claudio Naranjo
I'm a father of two
children, and right now I'm thinking of my oldest son, 5 years old. I would
like to start by raising an unanswered question. The truth of not knowing
exactly how to "educate" him. The sincere truth of an anguish, which
is also an expression of my love for my son. I refer to the occasions when I
judge his attitude as incorrect, bad, or even aggressive. Towards his little
sister for example. I try to put a limit on it; I try to tell him that his
attitude somehow hurts. For example, “give the toy back to your little sister
that is hers, don't you see how she is suffering? You would want us to do the
same if the toy were yours". Sometimes it seems that for such an innocent
and wonderful child as my son, it would be pleasant to make his little sister
suffer... I say to myself, it is impossible to understand. At least I'm trying
to be honest with my own emotion. But whatever the reasons that justify the
limit I impose on him (sometimes by force: taking the little toy from his hand
against his will), I cannot feel at peace with this imposition. In the depths
of my heart I know very well that there is another deeper and more mysterious
truth, unknown and in some sense impossible to know. Impossible to know from
our cultural construction. That is why, in the most integral and holistic sense
of the word, I am interested in cultural deconstruction.
What matters most to
me, what touches me, is proposing the vision that every child is fully good,
made of pure goodness. The only way this is possible is if the same is true of
every human being. If we could give freedom and genuinely not judge a child for
doing "something bad", then the conflict in Syria is automatically
resolved, or climate change is structurally reversed. In the deepest and
radical sense of holism that interests me, whatever is nearest, most immediate
and smallest is a mirror of the global.
What is holism? Holism
comes from the Greek ὅλος [hólos], which means "everything",
"whole", "totality". The holistic vision of education
invites us to see education as a whole. I'll postulate that this is much deeper
than it looks. Consequently, for example, we cannot separate education from
life itself; we cannot talk holistically about education without talking about
ourselves. In our conventional culture, it is customary to reflect on a topic
by separating oneself from the subject, separating it from all the other topics
in life, and then dissecting the subject into a list of parts.
In a holistic
understanding of life, there is no separation between good and bad. There is no
right and wrong. This takes a deep and personal process to understand. Within
the paradigm of separation that we inhabit, it is natural to feel threatened by
the wrong. Or to understand that the absence of incorrectness would mean
debauchery, for example to allow the whims of children, to accept their
dictatorship. The approach I'm proposing deconstructs these beliefs, little by
little.
Secondly, I will
understand education in its essential meaning. The word educate is composed of
the prefix ex-, 'out' and the verb ducere which means 'guide', 'lead'. In other
words, to educate means to lead from the
inside out. There is no need to inform the child so he or she can adapt to
external society - an opposite process that goes from the outside inward. There
is a need to provide a trusting environment for the child to sprout his or her
own talents and develop his or her own interests. Even biologically, the child
is like a seed that contains within him all the information he needs to relate
to his environment and develop. In fully holistic words, the child already has
everything within: the totality of the universe and the specificity of his or
her unique soul.
Worth mentioning, how
sick our society really is! Then why do we insist so much that children should
adapt to our sick society? As Krishnamurti said, "it is not a measure of
health to be well adjusted to a deeply ill society". Rather, we need to
give them freedom so that someday the real solutions to our planetary crisis
can emerge. These solutions will not emerge from our program of technological
advancements or from becoming super smart and finding solutions intellectually.
That is why it is necessary to deepen our understanding of our civilization's
crisis by means of cultural deconstruction. Without this process of cultural
deconstruction, our quest for solutions is limited to seeking culprits and
declaring war on them. I think the story of "good and bad" is as absurd
as Hollywood movies.
So, a key to a
holistic vision of education is that to educate our children we have to educate
ourselves. This is actually a process of transformation, precisely a very
profound cultural deconstruction. Through which we can find something valuable
and mysterious that we have inside and direct it outward. I hope that this
essay (and subsequent workshop) will serve to motivate that process.
Education in Our Conventional
Culture of Separation
How is education
constructed in the story of separation that permeates our entire society? If
each of us is a separate being in a space of otherness, where the universe of
otherness is at most indifferent and potentially hostile, distrust in life is
the natural response. Under this conception of the Self, there is nothing
healthier than distrust in life, with its multiple manifestations: for example
fear, obsession with control (on oneself and on the life around), loneliness,
greed, obsession with security, and above all distrust in oneself. If from deep
within you distrust life and therefore yourself, you will naturally distrust
children. Not because of bad intentions or lack of love, but there is no
alternative. That is the story of life transmitted by our educational system.
And it is not a matter of improving intentions. We have been educated from the
outside inwardly to distrust life, to distrust our own will, we have been tamed
to the point of getting used to it, and we cannot do anything other than
transmit the same thing. Unless we deconstruct ourselves. Unbelievable as it
may seem, to deconstruct is to trust oneself again, in our inner freedom (which
terrifies us), and not in the norms of society: the acceptable.
In our conventional,
implicit cultural construct, the human being is at least potentially or partly
evil. There is no guarantee of goodness. Therefore, of course, our educational
system (which encompasses much more than schools as it includes the family,
society, politics, etc.) invariably contains the imperative need to remedy
innate evil in children. "Be a good boy," as the songs of
"cri-cri, the little cricket singer" say, for example. Punishment and
reward. Grades. Etc. It is the paradigm of improving the human being that I
come to question with intense passion. The paradigm of improving the human
being, improving oneself, improving our children, seems indisputable in our
current cultural context. The dedication to self-improvement always has the
mirror of seeing others as beings in need of self-improvement. Invariably, this
violence towards oneself is at the same time violence towards others.
As Jordi Mateu says,
in our conventional education children's playing has to have a goal. The intent
is for the child to learn while playing. For example, to learn language. Is it
not enough to play? The goal of learning kills the game; the playing is
stressed and lost. Supposedly there is a dichotomy, a contradiction between
learning and playing freely. Learning and work should cost, be painful.
Otherwise there is neither work nor learning. This is the same dichotomy that
assumes that one must overcome something bad in the child, such as laziness or
selfishness. The autonomous play, however, naturally leads to the pursuit of
pleasure, relaxation, and kindness towards oneself and therefore to discover by
experience how pleasant it is to trust oneself. In a sense, why do we expect
there should be learning? We fear that the child will not adapt to society (and
in reality it is that fear that we teach). In another sense, free of
expectations, learning happens lovingly. Or it doesn't even happen! Because it
was already inside, you know what I'm saying?
According to Claudio Naranjo, education today creates mediocrity and idiots. It corresponds to a
paternal (patriarchal) education, in which the severe father demands. This
creates tension and guilt. There is no mothering. Educators are people with a
maternal vocation who love children. But they are academized. Education is
supposed to be "learning things about the outside world". The conditioned
person no longer even knows that he has lost his freedom.
Naranjo adds that
education is the most obsolete of our institutions; it has not changed at all
in 2 centuries. (However, I personally do not believe that the solution is the
evolution or progress of our institutions, but deconstruction). Naranjo calls
it the "Mysterious Obsolescence of Education", because it is very
difficult to explain. Is it because of bureaucratic inertia? Lack of wisdom? Seems like a secret thing
that keeps it that way. Today's education is to conform, to adapt to a sick
society.
We call ourselves
"Homo Sapiens", as if knowing was the most important thing. Is it
more important to know than to love? Without power, propaganda or money, there
is no preaching or teaching, just inter-being. Whatever it is, it's allowed to
be. Every creature has permission to be, in the absence of power structures.
The assumption is that
we are evil but we are divine and do not realize it. One example is laws: the
need to avoid the bad. "I have to do the good stuff." It represents a
loss of freedom and self-love. In order to obey duty, one must disobey the
inner feeling.
As adults we are
carriers of a hardness: society is obligatory. And the function we have in
front of children is to transmit culture. "When we meet our children, we
must exercise a certain amount of violence, because we don't know how to do it
better". The child is born free and is gradually conditioned through fear.
Claudio believes that it is possible to punish in a loving way. However, I
think the bottom line is that one (parent or teacher) has unmanaged,
unprocessed anger, perhaps not allowed.
A great temptation is
to say, "I command here". Repressing is a refuge, because it hurts us
deeply that children suffer. We feel guilty. We somehow know that children
suffer when they perceive the doubt within us, so we desperately seek the
closest state to no-doubt that we know, which can be "here I
command". But there comes a moment when our soul demands a deeper freedom,
in which the patch is not enough to replace the real experience of absence of
doubt.
Adults do not measure
well how much children's lives are affected by a childhood of excessive
seriousness and reprimand. We were all resented, wounded from our childhood of
lack of love. In short, we are all victims of a sick society. Civilization is a
response to human trauma.
The story of
Separation - a cultural and neuronal story - is the very antagonist of
holism. A story that is interesting because it is unconscious, profound, and
contains a myriad of cultural beliefs that are worth questioning. It is a story
that begins as I said before with conceiving the Self as a discreet and
separate individual Being, surrounded by otherness. In this story, curiously
through the centuries, we learned or were conditioned to perceive life through
the lenses of Separation. We learned as great learners that we are (we love to
learn) to use our mind, our intelligence and reasoning in a separate way. In
this sense, we live the imperialism of logical and linear intelligence
(patriarchal), certainly only one form of intelligence among many, but the only
legitimate one in our modern culture. The logical and linear intelligence is
precisely the separate intelligence (to deepen in this subject see my essay
Human Reason, among others). For example, the scientific method considers the
observer and object under observation as two separate entities. In short,
separate intelligence objectifies life and seems to limit human experience to a
linear, Cartesian experience in a time and space of otherness.
According to
Wikipedia, "holistic education is based on science". I believe that
through this, a rejection of religious dogmas and adherence to a more rigorous
search for truth is expressed in the holistic sphere. Also, it is probably a defense
strategy against the establishment that quickly discards any alternative idea
due to its supposed lack of seriousness. Of course we are interested in the
seriousness and rigor of science as seekers of truth or as any human explorer
of life. However, a truly holistic education cannot be based on conventional
science if it is to be called holistic. Real holistic education requires real
holistic science. Conventional, western science is not holistic because it
accepts the imperialism of logical reason, separate, as the only form of valid
intelligence, ignoring its limitations. Conventional science is not holistic
because it conceives the observer and the observed phenomenon as two separate
entities, not as a whole. Conventional science is not holistic because it
assumes that there is an external, descriptive, impartial, impersonal reality
in a Cartesian space-time plane and subject to change only by Newtonian forces.
A holistic science, on the other hand, will understand reality as a non-linear
phenomenon, never fully depictable (it is rather an absurd illusion to try hard
to describe it), and entirely linked and intertwined with the inner reality of
people, and of course the observer. By the way, truth is an emotional
phenomenon. And reality has to do, in a dance that is neither empirical nor
verifiable, with the will of the being. This will is not what we know culturally:
it was broken and we are barely recovering it.
As a society, we are
gradually becoming aware of the immense violence, damage and legacy of trauma
that patriarchy is leaving in us. Many of our attempts to re-construct a new
reality fail because we continue to carry the cultural-neuronal story of
patriarchy within us. We continue to perceive ourselves as individual beings,
separated. We continue, for example, to try to find a solution to the problem
through the use of linear logic, through the force of reason or evidence. But
that quest limits the search to places where the solution does not dwell: we
have to free our mind, our neural habits beyond the linear logic and the limits
of the possible. Limits that are plain cultural beliefs but that we have accepted
as unquestionable truths, as hard as a rock.
Distrust and the need
to control the space of Otherness are natural responses for the modern
individual who sees himself as a discreet being separated from life. What
guarantee can there be that life will not follow a hostile course towards me?
Consequently, in this story it is necessary and normal to control children,
just as we exercise control over ourselves, just as we exercise control over
the forces of nature, for example in agriculture or medicine. Distrust in life
is the same as distrust in oneself, and therefore distrust in the child.
Mistrust of his or her innate goodness, mistrust of his or her capacity for
autonomy, mistrust of his or her freedom.
Towards A Holistic Pre-School
Education
The holistic, integral education that I would
like to see born, is the education that is born of deconstructing our culture
of separation. The founding principles of this education are as follows:
- Principle of unity, inter being of all life. Everything is united, "we are all one". That's why we're talking about holistic education.
- Respect and trust in the divine center of every human being, of course every child. Education is about leading from the inside out.
- As good and bad is one, then the One is full. There is no need to eradicate evil in the child. Nor in ourselves. The child and every human being is made of complete goodness, there is no need to improve it[1].
- Life is fully wonderful; there is no need to improve it. If we do not embrace this vision in our hearts, our capacity to educate will invariably entail violence, the violence of transmitting to the child that life cannot be trusted.
Pre-school education
is the education the child receives in his or her first years of life (0-6).
This is not an education that prepares for the school stage, but rather has its
own characteristics as it prepares the child for life. This is known to be a
very important stage in a child's development for a variety of reasons. I'm
going to propose something very radical. I would say that this stage is
fundamental because it is the stage in which domestication occurs: the breaking
down of the child's own will, or the inculcation to distrust oneself and rather
to submit (in many cases) or trust (in the best of cases) in the authority of
the adult. Coincidentally, it is at this stage where the greatest incidence of
tantrums occurs, for me a pure manifestation of the human soul that refuses to
accept an adult world without freedom.
As Humberto Maturana says, "the future of humanity is not the children, it is ourselves with
whom children are transformed in cohabitation". We transform ourselves
together in cohabitation. "To love educates" because to love is to
let others appear, listening to them, without denying them. How can we recover our capacity to love if we
ourselves were taught to obey (deny ourselves)? It has to be in a way that it
is not violent against oneself.
I sense that in order
to build a holistic education we have to become one with the trauma that the
education of separation left in us. This is something very personal to me; it's
discovering how a traumatic childhood is both a gift and a blessing. Just one.
Of the multiple manifestations and variants of childhood trauma, in my
experience there is one key or central trauma which is the breaking of the
child's will. Claudio Naranjo says that we need to recover our childhood pain
and our childhood anger, to process them and be whole again.
The breaking of the
child's will occurs with or without violence. When it is with violence, the
child learns through fear. But you can also bend it without apparent violence.
In both cases, the child is domesticated, learning that he or she must adapt to
the world as adults propose it. Learn that you should trust adults more than
your own inner guidance. This is an atrocious damage, of course, but at the
same time I can anticipate that there is no damage.
The term
"school" comes from ancient Greek σχολή (skholḗ). Curiously the
original meaning in Greek was tranquility, free time, which later derived to
what is done during free time. For young children, above all, school should be
a place of tranquility, freedom, and play. There, without interference, their ways
of relating to the world can emerge from the inside out. In this way, we do not
even need to teach them to trust themselves, but we simply do not teach them
otherwise.
Inside the
cultural-neuronal story of Separation, the ideas that spring from a different
cultural-neuronal story - the holistic story of Inter-being - are heard in
the only possible way that they make sense within the story of Separation.
(Unless a process of cultural deconstruction occurs). For example, the invitation
to trust in life, or the invitation to consider that instead of being
individuals, we 'inter-are', are evaluated as irrational invitations, or at
best, invitations to be better people. That is why I insist that this is not
about becoming a better person, and that the primary postulate of a holistic
view of life and education is that the human being is fully good and does not
need to improve himself. Of course, the rational mind will have very good
reason to discuss this idea. Same that only makes sense once you deconstruct
the neuronal and cultural story, a very deep process. In other words, this is
an invitation to inter-reflect with the heart. What if we're inter-beings? What
if there is a different story that explains in us what we now call evil, lies,
laziness, etc.? What if all the harmful, sick, toxic or unpleasant
manifestations of the human being arise, not from our innate evil or original
sin, but from the lack of love for ourselves, arise from the trauma of ignoring
fraternal love, from doubting that we are a legitimate creature of creation?
“You cannot dismantle
the master’s house using the master’s tools” said Afro-feminist Audre Lorde.
The system cannot be dismantled using the same tools that were used to build
it. To create something truly new is not enough to improve our ethical
intentions and change our goals; it is necessary to change our methodology,
that is, the underlying story we inhabit. For example, peace cannot be built
through war. You cannot build holism from separation. Freedom cannot be
educated if freedom is an external concept to the child, which responds to
prejudices, conditions, theories or assumptions.
In the story of
separation, every search for a solution to our problems limits us to an endless
war against evil in others and in ourselves. In the holistic story of the
inter being, new alternatives emerge. In education it is very simple: the
message to tell the child "you are a legitimate creature, just as you are.
Free. We want to hear you out". And to tell the child that message, we
need to tell it to ourselves.
We don't really know
where we're going as a civilization. It is urgent to have the courage, humility
and sincerity to acknowledge this. Then there is no point in educating for what
is already known, or pre-established. We need to give ourselves permission to
educate our children and ourselves for the unknown in freedom. As Ken Robinson
says, we face an uncertain and unpredictable future like never before. As long
as we're afraid of being wrong, we can't do anything original. However, our
innate nature is immense creativity. Maturana says that children don´t have intelligence
problems, they have emotional problems. We are all intelligent, only that our
intelligences are diverse and do not meet linear standards.
We do not really know
where we are going, in any case we would have to accept that as a civilization
we are destroying life, destroying beauty, self-destructing, stubbornly
"progressing" towards the abyss. If we were sincere and rigorous with
the truth we would have to accept this, and accept that in so far as possible
there is no complete solution, only patches. If we were rigorous with the truth
(at least this is my truth), we would have to conclude that there is no alternative
but to trust life. Because trusting in life is a paradigm shift and this opens
up new possibilities that were previously impossible. There is real hope. That
is why the invitation to trust in life is not a call to become a better person,
it is because there is no alternative. Do you realize that?
Similarly, the
invitation to contemplate a holistic, inter being vision of life is not an
invitation to become a better person. It's not that I have to accept
responsibility or blame for being a bad person like Donald Trump, for example.
There is no alternative but to acknowledge that we are all one. It is not a
cliché or a call to goodness. Why is that? Because if we continue to perceive
ourselves separated, we will necessarily continue in war against something or
someone. And no matter how hard we try and however pure our intentions may be,
we will never be able to create a different story. If we separate the good from
the bad, invariably, whether we like it or not, we will separate our children
between the good and the bad, separate each child part good and part bad.
Invariably we will be judging, punishing and rewarding them, invariably we will
be educating them to distrust themselves. In this way it will not be possible
to educate for freedom and autonomy.
As long as there is a
separation between the good and the bad, there is a duty. The duty to do good.
The duty to obey the laws and authority. In order to obey the external duty,
one must disobey the internal feeling, and this is how mistrust in oneself is
cultivated. But evil is evil will tell the mind! How are we going to let
someone hurt someone else? If the universe is one, it is and has always been
impossible for the universe to harm itself. This is like learning to read
again.
Or, from another point
of view, it's not about putting yourself in hypothetical situations. No one is
saying that if you accept inter-being or trust in life you necessarily have to
be permissive of someone's abuse. Avoid it if you want, in the here and now
that is all there is.
Nor am I saying that
it is necessary to abolish all control standards (based on good/bad
distinction). If my slogan were to defeat the institution of norms, I would be
at war again. I could not separate myself from separation if I separate myself
from separation.
With or without norms,
cohabitation educates and this just happens by itself. We all like to do things well. It gives us
pleasure. No one likes to do things wrong, neither the teacher nor the child.
Then there's no point in judging "bad behavior". If she does
"bad" is because she doesn't know, and she needs to learn it in
coexistence. Nobody likes to obey. We all like to collaborate. Obedience is the
denial of self. If the learning comes from oneself, it takes place with a very
deep satisfaction.
It is possible to tell
this story. Being separated from the universe and from other beings, surrounded
by otherness, the individual distrusted the goodness of life. Why could those
around me be there in my favor? At best the medium will be indifferent, but perhaps
hostile to me. When he distrusted the universe and all those around him as
strange beings, he distrusted himself (obviously because all this is part of
himself). Then the biblical version of this appeared: he came with original
sin. With factory failures. And how that made him suffer. So he wanted to
reject the violent imposition of religion, and he decided to believe in logical
reason. "I think thus I exist," according to Descartes. And he became
an intellectual. Without realizing it, he continued to carry in his DNA and
neurons, in his way of perceiving life, the belief of the original sin, that
there is something wrong with him. That there are good and bad and he must
overcome evil in others or in himself.
Some of us became
anti-capitalists and our enemies, formerly the devil, sins and hell, became
neoliberal capitalism, greedy and unscrupulous transnationals, and corrupt
governments (on this subject see the complete look in The Space for a New Wayof Thinking Our Economics). We didn't realize that in those battles we've always
been fighting ourselves. Others became spiritual and our war simply changed
enemies, which became our own ego. Always at war, and always the main violence
has been against oneself. Believing, whether we like it or not, there is something
wrong with ourselves.
As we ease that
violence, the original violence of all (and we have to do it together otherwise
it would not be holistic), we can finally stop emitting violence, restriction,
repression, doubt, mistrust towards our children. From our own trust in life it
naturally follows trusting our children. What a beauty to imagine. All the
creativity of our precious, divine children, finally liberated, just as our own
has waited for centuries.
I have thought that we
really take our children to school not so much because of the education they
receive, but because we can't be with them at the same time as we dedicate
ourselves to our life, or to our work. I think the sincere truth may be that we
feel overwhelmed by them when we want to dedicate ourselves to a task that does
not include them. I think that in reality we are sometimes hindered from
carrying out a specific task, in which we care about effectiveness, the time it
takes, the concrete or measurable results of our task. A task that of course we
envision as separate from the task of accompanying our children (with good
reasons!). Our need for concrete and measurable results, our need for control,
easily becomes obsession or neurosis. It has to do with the same mistrust of
life. But well, the honest truth is, we need whatever we need. I do not propose
to overcome our need for control, let alone repress it, only to conceive that
there are other inconceivable possibilities.
How to care for
children when one child is excluded or abused by another? (Not only the
excluded child needs to be cared for. Support them to discover and trust their
own inner guidance, through their feelings, which will always lead them in the
right direction. But this is an ideal that does not include the adult's
emotionality and his own need for expression and deconstruction. Perhaps our
anger and the powerlessness of not conceiving why a child can act so meanly as
to exclude or abuse another child. Our terrible fear that the excluded child
will be harmed, that he will truly believe it in his soul when another child
calls him "stupid"...
It is both absurd and
interesting that we always want to know "what we have to do". We want
someone to tell us, or some theory to establish it. That's what we've learned,
that's what we know how to do: follow an external guide. In reality, any
education is good if it takes care of the child's joie de vivre. Relevant
changes in life happen when there is an important feeling that occurs through
an experience. The truth is emotional. There is very little that happens
through intellectual conviction. More important than knowing what to do, it is
that we transform ourselves by cohabitation, children and adults. And I believe
that in this coexistence the key is to recognize, remember and recover our inner
child.
About tantrums. Let's
say the girl doesn't want to put on a coat when it's very cold. We are forced
(after exhausting all dialogue) to bend her will. Sometimes patiently (we won't
go out until you put on your coat). Sometimes by physical force (simply putting
the coat against her will). We may not even be angry at all (at best), but we
still break down her own will, and the child suffers immensely. Sometimes it
seems that the child really wants to attack us, with all his will. We are
forced, with good reason, to restrict-break down his will.
What's to be done
about tantrums? Again, the deeper answer is that the question be allowed to
deconstruct. We transform ourselves by cohabitation. There is no solution, so
there can be. The tantrums of children hurt. The child who walks into a
"constant scream that when I want to talk to him or ask him what he needs,
he screams louder at me and hides my voice. And when I don't interfere and let
him unload so that he can speak more calmly, he searches for me with a scream
all over the house. Just for that, so I can hear his scream. After a while I
have the feeling that he no longer remembers why he is angry. Until the time
comes when we can put it into words... but for that moment we are all exhausted
and anguished..." (Account of a mother). There is no solution, so there
can be.
Does a child think he
is the most important thing in the universe and loses all empathy for others? I
feel that in the macro cultural context, our children have every right,
absolutely EVERY right to make tantrums, which are the deepest expression of
pain of the human soul. The saddest thing is when the child stops having
tantrums because it means that he has settled in, that he is satisfied with the
half-hearted reality offered by the adult world... although in his soul he will
always know that this is not the case.
Tantrums are said to
be normal in a child's growth. They might be normal, but they're not natural!
They wouldn't be necessary if our adult world were healthy. Something tells me
in my guts that it shouldn't be like this. At the same time, it is fine that
this is the case in this world in transition.
When we imagine a
healthy life I feel that we are satisfied with little. The trauma of having had
our will broken is very great. The happiness that awaits us, our divine right,
is plentiful.
(Talk prepared for the XXXVIII Foro Nacional de Educación Pre-Escolar en Morelia, Michoacán)
[1] It can be said that way, if
"there is a reality". In other words, it is our inner decision to want
to love. Whether the child is made of goodness or not, we can look at him
unconditionally in pure goodness.
