Our beloved Scrappy Scrapwood turned me onto the following which could have been written for each of us, answering the old question of why so many Americans are self-unaware, emotionally stunted and in a near constant state of denial undertowed by sleepless anxieties. Short answer is because they are force taught the wrong thing at the wrong time, the very time they should be exploring, using their imaginations and developing their creativity. Here is some of Scrap's borrowed wisdom which he reminded me [...] its not for us, its for our children and our grandchildren:
From: The Wisdom of Hands Blog
Member Whole
Froebel's concept of Gliedganzes or "member-whole" was an important part of his educational philosophy. It means that a child is not merely a child but also a member of a family, a community, a state and a nation. Aristotle and Hegel both discussed the same notion, and for Froebel the idea helped to explain what he had observed in nature.
"The fundamental law of vegetable life is that each successive stage of development is a higher growth of the preceding one--e.g., the petals are transformed ordinary leaves, the stamens and pistils transformed petals. Each successive formation present the essential nature of the plant in a more subtle garb, until at last it seems clothed only in a delicate perfume."Consistent with this thought, Froebel believed that "to become conscious of self is the first business of the child and the whole business of man."
What if we as teachers, parents, guardians and promoters of wisdom and growth were to see children in their full dimensions, not as mere children, but as growing into membership of family, community, state and nation, and more? Assisting that unfolding of consciousness is the most important goal of education. The following is from Susan E. Blow who founded the first public school kindergarten in the US.
The greatest mistakes in education are rooted in the failure to recognize and conform to the different stages of natural development. Educational theorists are constantly pointing out this error; educational practice is constantly repeating it. Notwithstanding all that has been said and written, we still make knowledge our idol, and continue to fill the child's mind with foreign material, under the gratuitous assumption that at a later age he will be able, through some magic transubstantiation, to make it a vital part of his own thought. This is like loading his stomach with food which he can not digest, under the delusive hope that he may be able to digest it when he is a man. It is forcing the mind to move painfully forward under a heavy weight, instead of running, leaping and flying under the incitement of its own energy and the allurement of its own perceived ideal. The attempt to force a premature activity of reason can result only in repulsion of his sympathies and the stultification of his mind.There have been a number of articles recently about how desperately misinformed people are, how little they know about science, geography, and/or any other subject. They have a huge number of deeply held opinions about everything, nonetheless. Much of what we see in the media regarding moronic political discourse, anger toward academia and science, the calling of names like leftist and socialist, the fixation in the media with characters like balloon boy, Joe the plumber and Sarah Palin are the direct consequences of the schooling that Susan E. Blow describes. Her words were written in 1894. Can it be that by neglecting the education of our children's hands, we are turning their minds to mush? There is a direct one-to-one correlation between the decline of the manual arts in education and the rapid rise of the American pinhead.
Froebel, like other German educators of the time, was influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who said, "“Each has his own happiness in his hands, as the artist handles the rude clay he seeks to reshape it into a figure; yet it is the same with this art as with all others: only the capacity for it is innate; the art itself must be learned and painstaking”
I will harp on a point I have made many times in the blog that relates to Ms. Blow's point of conforming to natural stages of development. In Finland students become better readers in 37 1/2 percent less time by beginning at age 8. Here in the US, we seem desperate to reside in idiocy. [...]
Got that? Now, here we are in the holidays which in addition to the prototypical holiday behaviors, always brings up a few tattered memories of Christmas past. Confession: I admit to a slight sadness the one thing I really wanted I never got, realizing what I wanted I would have to give myself in my own way. As the years rolled along I did just that, but it was too late. You must begin ballet training very early, between three and five, no older than eight, if you are going to dance professionally with a successful company. All those childhood nights after school, the tears, the anguish, the cruel words and ambiance of abuse permeated the dining room homework sessions as I sweated out memorizing multiplication tables hating the deal that was my setup for failure. If I made an A+ in math I would get ballet lessons, which never happened. To see the variations of the Nutcracker now, I see what I could have been doing and am not. Instead, in art school, I supplemented my course work with dance training, I loved every minute, was a natural, made "A"s effortlessly, every time, but even then it was far too late. Don't get me wrong, art IS my raison d'etre, but it always existed alongside my other gift, the one I was denied until I could earn the means and the scholarships to do it myself. |
| Did something like this happen to Edward Degas? |
The truth was, and I figured this out early too, dancers were thought of as fallen women, burlesque performers, at least as my parent's zeitgeist trained them. I must have been raised to be rich, even though we were not rich that I could see by any means, have servants, nannies for the children, spend summers sailing at a family compound, perhaps they imagined me a surgeon's wife, provided he was well educated and from a good family, mostly I think I was supposed to be off to lunch with other rich ladies and write checks to popular charities at society balls. I know a lot of women who were raised to be exactly the same thing, unconsciously transmitted to them by equally well-intentioned mothers and fathers. Sometimes we joke with one another at our mutual reversals of fortune and the myths we were born into which fell drastically apart once we were on our own, because nothing we learned in school gave us skills to deal with real life. It was as if we had been raised to do nothing while appearing to be doing something beneficial. Everything I really needed to know I've learned by the seat of my jeans.
We cannot change the past, we can only move on and make the best of what we've got. I don't blame my parents for their child rearing practices, my father abroad for months, my mother sliding down the social ladder from socialite to department store saleslady, repeatedly relocated far from anything she'd ever known, they were only operating within the sole system available in their gradually diminishing circumstances, however, the next generation and the generations following need our help right now as they enter their journey into a new world with new systems and options previously unheard of or lock into lifestyles previously demeaned. Here is another very important and helpful persuader. When you really think about the system as it exists today, anything healthy about the typical American education is being slashed from state budgets, so why even bother? I have much praise for homeschooling and even more for children who are comfortable in their own skin, free to go all the way into their areas of interest as far as they want. Is there a problem with that? The only problem is the same problem unacknowledged inside the preoccupied din of the ever-creative errand boys operating as delivery men for the gnashing beast demanding obedience.
As recessions rose and laid dormant only to reoccur, what one person once snubbed as beneath them, i.e.; not good enough, became another person's valued employment as the little people en masse are at last forced back against the wall to accept total loss as normal everyday phenomena. Conversely, what was once refined and respected is now uniformly trashed as FUBAR and vice versa: any job will do, flip burgers, push mops, greet consumers, scrub toilet stalls, who cares, everyone has to eat. The people who perform those jobs that Americans wouldn't do, deserve our sincere respect for doing them now. Thus, looking around, you'll see the revolution is already in full swing. It is also violent, but not what we were taught a violent revolution was in world history class. Now violence takes place in protests, pitted against masked Darths and their thuggish, brutal street tortures, it takes place in undeclared wars far away from our vision, it happens in the too-frequent and violent crimes discussed in my last post, the kind of crime people resort to committing when they simply explode from a lifetime of abuse via suppression, backwards and upside down to the needs of the authentic self - that real self deep inside us who reaches out unthinkingly to carry a crying baby dolphin to shore as happened in the active phase of the BP debacle. The kind of crimes that are a release from and attack against the abusive, often religious morality imposed from birth that denied whomever else it was the criminal could have been had he/she been treated with respect, insight to interest and encouragement of those interests, exemplified by the tragic fate of Shaquan Duley and her young sons:
[...] What is it that makes one child oblivious to abuse and another cower and fall ill at the moment its shadow appears over the horizon? What is it that allows one person to be unfeeling towards someones suffering but another experience compassion? [...]
As with everything else, if we want something to happen we have to do it ourselves. Its too late for many of us reading here, our pasts are already yesterday's tire treads petroglyphed along forgotten trails, a permanent reminder those who inhabit our future might someday find themselves travelling the same destructive paths. We can make it easier for them if homo sapiens are to survive. And should they survive, which I am not exactly confident they will, we can at least allow them to possess peace of mind and meaningful lives free of irresponsible value judgements and at all times fully aware of self-worth and skilled in the creation and stewardship required for sustaining life on Earth. If we cannot leave them material things, as used to be and still is for a certain minority, a yardstick for some kind of unearned accomplishment, we can give them a better trip. That is the only gift that matters.
Coincidentally, from Visible's essay today, A Transmission from the Visible Planes:
If your idea of loving someone is to give them things in place of the love, you’re going to have a front row seat through the years to what that policy accomplishes. [...]
Photo: Degas oil c. Google Images
