Some Thoughts About Education

Do you remember when you were in school, what kind of stuff you had to learn and how you asked yourself, well, what do I need this for? Or else, what has this to do with my life? Surely you had some questions like these, that made you aware of the fact that what we all have to learn is a lot of stuff we cannot connect to our experiences and circumstances at the time.

Young children don't do things because it is necessary - five year old children will lay the table not because everybody is coming together to eat, but because mother told them to, and they either want to please her or else do something that lets them feel valuable. So learning how to lay a table is a side effect. It has to do with the relationship (in our example) to the mother, which means, of course, the very important thing is the quality of that relationship. Learning for a young child is motivated by the need and want of being (from our part of view: becoming) a member of the community, a valuable member, of course. This is done in the way a young child has the capacity for, and that means: as long as the attention can be focused on a subject, and as long as it doesn't mean you demand too much from your child. As well as anybody else, children are growing with their tasks. And, more than adults do, they learn from other people's examples.

What a child needs, therefore, are a lot of opportunities for learning in this way. Although children are every people's future, we do not organize our life around their needs. Instead, we built a structure of division of responsibility concerning almost every important thing with regard to our life. That means, everybody focuses on just one task at a time, which may be more effective than any other way of organizing work, but needs a lot of concentration. "Working together" has become a way of dividing labor; each person contributes only one part to a process the whole of which is supervised by yet another person, demanding timetable included. Much of our wealth (and also comfortability) comes from that. Because we cannot take our children with us to work (it is either dangerous for them, or they would disturb us), we put them in daycare - kindergarten, preschool, or whatever possibilities there are.

These kinds of institutions can barely provide for our children's needs. While at home, you can give your child daily tasks. In kindergarten there are too many children, and too few opportunities to help. The teachers' daily work is with or for the children, not something they do for a living where children would be able to help them, let alone to take their work as an example. There are few tasks left: laying the table, and maybe helping in the kitchen. To improve the situation, tasks could be invented. But the point is, the work in a kindergarten or similar institution is there because the children are there. This is absurd. It is no opportunity to take part in the usual work that is done for the living of a community.

The tasks in a household at home are better suited for the purpose of raising a child (although they are restricted, too). Cooking, washing, cleaning, are done for everybody, and everybody needs them. Maybe there is a garden, too, where some vegetables are grown. This way, we can provide our children with a lot of opportunities to being helpful, developing necessary skills, and at the same time feeling needed and valuable. This really lays the basis for self-esteem and self-confidence.

There is another point: children need to be able to observe people who are exercising their tasks. Nothing like that is possible in kindergarten; instead, adults there are busy with the same children who should be observing them - another absurdity! Our home provides this opportunity of observing only to small children (and only as long as we really do the cooking, washing, cleaning, etc. ourselves). At school, the teacher's teaching cannot be observed, because the focus is on tasks teachers are not exercising, only showing. "Exercising" would mean, children could observe for instance a teacher doing maths as part of a practical tasks, with an outcome needed by the community. (But then, of course, the teacher wouldn't be a teacher in the usual sense of the word.)

So, instead of letting children adjust to our daily life, we turn things around: We keep them from life, and we pay people for caring for them, which means, focusing on them (instead of children having to focus on adults), keeping them busy, teaching them - not to forget, watching them. This is certainly one (if not the only) reason why our children usually don't follow our examples, don't obey our instructions, don't consider or even seek our advice.

Of course, children will adjust to the ersatz world we built for them. They are in no position to protest a treatment their parents think to be perfectly normal. And they certainly have not developed the skill to name it - they would need the help of adults to do so. But the very same adults are not in the position to name it, either, because they take it for something else (that is, for a necessary step in education).

What we can often see when children have to start kindergarten, is a certain degree of anxiety. I think, our society does not take this for what it is: A change too big for a child, which she never had chosen for herself in the first place. Instead, we persuade ourselves that we have a normal situation of the type: starting something new, exploring something unknown, makes everybody anxious - an anxiety that must be overcome. So we "help" our children to deal with their anxiety when having to go to kindergarten.

We dismiss the point. Learning of course has to do with exploring things, and being anxious or feeling uncomfortable because of the unknown. But learning to overcome anxiety, can only be done, when the experience is not one we are forced into making. It must be our own choice to make an experience, only then we are able to change our anxiety (or just a part of it) into courage (or back off, if we recognize it as too big a step at a time). Forcing people into experiences does not teach them to overcome their anxiety, but to suppress it. At the same time, this is a way of getting them to let go of their impulses. The extreme outcome of this would be a person who only learns what others tells him to learn.

When starting school, children are already apt to the abstract way of learning. Until later in their lives (e.g. at puberty), most of them will not call this into question. They have gotten used to learning from books instead of people, alienated from life itself - they are just preparing for their life in the future (fortunately, some do complain this).

I think, this is cruel.

Our task as adults is, to help the next generation growing into our society, which costs a lot of work, money, patience, time; this is how we pay back the caring we got from our parents.

Children do not want to be pampered; from the beginning, they want to do things on their own. If this is in regard with caring for one's own (which means: taking responsibility for one's self), or caring for the community, does not matter to them. Either way, it teaches them how to live, how to cooperate, and how to be a useful, valuable member of the community.

As adults, we are responsible for the next generation to be able to maintain our society. Over the last decades, we have not made a good job. More and more children have many problems to adjust to the circumstances; putting them on medication can certainly not be an answer. And an economy, who is focused on (cost) efficiency instead of taking responsibility for the next generation to develop their skills, is certainly not helpful. The many complaints we hear about young people not being able to be trained, indicate our failure with regard to the integration of our descendants into society.

We must come to realize that we, as adults, have to adjust to the needs and possiblities of our children. We must stop pressing them into a structure that apparently only makes growing up difficult - it is imperative to reconsider this structure. If we want our children to become happy rather than troubled adults, we have to change our behavior.