As the Dalai Lama, simply puts it one of the greatest challenge of our current times is that “we have acquired more power than the responsibility to manage that power”. I will draw a line of possibility here on how being with our children during this health crisis can help us balance those two aspects, if we give it a go.
Our current education systems stem from an Industrialized mode of life. This industrialized mode was marked by technological conquest, and certainly epitomized the conception of “endless possible (material) growth” on a (materially) finite planet. All of a sudden it was now possible to make not twenty cars in a day, but two thousands, twenty thousands, two hundred thousands, if things were only “assembled in the right manner”. This re-assembling of things, meant among other things that children had to be completely removed from the system; and hence our modern schools were created, to keep children busy while their parents worked in the factory.
Even the some of the best educational models today are humanized versions of this developmental divide that industrialized mode brought upon human life.
Now what happened here? Three things can be observed. On one side, “endless possible growth” was given a free pass both conceptually and in terms of human will. When “the children concern” was removed from the system, it became very easy to split the means and the ends, and foster the paradox of working for “a better world for our children” where our children no longer fit. The functional dream of the future became a childless dream, where children and their presence could no longer inform the world that needed to become.
Additionally in terms of human will, when parents no longer had to be attentive to their children´s developmental needs and basic care, they had their full energy available for being in service of corporate economical ambition on a “bigger and faster is better” kind of scope. This led to the loss of the ethics of care by means of the rhythm that began to permeate daily life; and generated a framework for aspirationality that was not compatible with the caring life. This framework of aspirationality became a widespread canon in modernized life, and even people working in realms such as education, social politics, ecology and other related fields, leant over to this developmental divide, fostering “bigger and faster” criteria as a measure for success, and often sending their children off to school so that they could have time and space to be efficient in their “caring for life”.
Child rising in this sense, could be seen as the general containing boundaries of the human developmental “water shed” — where the natural needs of tending to life in a daily manner serve to hold and channel correctly our aspirations and developmental forces in life, so that they truly serve the overall wellbeing.
This “limitless” aspiration of the industrialized model, became mascaraed as “personal liberty”, and so a functional believe system was created, where our very notion of freedom justified our “limitless” approach towards life; and left children pretty much to their own means to decipher this strange notion of “free life” and “human purpose” in a world where “human purpose” as it manifested in their closest adults, was no longer vitally willing to care for them in a wholesome way.
The lack of connection with their closest adults and the inter-generational breach that this created generated huge gaps intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually for children.
Intellectually, children were left without the whole set of skills and knowledge to live properly within their socio-ecological context. Things like botanical diversity, or ecological rhythmicity, were all of a sudden not a primary subject of learning but rather secondary to the needs and pressures that the standardized educational model imposed.
Emotionally, the structural lack of empathy of the economical model — empathy towards them as children- created an emotional training lacking empathy, which is the basis for true responsibility and the key for the proper management of power. The focus was then to create emotional structures fit for competition and individual gain, and available to cope with an industrialized approach towards life.
Spiritually, the fact that parents where no longer available to teach their children about “the sacred” — in whichever terms they chose to understand this -on a daily basis by means of their own vital example, generated a notion of a “de-sacralized” life; where our deep connection to the earth and cosmos was secondary to our expectations and material ambitions towards the world we were given to live.
From this inter-generation divide, the same breach happened to adults on all three realms. Intellectually, emotionally and spiritually the skills, knowledge, and connections that are not vitally passed on, get lost or lose their vital relevance.
Our children are a remainder of the importance to live properly in place, of the value of empathy and a web of relations build upon mutual caring, love and compassion; and on the spiritual dimension and sacred quality of human life “in the here and now”. Teaching them can help us re-learn and reclaim our wholeness as people and cultures. Caring for them is not only a containing border, but also a vessel of meaning; which is furthermost what has been lost or obscured in our industrialized mode of life and work.
Scarcity, from an ecological point of view, is a lie; and a functional idea to justify our current model of growth and this inter-generational divide “The world has enough for everyone’s need but not for anyone´s ambition”, and our world has certainly become poorer and poorer — in water, in soil quality, breathable air, life diversity- since our economical ambition have taken the reign on daily lives. But now it can change
When our economical model is collapsing; we might turn and ask for what are we working for and why? What is true richness or abundance and as what does it exist? Where do I live, and how can I learn to live better here? To what relations am I inter-dependent with and how can I tend to them better? And what is the real opportunity of the human life on planet earth, and how can I make the best possible use of this opportunity “here and now”?
In times of radical uncertainty we might venture to plunge into our children´s eyes and dreams and imagine the world they are longing to see.
We might imagine a world where work, family and education become integrated in a brand new fashion, where coherence and systemic care can become the new anchors points of the life we can create, and where sustainability, belonging and the possibility of a full life begin at home, and in the caring of our human seeds.
Article by: Felipe Medina
