In short what we need to do is recognise the issue of disrupting relationships, and stop, and then not so much “encourage” or even “support” the rebuilding of relationships, as that is yet again outside intervention, bad idea, but respect acknowledge and also value them. Our schools have only been the normal way of educating children for just over 100 years. During those 100 years a new culture has developed slowly but surely, of bullying. A child needs love to do well. How can one teacher, even with as few as 20 children, all the same age, love them all, relate intimately to them all? Before the “national curriculum” came about, around 25 years ago, teachers had some freedom to conduct themselves and what they taught as best they thought. Not so now. And how does a teacher stand any chance if faced with 20 children, some of whom haven’t the self-discipline / state of mind / maturity to sit still and shut up, to do anything other than “pass the time”. It must be excruciating. It is probably also embarrassing and even frightening, for all concerned. There used to be some joy in teaching, and farming, and a number of other “trades”. That is all being wiped out, for the sake of a “standardised product” which then often ends up being “as cheaply as possible”.
If in the right frame of mind and situation children not only learn very fast, they teach themselves. Think of the determination a baby / toddler has to teach itself to not only recognise words, but then speak, wish to communicate. Having done so what next? Some sort of shut down in many instances. Life ceases to be very interesting or exciting, other than through increasingly strange habits such as “shopping” “texting” and for something a bit more exothermic, gangs. This new reality has no place for skills, no place for healthy relationships, no place for real and meaningful development, which comes within oneself. Years ago a wise old chap on TV said “These days a man is judged by what he has. In my day a man was judged by what he could do without”. OK “doing without” as a “policy” for its own sake isn’t all that good an idea. I tried it for 25 years, thought that my role was to give joy to others, and watch the joy of others (other than the deep joy I “received” from my little children). I then found I was capable of feeling joy myself, and that really mattered to me. It required “letting go” of a planned “conventional” route, mapped out by society to protect society (and supposedly me and my children). Absurdly I denied my own instincts, free will, thinking that I didn’t matter any more, I had made my mistake and had to suffer the consequences with as much grace as I could muster. I accommodated to a joyless life for the sake of what? “Turning the other cheek” doesn’t work. I had no idea at the time that I was blindly obeying conventions. Elsewhere I will tell how I realised how ridiculous that was, when I was forced to face the effects of a very different culture (who “circumcise” their female children) and realised that my mind had been “circumcised”. I had choice. And I took my life back into my own hands. Not that the price wasn’t high.
The next implication of the universal law is that besides, through our control freak mentality, going against even the entropy law’s “discipline” of dissipating energy, we insist on creating critical mass, for the proliferation of “bad things” not just such as nuclear weapons, or piling all our savings in one global bank. Another more intimate / discrete example is that the best place to catch a killer disease is in hospital (other than, in the case of sexually transmitted disease, having loads of different partners, who in turn have had loads of different partners which creates a similar scenario, nothing to do with being “immoral” simply “dodgy” a kind of Russian roulette). Also with that same control-freak mentality we take it upon ourselves to ignore and disrupt relationships, and “rub them out in the bud”. We also decide to set ourselves up in judgement (variously, typically our children with certificates, I have loads, it doesn’t get me a job though, but luckily I enjoyed my studies). We do that so that we can “evaluate” people. Education did not start off as a sausage factory. (Even 60 years ago it still wasn’t). In the good old days (in Ancient Greece) it was about developing minds, not only through knowledge of facts, but through the development of the skills to think, or one might say courage to think. It was nothing to do with training in order to get a better job, to feed the national or global economy with “raw material”. It was about making doorways within minds, and showing how to walk through them to a much bigger more interesting world.
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