The concept of education has recently been prostituted entirely. Besides training people to have the skills employers are seeking, for most of the age group 4 to 16 the role of the “authorities” is to provide a child minding service, to keep the children off the streets. But the final outcome, “day of judgement” mechanism is that virtually from birth we now train them into homogeneity. We standardise “products” be they Lego-fit windows or our children, so that they can be assessed to fit into a series of pigeon-hole criteria. Where is the space for joy and pride? (I don’t mean pride with a capital P along the lines of cut off your nose to spite your face).
Hopefully it is now becoming apparent to you that there is an all encompassing universal law that “the universe tends towards maximum diversification”. Besides that as far as I am can imagine there has to be one single “commandment” that we are obliged to acknowledge and work by, and that is that “whatever we think we should aspire to it has to be sustainable”. Continuing to increase our demands on the planet, whether by our numbers or the consumption of the same number, is not. How it seems to be useful to address this discipline / constraint I deal with under a different section ( model ). Within human relationships love allows very much more to be sustainable than it otherwise could be. That can get confused with the dumbed-down version sentiment, which we can’t very often “afford”. We have evolved to be able to do that as our children take such a long time to grow up (mentally, far longer than they take physically, which seems a bit daft, but there it is, we’re stuck with it). In large part that we are physically ready long before we are mentally capable is due at a number of levels to the various complications caused by civilisation. Plus I very much suspect that when we were part of a nomadic tribe the “elders”, lucky if they got to 40, must have had a considerable and active role as grandparents. The isolated nuclear family seldom seems to work, in that “it takes a village to bring up a child”. I doubt we have changed that much in a couple of thousand years. When a child is exposed to a number of different adults, all of whom love him (which he will feel instinctively), I suspect that he is more likely to feel free to make up his own mind, as very often each adult will have a very different view of things. I was privileged to be sometimes “fourth man” when my Dad and two uncles played cards. Three more different personalities one couldn’t encounter, other than that they were all working class Londoners, back in the days when TV wasn’t such a big part of our lives. That was also in the days when (although two of them who had been in the navy for a couple of decades, “below decks”) children and women didn’t hear men swear (badly): I also swear now since the Edge Lane debacle as I found none of my usual terminology fitted some of the people involved.
Thanks
to Florida Vacation Homes