Again and again and again the words written by the great Russian Alexander Herzen about childhood should come back to haunt and accuse us.
“You are confused by categories that are not fitted to catch the flow of life. What is this goal for which you are seeking? Is it a programme? An order? Who conceived it? To whom was the order given? Is it something inevitable? Or not? If it is, are we simply puppets? You think the purpose of a child is to grow up because it does grow up; but its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If you merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of all life is death”
In this iron age of pervasive consumerism and exaggerated emphasis on material success, I think of Herzen’s words and I lament the hurt and damage we parents are constantly in danger of inflicting on our children. The only results that matter in a child’s life are those that lead to a child’s contentment in its own time of childhood and fulfilment in future life of his or her own unique potential.
We are all human so we all make mistakes and misjudgements which have consequences great or small depending on luck and our ability to learn from these mistakes and misjudgements. But there are some mistakes which so deeply stain the fabric of our lives, which are so irredeemably harmful, that they qualify to be named life mistakes.
We make a life mistake when we seek to embody in our children our own ambitions and desires. This is not to be forgiven. In God’s name, our children are not us. Our children have their own abilities, qualities, talents, weaknesses, ambitious, drives, inclinations, likes and dislikes, joys and despairs, concepts of success and failure all of which we must try to decipher and fully understand so that we can help develop their gifts, ease where they hurt the most, and in the end help them achieve their very own aims in life however different those may sometimes be from our own aims and ambitions for them.
When parents say they want only the best for the child they have in mind their own concept of what is best and feel it hard to adjust to any concept of what is best which the child may gradually begin to frame in his or her own mind. But the adjustment must be made or parents risk sucking the life-blood out of the child.
The pride parents take in their children’s school success is all too often the merit they feel reflected on themselves for begetting and bringing up such hard-working paragons of scholarly virtue.
We also make a life-mistake when we judge – and seek to pass this judgment on to our children – that wealth, material possessions and prestige in the eyes of the world can ever be a substitute for love and tolerance and civility and honest-dealing and fairness and sympathy for the rights of others and a deep-down effort to burnish the human spirit all our lives to the very end.
Consumerism and the wholesale use of material worth as the only measure of success have done unworthy things to all of us. Until the overwhelming advent of the modern market culture, whose origin was in America, all human societies involved the cultivation of values that constrained choice and individual appetite in the interest of social harmony and the brotherhood of man. Now limitless choice and the gratification of individual appetite is the be-all and end-all of this world. God permit that we at least try to lead our children into a world better than that.
We make a third life mistake when we look upon the education of our children as consisting of cramming them relentlessly, day inexorably following day, with undigested book knowledge.
Education is about enlivening a child’s mind, developing a child’s imagination, expanding a child’s voice, bringing out a child’s creativity. We damage children if we spend our time treating them as if they were adults writ small who are badly uninformed and simply need therefore to have knowledge drummed into them. The great 18th Century French philosopher and novelist Jean Jacques Rousseau said it perfectly:
“Nature wants children to be children before they are men. If we deliberately
pervert this order we shall get premature fruits which are neither ripe nor well flavoured and which soon decay….. Childhood has ways of seeing, thinking and
feeling peculiar to itself; nothing can be more foolish than to substitute our ways for theirs.”
Why are we so determined to press-gang our children into learning by rote, learning by compulsion, learning by extra lessons, learning by rigid syllabus and unforgiving exam? Why must the system we support be so heavy-handed, so unimaginative, so uninspiring? Poets are always the best teachers, so listen to what Coleridge has to say on the subject.
“Touch a door a little ajar, or half-open, and it will yield to the push of your
finger. Fire a cannon-ball at it, and the door stirs not an inch; you make a hole through it, the door is spoilt forever, but not moved. Apply this moral to educating your child.”
It was Coleridge also, with a poet’s perception, who warned of the dangers of be-labouring, be-schoolmastering, be-lecturing, be-tutoring, be-lessoning children obsessively and failing therefore to educate them in any sensible way.
“And all from inattention to the method dictated by nature itself – that as the forms in all organized existence, so must all true and living knowledge proceed from within; that it may be trained, supported, fed, excited but can never be infused impressed.”
But children here and now – trapped in a system of overloaded syllabi, learning by rote and repetition, extra lessons, and concentration on exam results have little chance to break free from the vice which tightens all too early around their young lives and imaginations. It is unbearable to think what an iron trap we risk fashioning for our children by the life-mistakes we make. It is a trap which wastes potential, inhibits talent, stunts God-given gifts and can damage young lives.
