Educating for Life

    As an involved observer I've come to believe that institutional education like institutional food is commercial, bland and unhealthy. Kids deserve better than canned education and junk food. The school environment has become limiting, intimidating and even dangerous. And in the last few years the politicizing of education has not worked for the better. An ancient chariot bumper sticker (it's a joke) in Latin says "Non pro schola, sed pro vita discimus." The priority of this wisdom has been set on its head in America; under the present Administration "we study not for life but for school."
    Understand I am not an education professional. I have indeed spent a lot of time in classrooms and I've been much involved in the education of my six daughters, and now with my grandchildren. So I am not a disengaged observer. But of great value has been the education I've gained from my wife who has advanced education degrees and has taught almost uninterruptedly over the past 53 years. So the conclusions I've come to are not uneducated.
    Education should be an enlivening experience, not a frustrating one. When learning and experience find accommodation, life is enlivened; every life is an individual thing that unfolds originally with personal experience, and it shouldn't be made to conform to a universal silly-putty mold. There are stages to life that are common but also original. Emotional health is a matter as urgent as physical health. Childhood and early youth is a time to acquire physical health as well as to develop emotional intelligence; upon these, rational balance depends. The hyped emphasis on rationalism in early childhood and the lack of purposeful physical exercise interfere with healthy emotional development and rob children of their childhood.
    As to lifetime habits of learning, what happens in the first 10-12 years of a child's life are permanently determinative. The lasting lessons of emotional intelligence are mostly learned at home. The artificial environment of schools doesn't have the equivalent stabilizing effect (normally) that the home environment does—parents of course have to be able and want to provide for their children's emotional/learning needs. Educational institutions must understand that their place is supplemental to parental teaching and they should encourage parents to be the primary educators. As much as possible the first ten years of learning should take place at home.
    Children will be more ready to benefit from formal learning if they are emotionally stable and have developed ready and matured habits of learning. The high costs of formal education will be better accounted for when children are ready to deal with the formal environment.
    First learning should focus on three objectives: iterative stimulation, that is, repetition exercises (memorization), connection, and self-motivation. Things appropriate for memorization and making value connections include singing, learning to play a musical instrument, play acting, hands-on craft skills, drawing, calligraphy, painting—works that give a sense of accomplishment and self-esteem. Social skills involving service to others, doing things for each other on a daily basis at home, chores, reading together things with lifetime value-lessons, such as poems, proverbs, mythologies, stories of indigenous cultures, especially stories of indigenous America and talking about lessons, are important to sensitivity and valuation beyond ego-focus.
    When the child acquires facility in these learning objectives and grows to own them in the first ten years of life, it is likely the child will excel personally in life and be enabled to experience self-realization more fully. Repetition (memorization) establishes habits of discipline and permanent enjoyment in things committed to memory; connection stimulates imagination to find meaning in all learning and the fun and challenge of connecting things learned; and self-motivation helps one acquire zeal for social relationships, eagerness for learning, being of service to others, facing up to challenges and becoming a learner and teacher for life.
    The intelligent life isn't something that just happens or that depends on genetic chance. Intelligence is a learned skill that comes from exercising the unique natural tools everyone is born with. As a society we are depriving our children of their childhood, that is, of the time they need to acquire foundations of emotional intelligence.
    The engrained culture of patriarchal presumptions is a traumatizing obstacle. The price society pays for this defect is the gross dysfunction and the degrading consequences of pushing children into harsh rationality before they are emotionally stable. A child is no more a mini rational adult than the male seed is a full but miniature male human being (an old presumption even of Thomistic Scholasticism). The potential of a specific human being begins only when the sperm joins an egg. And a child grows into a rationally intelligent person only when intelligence matures in the solid grounding of emotional health. The truth of this reality needs to be recognized and society needs to prioritize values and strategies so that our children acquire the emotional foundations they need to cope with the difficult circumstances of unpredictable change that surely will come their way only too soon.
    In short, education and religion both need to understand the faith basis of emotional intelligence, which is the sustainable basis of rational intelligence and civil/religious relationship.