EDUCATING IS SOWING

Because educating sowing. Sowing love, sowing awareness and the humanity plant to grow good people, good citizens and good professionals. I want to share with you a beautiful text by Marguerite Yourcenar, on education of children. I find it extraordinary. Here it is, for you to enjoy and get a flavour [free and unofficial translation]:

“I have thought often about what could be the child’s education. I think that basic studies are needed, very simple ones, in which the child learn to live, within the universe, on a planet whose resources must take care later, as he is depending on the air, the water, and all living creatures, and that the slightest error or minimum violence, can destroy everything. Learn that men have killed each other in wars that only have caused other wars, and that each country adjusts its history, falsely, to flatter its pride. It would show him enough of the past to feel tied to the men who preceded him, to admire them when they deserve it, without turning them into some icons, nor of the present or of a hypothetical future. We would try to make him acquaint, with the books and things, the names of plants, he would get to know the animals, not doing these odious vivisection imposed on children and adolescents under the pretext of studying biology, learn to give first aid to the wounded, his sex education would include to be present in childbirth, his mental education to see serious sick and dead. He would also be given simple notions of morality, without which social life is impossible, an instruction elementary and middle schools do not dare to give (…). In matters of religion, he would not be imposed any practice or any dogma, but he would be told something about all the great religions of the world, especially those of his country, to arouse respect and destroy in advance certain odious prejudices. He would be taught to love work when work is useful, and not be fooled by the fake advertising, beginning with the candy that weighs more or less adulterated, which prepare future decay and diabetes. There is certainly a way to talk to children about truly important things, and sooner than we do.”

Kisses, hugs,

Álex