Reflection N° 149 - Child Education
The child education has been distorted at the end of the Christian civilization. Technical breakthroughs in physical communication sciences have efficiently replaced, with no rivalry, the grade schoolmistress, however skillful she may be. Anything that a child is able to learn at school by following traditional programs of teaching, reading, writing, history, geography, and so on, he can do in a better and more entertained way with a TV set at home. In fact, in many classrooms there are calculating machines, portable computers, cellular phones, even electronic games for leisure time in the yard. Public schools go on to work because the world education is free and gratuitous, and if a father refuses to register his child at the school, he is punished by the law. Then, the State fascism is imposed in a better way than in other areas of the population.
What is the TV teaching through school programs and computers with files that are handled at will at home in many nations that are ahead in regard to such alternative like China, Australia, Russia or Canada? The TV is teaching in the same way like official education programs, according to –and entirely gratuitous, uniform and controllable– political system of the country. Some of the competence tests have been tried with variegated communication methods between a cybernetic schoolmistress and a classroom schoolmistress, whose best results are registered in electronic education, according to those purposes that the authorities are seeking: citizens obeying the laws of the nation, inexhaustible consumerism for regional economy, Capitalistic Patriotism or Communism according to the country, compliance of traffic and police rules, learning of English, Chinese or another language, and secrets of computation, plane and high-speed train, vacation on the beach, or liberal sex, that is to say, in fact what exists and must continue.
The public official education is improperly working for the purposes of the modern society: ceaseless strikes, indiscipline, violence, incompetence of schoolmistresses under stress, immorality of teachers and pupils, and political maneuvering. Well-to-do families support costly high-level colleges with the same special economic and social aims. In such cases, they complete their professional formation at a prestigious university of England or Germany.
The child education at school becomes unnecessary because its aims –now at any place of the world, which means social continuity– are achieved with better results through a troublemaker street, TV or Internet. Anything available at school can be immediately learnt by the human competence. For instance, see those gangs of four or five kids in front of traffic lights in red, who are cleaning windshields and, if you refuse to give a tip, they hit hard on your car. All give tips to avoid car scratches, and such kids know it quite well and prematurely are practicing violence and as they are grown-ups use it in their daily chores, in the family, as car-keepers, in night-clubs, with larceny, and even physical violence to rob. We should make it clear: not all of them are thieves and wear a classic face mask, but they plunder drug-stores forging medicine punches that later trade with a Mutual, changing commodity expiration dates for some week later, bribing policemen as it is often denounced, through high-rank official corruption with overcharges shared in every investment, and so on? Why should they go to school if nothing new is learnt? Just to keep appearances and proceed with the same.
If child education is not able to change the moral attitude of citizens, what can one expect from an education for the future? May be taught Renunciation, the Law of the starting New Race? The only known experience, that is to say Cafh, systematically practiced for many years with children, young persons and adults has entirely failed. Of course, the Master Founder had to leave and perform only a half of his work, his close Community disciples were many times instructed by daily conversations but his ideas have been reverted and shortly afterwards the Order became an economic-financial foundation. Its disciples were dispersed and gave way to other persons formed as to worldly rivalry. By one of the Renunciation principles that are Analogical Reversibility, the Work became the Renunciation Message, Canon that some few years later is universally spread. Such Teachings that are heart of the doctrine and vehicle of new ideas, are for ever on remotest places through translations into variegated languages, and constitute the cornerstone of the future education for the formation of the American man.
Conceptually developed within the Teachings, these Reflections try to respect their limits, for otherwise it would be to lose one’s bearings in the maelstrom of ideologies, dogmas, strange ideologies, propaganda, and modern concerns. The Master has personally practiced educational Renunciation with good results when he was alive. But, as we said, if such education has been altered in his absence, what can be done now?
The planet globalization through computers, robots and communication media are based on binary mathematics, a language created three centuries ago by Leibnitz in Germany, an entirely different society from our present one. A child talking by cellular phone to his parents residing in another Continent is basically using the binary language without being aware of it. Could Leibnitz imagine his invention might change the world and in what form? No.
From the Cross, as Jesus the Christ founded the Christian civilization, the Roman Empire was living its splendor. Most outstanding students were learning Rhetoric and Philosophy with pedagogues that were slaves captured in Greece. Most Romans could not read or write. They lived on trade, agriculture and war. Could they imagine their swords replaced by F-16 (Fighting Falcons) of the new American Empire? No.
During the middle Ages, the Church kept parochial schools in which there were priests teaching catechism and reading in regional language during the early childhood. Later such pupils were sent to serve both in the countryside and several occupations. Now there are no boarding schools and the schools follow secular programs regulated by the National Education Ministry. Some of such schools are expensive, while others not so much and are used to recruit aspirants to seminaries. In this competitive and worldly century, what do they teach? Catechism.
At present, the child education has a painful problem, not only for educators but also for parents. Many times I have heard of parents that do not know in what way educate their children. What to do?, they have asked. Although fortunate for being healthy and intelligent boys, in their puberty they are facing a rampant immorality in secondary school, and in case of continuing in the university, situations beyond control and a financial problematic future. Here is a reality of young persons everywhere, with few positive exceptions.
The school cannot do anything else than what it is doing on all levels: ideals of Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Fröbel and forerunners of the nineteenth century have been forsaken. But the parental mission never ends; it is a part of life. As a mother teaches his child basic functions of self-sufficiency during the early years –to walk, speak and eat– so every father must ever perform his duty. It is said that a child belongs to his mother the first seven years and to his father until fourteen years old. But the masterly mission lasts the whole life.
A father must teach his sons and grandsons with example and word. The Renunciation Doctrine is not a system of concepts or a dogma, but wisdom that is growing through the experience of years. An old man also learns exchanging ideas with young persons, being updated through news offered by history day by day. The Teaching is a communion of souls between giver and recipient; then the two are growing.
But the Mankind faces a historic collapse. Twenty thousand years encouraging rationalistic ideas of the Teutonic Race are coming to their end. In fact, this civilization has collapsed during the Second World War with the Allies destroying Dresden with thousands hard bombings and killing 130,000 refugees, women, children and old people, while Russians besieged Berlin, and in Hiroshima, the United States killed with an atomic bombing 130,000 inhabitants the same year 1945.
Public institutions are unable to do anything to stop the sentence of History. There are nations marching to the decline in the civilian life through an alienating culture, pitiless rivalry, poverty and famine, and more and more frequent and destructive ecological disasters. In front of such situations, if the school is unable to educate their pupils, fathers must deal with those children that they have brought to the world. If there was ignorance at the conception moment, at least they have to perform their parental duty until a time when the child may understand what happens around, when he is 20 years old.
You cannot go to sleep peacefully on Saturdays when a teenager daughter pays visits to nightclubs where drugs are used and music brutalizes senses, and at times, there are deaths as the result of fights between gangs. Two years ago, here in Las Vegas, Mendoza, 30,000 secondary school students gathered to celebrate their day and the arrival of Spring on September 21st, and every calamity beyond imagination took place. Also now the so-called primary school trips celebrating the end of studies become cultural calamities in Bariloche, Cordoba and other places. For what one should continue giving examples when these negative facts occur at the sight of all, authorities, educators and parents that are permitting and motivating them?
It’s time of parents. Those who can, do your duty. Those who do not, keep complaining.
José González Muñoz
March 2011