Developing Each Child's Unique Destiny, by Daniel Greenberg

If you’re stuck in this country, you’re going to have children who grow up in country's culture, and the only thing that you’re going to achieve by fighting it is getting the kids to want to know more than ever what it is that you’re keeping from them.

We’ve seen this in our own family, with our children and TV. Our kids were born in the sixties and, like so many of our contemporaries, we did not want to expose them to TV. We kept it in the closet after we finally bought it. The kids would ask every now and then,“What’s that thing that looks like a suitcase?” and we wouldn’t answer – until we finally realized that what they were doing, of course, was spending an awful lot of time at their friends’ houses, looking at TV! When I was a child, I wasn’t allowed to read comic books, and guess what I did in my spare time? I went to my friends’ houses and read comic books!

You can’t fight it. What happened was that the minute we said to our first child, “Ok, you can have TV,” he sat in front of the tube all day, just to show us. After a while, he decided there were other things in life. Our youngest child, who had TV around from day one, hardly looked at it. You can't avoid the culture you’re immersed in. You can exert your own influences. You can say what you think about it. There’s nothing stopping you from giving your opinions, but the ambient culture is everywhere, and it’s unavoidable.

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I have a big book, which weighs about 8 kg and has 650 pages in it. It is a compendium of standards and benchmarks for K-12 education. I’ll just open this thing at random to show a typical example: “It’s essential that every child in grades five to six in the country must understand the impact of European military and commercial involvement in Asia, e.g. how the Netherlands, England and France became naval and commercial powers in the Indian Ocean Basin in the 17th and 18th centuries. The impact of British and French commercial and military penetration on politics, economy and society in India. Why the Dutch wanted military and commercial influence in Indonesia and how this imperialism affected the region’s economy in society.”

This is one item for grades five to six! In case you think that was unusual, there’s a whole section here for grades five to six, and seven to eight, and nine to twelve, three whole pages of subject matter “which assures that everybody in those grades will have an understanding of the major developments in east Asia and southeast Asia in the era of the Tang dynasty from 600 to 900.”

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Figuring out how the world works, the problem solving - these are skills that everyone has, by Nature. Everybody is born with the ability to think, with the ability to figure out the world around them. What you want to do in the school's environment is provide something in the environment that will give that inborn skill a lot more use and practice in a natural way, without intervention. Not by teaching people how to think. Not by setting up courses in logical thinking. But by creating something in the environment that will naturally enhance the ability of children to think and solve problems.

Over the years, we came to realize what that “something” is. It’s the concept of the role model in its broadest sense in the school – a passive example provided by other people in the school for the child to observe with respect to how they behave and how they think. Perhaps the most important way children and adults perfect their thinking skills is by watching and figuring out how other people think. We saw in an earlier talk, about conversation, that the desire to watch how other people figure out the world is at the root of why children want to communicate all the time, because the essence of that communication is to find out how other people think.

The greater the range of role models available in the school and accessible to children, the more useful the environment, the more helpful it will be to enhancing a child’s ability to solve problems.

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Role models can be positive or negative. Negative role models are just as important as positive ones. This became really clear to us years ago when our oldest son reached his teenage years. One day, out of the blue, he said, Those two years that I spent as a kid, when I was about seven or eight years old, in the smoking room back in ‘68 and ‘69, were the best years ever for me.” At the time, in ‘68 and ‘69, when we saw our seven year old hanging out in the smoking room with all the beatniks, we wondered. Our son said something very simple: This period was wonderful. It taught me what I wanted to emulate, because these people were phenomenal musicians. They had lots of imagination. They were fun. They were interesting. And it taught me what I didn’t want to do. I saw how drugs, for example, wrecked them, and drugs just never interested me after that.” Now, other children might reach other conclusions, but the point I’m making is that the negative role model that these kids see is of crucial importance to their development. Kids can look at an adult and say, “I don’t want to be like that person. I don’t want to be irritable. I don't want to be narrow-minded. I don't want to have this or that trait, or behave in this or that manner.” Kids don’t have a chance to think that way if they aren’t exposed to wide range age mixing.

There is nothing wrong once you understand, that a child who feels really empowered, a child who feels really in control of his/her own destiny, is not slavishly following the role model. They’re studying the role model. The more role models there are for them to study intensely in their environment, the more options they open for themselves in later life. As long as you have trust and confidence that your child is developing their own inner voice, you don’t have to worry about how much they copy someone else at some stage of their development.

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We all know how much people are inundated with information from TV and from movies, but age mixing is a much more important source of information. Children, in the course of the days and weeks and months that they interact with each other and talk to each other and exchange ideas with each other, over this broad and narrow age range, talk about just about everything. They hear about everything. The likelihood of their coming across something that really excites them is very, very high.