On Tuesday of this past week I dropped of my youngest five year-old son at preschool, as I typically do Monday through Friday. When we arrive, most commonly his classmates and teachers are just going outside to the gated playground that is in the front of the school. We walk through his classroom to the playground-leading door, and I notice his body language starting to change. He goes from loose and playful, to stiff, reserved, and hidden. The transition from home to school has never been easy for him. Just like his dad, he exhibits a sort of hypersensitivity to physical environments. I hug and kiss him, tell him I love him, and let him know roughly when I will be picking him up.
Now I’m back in my car, and per our ritual, I drive by the front of the school where the playground is, I honk my horn, and my son and his classmates wave as I head to get coffee from a Royal Farms gas station down the street. As soon as I pass the kids as they stand and wave behind the metal fence, a small grief-filled arrow gets flung right into my heart – and a few tears typically come down my face. On this particular Tuesday, as I drove by the playground, my son stood away from all the other children at a far side of the fence – his face frowning, his shoulders slumped – as one hand gripped the metal bars. He looked terribly sad, alone, and rigid. As I passed the school, the grief hit me – a combination of guilt, despair at having to put my son in a preschool at all, and a fear that this daily grind will eventually kill off his little beautiful soul.
I went about my business that day, sitting with a strange sense of that morning visual of my son behind the school fence. Around 4pm I picked him up and we began our trek to piano lessons. It was a beautiful day, the windows were down, and as we drove, my son, just five years old asks me, out of left field: “How did God die, dad?” I should proclaim that we are not praciticing Christians, nor have we taken our sons to a church outside of one Christmas eve service. The question intrigued me immensely, and I told him I didn’t think I could answer it well enough in that moment. He conceeded. A few minutes later, I hear: “Dad, why is love real and why does it matter?” Shit, kid – real softball questions today, eh? I laughed and said, “Oh, buddy – that’s another great question and one I’d love to answer, I don’t know if I can in this moment.” We got a stop light, and I looked in the rearview mirror, and I saw him looking out of the window, contemplating the world. I was filled with a sense of gratitude, love, despair, and hope.
As happens with me sometimes, I allowed the despair to take its course to feel into its origins. Why did I feel a sense of unease at his asking these BIG questions?
A whisper of remembered childhoold past came over me – a knowing of what American culture does to children with big questions. It crushes them, discredits them, distracts them, and silences them. It tells them they are blank slates, know nothing, and must be filled and taught “all the correct answers.” It shrinks the grand divnity and power of a child’s magnificnet essence into a little 2.5’ x 2’ desk, under flourescent lights, in horrifically ugly buildings, for half the days of their life from aged five to eighteen. Public schools, not to the fault of many of the incredible teachers and adminastrators, DO NOT honor the earth-shattering creative imagination of a child. The State wants every single American child to shut up, do what they’re told, stay inside boxes, and never question anyone that is an authoritiy figure. Everything is either right or wrong, no shades of grey, no time to ponder and wonder about new approaches or solutions to the great issues of our time.
If I sound sour to the American public education system, well – shocker, I am. It is of great significance to understand that our current education system was directly built on the foundations of the Prussian Education System. For all intents and purposes, this system was created to fashion children into obedient, uncritically thinking, workers. Period. In one sense, the entire model was a reaction to groups of soldiers beginning to think for themselves and question their superiors’ motives. Therefore, a model of education had to be fashioned that could banish the curious soul within young people.
“Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus school they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wanted.” – Johann Gottlieb Frichte (Philosopher that inspred the Prussian Education Model)
Beautiful, huh? Remind you of all the scrantron forms we had to use for tests? Or flash cards, other memorization techniques – militaristic ordering of school days? The cold, cinderblock walls, and mechanical bells ringing to tell us when to go to the next class. The formulation and subliminal messaging to our American children is clear: you will submit blindly to this country, pledging your allegiance to it every school day, while we manipulate you to believe that you’re actually being “educated.” Conformity to the confines of the system - or the best displayed success within that system, is mostly highly rewarded – these students exhibited to the rest, like a show pony, at “student of the quarter” assemblys. These kids are showered with praise, on a stage, while all the other kids are watching and realizing – if I want to be shown praise for my being in the school, I must conform to the system like that child on stage. If one questions a teacher, they are sent to the principal’s office for punishment. If one challenges any authority in any way, this child is lableled a “behavioral problem.” If a student proposes an alternative answer to something in question – if it exsits outside the available answers, it is outright dismissed, squashed, and quickly forgotten.
“The schools must fashion the person, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will.” – Johann Gottlieb Frichte (Philosopher that inspred the Prussian Education Model)
What does all this rhetoric and soulless formulation teach a child – at his/her core?
You are a nobody unless you conform. You will be dismissed, forgotten, or outright ignored if you do not comply. Your big questions should not be asked, because they are not appropriate. You are small, you are not interesting or capable, or wildly beautiful. Now get in this military-like line, stand against the wall, and walk to your next class.
This all reminds of the film, Midnight Special, by a great American Director, Jeff Nichols. The best short description of what the film is about I found on Rotten Tomatoes: The government and a group of religious extremists pursue a man (Michael Shannon) and his son (Jaeden Lieberher), a young boy who possesses special powers.
The film was released a year before my oldest son was born, yet I remember watching after my son was born in 2017. As I watching, I couldn’t shake the idea that Nichols, a young father, wrote and directed this film as an existential exploration of his fear of exposing his miraculous child to the bereaucratic powers of the State. I felt it in my bones – and it was palpable. Children, by their very nature, are able to live in a way that is more open to the universe. It is almost like all their doorways are fully open, able to live within the material realm around us, and the realm of the imaginal at the same time.
Jungian analyst Donald Kalsched in his seminal book, Trauma and the Soul states: “As Jung demonstrated, the child –as symbol–is the child suspended between two worlds, one material, one spiritual, one inner, one outer; and this dual aspect of the child is part of what. marks him orher as a symbol for that paradoxical unity or whileness that we associate with full aliveness and therefore with the human soul.”
There’s a certain flow state that children are able to reach that is formidably enviable. I see it in my sons all the time – walking into new environments and naturally, like water, finding their way to engage people and objects around them. It is this freedom of exploration and experimentation that is so antithetical of the public eductation system.
Kalsched continues:
“So to enter this “space” of aliveness where the two worlds meet is to enter a spiritual–material matrix where both the soul and the child seem to belong….we might also say –
on the seashores of endless worlds, the soul comes to presence (indwells) through the evolving life of a child at play, free to live with his whole being, all out, with all [his] heart, with all [his{ sould, and with all [his] might.
Both the indwelling soul and the quintessentialy alive child, therefore occupy that potential space between the worlds. It is this correspondence between child and soul that seems to account for the fact that, in dreams, the child can be said to symbolize the soul or to represent a symbolic carrier of that spiritual substance we refer to as the soul.” – Donald Kalsched, Trauma and the Soul.
As I read these words by Kalsched, I cannot help but wonder if many of our adult problems, are in effect, a symptom of this loss of “transitional space” between the worlds. If our childhood is in a way already representative of a sense of wholeness, why do we lose this as we age? Perhaps this is part of the evolution of maturity and becoming an adult – that as our cognitions sharpen – our sense of wonder and connection to both worlds diminishes. Perhaps this is the cosmic tradeoff?
Or, perhaps more insidiously, the external forces of centralized power in the world will do anything to halt the evolution of consciousness from childhood to adulthood –to, as Frichte wished, create numbed out, psychologically predictable, obedient citizens that have no idea how wonderfully powerful they are. The onslaught of projected media forces outwardly to children is more severe than its ever been. These bastards want to get their messages so engrained in our childen, their mirages so hynotically intertwined in their psyches, that children begin to distrust and become disinterested in the wondrous, magical richness of their own life experience. To control the masses, you must persuade the citizenry to become divided against themselves, and then addict them to platforms that can be surveilled. “If we can just get kids to become addicted to these platforms, we can slowly manipulate them to do as we wish as they age.” Digital platforms can be controlled, – trees, woods, and open fields out in nature cannot.
There is a hope, in these external wealthy powers, such as Mark Zuckerberg, that in their sociopathic minds that they convince billions of people not just to hang out on their apps online, but become more interested in their personal digital avatars than their real life relationships. Their gameplan is as clear as day to me: the world’s physical real estate is all but entirely purchased and controlled, but the real estate within the human mind is limitless. These people want billboard space in your mind as well – in our children’s minds. Fuck that noise. Hey psychopath Marky Z, I just permanently deleted my Facebook account – for good. It was really cute seeing all your desparate attempts to keep me. Hugs and kisses!
So, for the sake of our children, for their souls, how do we allow and nuruture their BIG QUESTIONS? I cannot think of another path other than to band together, swaths of parents across the globe, and to teach our children want their schools won’t: philosophy, depth psychology, quantuum physics, metaphysics, consciousness studies, propaganda 101 - etc. Let us raise children who respect but challenge authority – who can see through the bullshit illusory of it all, and who are unwilling to bow silently to soulless education systems and psychologically oppressive and tyrranical media congolemerates and governements.
“If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out… but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays
To all the children suffering silently through their big questions, and to my own sons, keep asking – please for the love of everything holy and golden, NEVER stop asking.
-David B. Godin
Sources:
Donald Kalsched
Henry David Thoreau
Johann Gottlieb Frichte