We don’t know what’s real anymore. What’s real? A kid with a different energy is real. We need to fix the program to fit the kid, I mean the kid to fit into the program. We’ve got to respect different kinds of learning. I cannot tell you what, I think about this so much, almost all the parents and even the teachers at the school envy my energy, that I can keep going even when they’re tired. I can travel all weekend and come back and do what I do. They envy me. Can you imagine what that was like when I was a little kid? I was one of those children with just tremendous energy. I get great, I’m so frightened of what might have happened to me if my parents hadn’t paid attention to that.
Things to think about
Is your classroom set up for children with all kinds of energy levels?
Have you had to change your schedule, routine, or philosophy to accommodate a child who needed something different?
Do you see children being medicated when they may just need a change of environment?
How can you educate parents about energy and how that translates to passion and focus as an adult?
Highlights from Playful Wisdom
by Michael Mendizza featuring Bev Bos and Joseph Chilton Pearce
For millions of years the human body adapted to the natural environment. There wasn’t anything else. As the imaginative and creative capacities of Homo sapiens grew, they altered the environment with their tinkering, and the human body and brain mutated to stay in balance with these creations. The greater the tinkering, the more the human body and brain adapted and mirrored the new normal. To catch the enormity of our hubris, remember that nature has been creating us for billions of years. Rather than expanding our potential, Joseph Chilton Pearce has maintained for decades that each new technology diminishes our innate and near-infinite capacity. Technological counterfeits are no substitute for the development of our vast human potential. The issue is the development of capacity, not content.
As many now realize, BPA and other plastic molecules are dead counterfeits of estrogen. When present, these counterfeit molecules displace natural living estrogen, thus disrupting normal and healthy development. The same is true of screen technology. Remember, screens are dead but mimic living systems. Compared to a living face, the same face on a screen is sensory deprivation, containing a distorted fraction of the information and meaning of the living system it mimics. The more we interact with the dead counterfeit, the less attuned, sensitive and empathic we are when relating with a real face. Our nature is nature, not Facebook, Instagram or the World of Warcraft. Ideally the dominant environmental influence that shapes human development during the most formative years, preconception to around age eleven, would be alive—in a word, “nature.” The more the developing child interacts with dead counterfeit screens instead of living systems, the less aware, less sensitive, connected and empathic that child will be to living systems. Less sensitive and less empathic translates into more aggression and violence towards themselves, other children, or girlfriends and wives (domestic violence and rape come to mind), birds, bunnies, fish and trees. And this developmental pattern translates into culture and society. A perception-behavior system that is highly connected and empathic to living systems will respond differently, less selfishly and aggressively than the non-empathic brain-body, and all this is established very early in life. So called first person shooter games do little to open and expand empathy.