So i recently posted an article from Michael Mendizza and it got me to thinking. First of all, Michael Mendizza is the coauthor, with Joseph Chilton Pearce, of Magical Parent, Magical Child. Pearce is one of my favorite authors and thinkers on childhood, childrearing and education. The essence of their position is that content and task training is a thing of the past. Our current educational system is based, as John Taylor Gatto explains, on a Prussian military model which was designed to turn out factory workers – not well-formed humans.
Today’s rapid information and cascading technological advances demand an evolution in thinking and therefore in education/learning. Rather than rote memorization of facts that will be outdated three years from now, we must be trained in structural and functional well-formedness as recommended by Riggio, Hanna and others – so that we can update as quickly as the technology and culture around us.
However, the more research i do, the more i realize that the state that Mendizza is referring to as, “flow,” “the zone,” and “play” is never delivered with the complementary instructions on how to access it nor how to develop it into our children. To my mind, the only programs that consistently deliver this type of direct experience and self-aware knowledge of how to access the “flow state” is Joseph Riggio’s Mythoself(R) programs, or offshoot programs delivered by his students.
In this vein, the closest to a step-by-step approach to working with kids are two of my peers, Joseph’s students, Joshua Wayne through his teen tool-kit and Jeffrey Lieken, the Mentor Counselor. Both of their programs are brilliant, both of them are giants of integrity, and both of them offer direction on how to raise children.
That said, what i want is an even earlier application. Pearce and Mendizza are documenting the development of children prior to birth. Stanislav Grof also talks at length about the importance of pre-birth experiences and development. And all of them look to these earliest developmental stages as THE most important developmental years.
Arthur Schopenhauer sums it up like this:
…the experiences and illuminations of childhood and early youth become in later life the types, standards and patterns of all subsequent knowledge and experience, or as it were, the categories according to which all later things are classified—not always consciously, however. And so it is that in our childhood years the foundation is laid of our later view of the world, and there with as well of its superficiality or depth: it will be in later years unfolded and fulfilled, not essentially changed.
Yet what i fail to see is a rigorous, well-explained system which can be shared, taught, learned and modeled from one person to the next. A way that parents can be taught about development and child-rearing that they can apply and develop on their own or in a community.
Obviously, as an advocate of Pearce’s Model Imperative paradigm i think that parent’s first need to be able to model appropriate behaviors and states to their developing child. In addition to this, they need an understanding of what their children need in general and what their child needs in specific. As written in my last post of Mendizza’s article:
The key to improving child development is optimizing the state of the adult. Joseph Chilton Pearce calls this the “model-imperative.” No capacity can unfold without an appropriate model and proper nurturing. The power of the bond can come into our life only through the power of the bonded person.
Which leads me back to the my own need to continue development of the Human Operating System – a codified, unified language of behavioral software that everyone can learn and use. The Human Operating System enables the sharing and trading of behavioral software.
I think that a functional, effective and efficient system needs to be set up. A system that allows and encourages testing and improvement. To do this, the operational and philosophical structure needs to be laid and then applications need to be developed around these. For example, first we need to know that a child loses its ability to naturally lip read languages it wasn’t exposed to after 6-months of age and then we can make sure they’re exposed to multiple languages at an early age.
I guess it’s back to the salt mines for me. BACK, to developing the Human Operating System!
