At lunchtime I was watching them out on the large field that forms their sport and play area. It’s a perfect spring day here, warm and sunny with just a light breeze, and the jumpers and coats of the last few months had been consigned to the cloakroom pegs. The boys were in short sleeved white shirts, and the girls in sleeveless blue dresses. Some were running, some were talking in groups, and others were sitting in the shade of the cherry trees dotted around the perimeter, now heavily bedecked in pink and white blossom.
I’m in awe of these kids. Forget the playboys, the jetsetters and the adrenalin junkies. These children are the ones who know how to live. I remember it surprisingly well. So much energy, and the taking of so much joy from such simple pleasures. I asked myself why we have to grow up and make everything so complicated. Why do we have to start concerning ourselves with things like status, success and acquisition? Why can’t we just live in peace with each other, and have fun in the process?
So then a cloud came over my thoughts. These kids are aged between five and eleven; soon they’ll be entering the crushing jaws of serious schooling, forced to spend ten years of their lives being conditioned to the complications of adult life, made to jump through hoops, and engineered into good citizens of an establishment over which they’ll have little or no control. And many of these beautiful, innocent children will, no doubt, contribute to a statistic that was given to me recently. A local mother of two teenagers told me that around 50% of the pupils at her daughter’s school are on anti-stress medication.
That doesn’t surprise me, and I’m being serious when I ask:
‘Is it worth it?’
2 comments:
I suppose it depends on what you think the purpose of life is? Is it about happiness, or transformation and pain? I'm not saying the two groups are mutually exclusive, but everyone does life in a more stressful society all over the world, except I read that smaller, native cultures, know more happiness than the typical western-euro. culture and they of course have "stress" but they've been given greater tools to work with it. I wish parents as well as the culture at large taught children about the impermanence of life and that loss is part of that, as well as joy. And again, we don't know when our lives may be suddenly over...If these children or adults experience one day of bliss and then it's all over, is it worth it? I think so...
We could discuss this all day, Wendy, but three brief points:
I certainly don't think life should be about designing a society that puts so much pressure on 15-year-olds that they end up filling their bodies with chemicals to help them suffer less from it. I think we've gone way too far down the wrong road.
I don't think the 'western way' and its narrow obsession with wealth and materially-oriented definitions of 'success' makes for happiness. It makes for having more things - including stress and debt.
The question of whether life as a human being really benefits from formal educaction is debatable. If we want education, however, surely it should be enlightening, not grindingly stressful.
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