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  Learning starts in the womb. Education begins after birth. Education leads forth into knowledge, but learning goes on from the very beginning. The environment is the greatest teacher of the child. Very few of the structures of knowledge that take place in the nine-brain system are the result of adult verbal directives: our teaching of the child will account for no more than about 5 percent. Ninety-five percent of the learning will simply be automatic and spontaneous, beneath the awareness of either the child or our-selves. They will simply become who we are and not who we tell them to be as they become what the world itself teaches them to become. The entire environment teaches the child. We hear of kittens raised in an artificial environment where everything consists of vertical stripes who, when mature and taken out into the ordinary world, will be only able to cognize things of a vertical nature and will stumble right into anything horizontal. We are more flexible, thank God, but a certain similar element can be found in our lives as well. The world environment we are in teaches us and brings us forth into that world. If children feel unconditionally accepted and wanted by their environment-ushered into it-they will open up continually into the higher structures of the brain and embrace their world. If that world is threatening there is a closure, a movement toward a defense of self against a hostile world-which is completely natural. The first great imperative of education or leading forth into knowledge is that the child never be threatened, that they never feel attacked, questioned, or judged by the world but that an open acceptance of the child is be reflected by the world itself. I believe it was Piaget's his great statement that the one hallmark of the early child is an absolute unquestioned acceptance of that which is given them. The world is just there, they never question it. They never question the actions of adults, they simply accept everything as it is unconditionally. This open acceptance of that which is given forms the basis of what Montessori calls the totally absorbent mind. You don't need to teach-cram in from on top-you simply need to provide an environment that openly accepts the child and in return the absorbent mind will take in the world and learn about it. We spoke yesterday of betrayal of intimacy, a term Michael Mendizza uses, and someone mentioned that the greatest betrayal the child feels is when they open up in total acceptance and the parent fails to perceive it, which the child then interprets as rejection. If the child's open acceptance is betrayed there will be a tendency to use all the higher structures of knowledge on behalf of a defense system of maintenance down in the lowest evolutionary structures. So education leading forth into knowledge really leads to our full biological possibilities; we get up into the higher centers rather than staying locked down below. |
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