Child education

The most imaginative years of life are between the ages of three and fourteen. During those years whatever is creative in a child should be developed and encouraged. Instead of “cramming” for examinations, where questions are to be asked, children should be encouraged to take an hour’s walk, either in the woods, or through a store, or around a city block, then asked to write an essay on what they saw, or what their thoughts were. A creative education should be based upon doing things which cause the children to think and know, rather than to remember and repeat. During school years the main object should be to develop creative expression by stimulating the imagination. That is helpful in awakening that spark of genius which is in everyone, for creative expression compels inner thinking. A small percentage of time should be spent in giving them the essentials for that expression, such as simple mathematics, grammar, spelling and geography. Every other study, such as history or languages, one should get by reading during subsequent years.

It would be better for the new generation if all history study could be withdrawn from the schools. It is all written upon a war basis and the glorification of the desire in pagan man to kill his fellow man. History, as written for schools, is a war to war inventory. Its motive is to promote hero worship of world-killers. The motive upon which history should be written, if its purpose is to en- lighten the human race instead of degrading it, is to teach the lessons of agony that wars have given to man. They should be lessons which demonstrate that war does not pay, as some of our crime lessons demonstrate that crime does not pay.

Drawing, painting, sculpture and music should be a part of every child’s education. Children always love to draw. Desire for drawing and painting develops in early childhood. It should be encouraged in every way. Likewise, the music of the great masters should not only be heard, but analyzed until thoroughly understood in comparison with the split rhythms of sensualism.

The principle of “educating” the senses, instead of unfolding the treasures of the Mind in creative expression, is not only very hurtful to the individual but is hurtful to the effort of keeping the Christian spirit alive, and multiplying it throughout the land. Every accentuation of sensuous thinking lessens the desire for spiritual expression and increases all of the qualities which the human race must eliminate in order to progress towards its goal. To spend valuable years in thus stultifying and smothering that spark of divinity, which must some day be illumined into activity for every man, is a great and tragic pity.

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Children should be taught at a very early age that whatever they do to another they are doing to themselves. That is the very first principle upon which to found their morality and character. If they are made to know that they hurt themselves when they hurt another physically, or by unkind words, and are made to know it as a part of Natural law, that knowledge will become habitual with them. “As the twig is bent so is the tree inclined”. Hitler said: “Give me a generation of children and I will give you another world of men who will be like me”. The habit of thinking in patterns becomes traditional, then automatic. Mankind is more or less a mass of automatons. It thinks in the patterns of world traditions.

You should know, and you should see to it that your children know, the invisible universe even more than the visible universe. You should teach them how the invisible universe controls their every movement, governs their every action, blesses them for every expression of love which they give out of themselves, and hurts them for every hurtful thing they do. If the new generation is given that kind of dynamic knowledge, the whole standard of civilization will quickly rise because man’s actions toward man will change as the patterns of his thinking change.

Many mothers now tell children that God knows everything they do, in the hope that they will be deterred from wrong actions. That is too abstract and too indefinite for the average child, and, therefore, meaningless. Nothing could so permanently hurt a child as to tell him that God will punish him if he does wrong. Children should be taught that they will punish themselves. Parents should talk to their children more dynamically and realistically about God. Teaching them to pray at bedtime can be as harmful as it is good, for many children think of it as a time to ask God for what they want without giving anything in exchange for it. The Santa Claus conception of God is not a good way to think of Him.

A woman once told me of the long list of things her child asked God for, which she herself bought for the child. “Don’t you think it is cute”? she asked of me. “I think it is tragic, not cute”, I replied, “for it teaches the child to expect things to be given to her without effort on her part. It does not convey to her the feeling that she must regive anything for her gifts. She should be taught to be worthy of every gift she receives”.

Our students’ children are brought up with a feeling of familiarity with the God presence. They are not taught to pray at prescribed times but are taught to talk to God at all times when His help is needed to guide them. To talk to God has the connotation of a conference or communion, whereas praying to God has the connotation of asking for some favor. One of our student’s children came running to her crying lustily and seeking the usual comfort which mothers mistakenly give on such an occasion. The little girl had been playing with her sister and a quarrel developed. “Why do you come to me”? her mother asked. “God was there. He knows about it and I do not. Why not talk to God about it”? The child cuddled up in a big chair and was quiet for some time. Then she ran to her mother looking quite happy. “Well–what did God say about it”? the mother asked. “He told me to go and kiss Susie”, the child replied.

That way of telling children to talk with God at all times gives them a friendly feeling of dependence upon God, instead of the feeling of a far-distant God who exists only to grant the favors asked of Him. They should be taught that they are either working with God or against Him. They should be shown by continuous demonstration how God works with them to bring food up from the ground for them to eat. How all the things they like, oranges, nuts, carrots, rice and all things else they need and like, are given to them only because God is working with man, and man with God, to produce them.

They should be informed of the manner in which God works with all of His birds, animals, insects, fishes and reptiles to teach them the way of survival through instinct. They should learn how God protects them through camouflage of their bodies which makes them more difficult to see. They should be taught the wonder of how God guides them in the choice of materials they need for comfort and of their engineering principles for constructing nests, spider webs, dams, ant hills, honeycombs and hundreds of other forms which are repeatedly done in every succeeding generation without being taught by parents. It should be equally demonstrated that these creatures all work with God as He works with them. They work to build their nests, and other things, as God directs them to do, otherwise they would perish. They do not ask God to do it for them, as many people do. They work with Him constantly, as all things in Nature do.

That is the great principle to impress upon children, for too many lives are wasted in wishful thinking instead of earnestly working. Those who ask God in prayer to do things for them without their co-operation are not working with God.

Many people say that God’s gifts are free. That is not true. No gifts of God are free. Whatever God gives to you must be paid for by equal regiving. When you hear people say that God’s gifts are as free as the air you breathe, they should be reminded that it requires an effort to breathe it in, and it must be regiven equally. Not even the life He gives you is free. You must regive it to Him. People often say that those who work for God should receive no payment for their services. Every man on earth continually works for God, whether he is aware of it or not. Every service rendered to any man should be regiven by that man. That is God’s law. He who does not regive is taking. It will avail him nothing.

God will fulfill every desire of every man, insect, bird, animal or any other living thing, if he who asks immediately starts fulfilling that desire by his own action, with full knowledge and belief that God has also started working with him to fulfill that desire in the orderliness prescribed by the creative process, and the time element, which is also prescribed.

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Children should know that they have free will to do anything they choose to do by working with God or against Him, but that when they work with Him they find happiness, and that when they work against Him they make themselves suffer. Give them simple demonstrations of that fact at every opportunity. Show them that when they are watering a little plant and caring for its soil, God is making it grow, and that is the way they are working with God by creating a plant with Him. Then demonstrate that if they stop watering the plant or caring for its soil, the plant will die. That is working against God. Such demonstrations and teachings to children should be endless, and in all walks of life. If there is a great industrial plant in the neighborhood, they should be shown that it grew to its enormous size because someone desired it and started working with God to create it. It had been started by one man who had worked hard in a little place before he could employ thousands of men in a big place. Then show them the little sapling which becomes a mighty oak by working with God.

The present generation very much lacks creative knowledge and desire for creative expression. It lacks demonstrations, such as those indicated in the above paragraph. The trend of modern civilization and its teachings is causing far too many to expect public support as a right, instead of the opposite. Also the glory and love of excelling in work is being lost by far too many who watch clocks with eagerness for closing time instead of regret that they cannot continue to give far more than is expected of them for sheer love of giving.

These are the teachings which will make a better civilization because they will make better men. These are the lessons of Nature, our only teacher, which are of the greatest import for schools to teach. Instead of that our schools think that the teachings of greatest import are the dates of battles, the names of characters in events such as “who killed Julius Caesar” or the location of countries, cities or rivers. Any man may be a great inventor, painter or writer without any such information, but millions of children are bursting with such information who have no creative ability whatsoever, or if they ever have had, it was crushed out of them by brain building instead of Mind-unfolding.