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IT IS NECESSARY TO EDUCATE CHILDREN BY GOOD EXAMPLES AND NOT BY PUNISHMENTS

 

To spank, to scold or punish, is not a logical way of educating and rehabilitating children. How can we, in fact, raise these little beings mistreating them and refusing them the continuous delicacy that a truthful education represents?

Children should never consider their parents as a continuous or permanent police that only brings out their defects and mistreat them. This by itself brings about hatred feelings, vengeance thoughts, hypocrisy and deceit, besides inferiority complex or self-pity and an antisocial attitude.

A child that received a whipping is not the same he was before the whipping. Children know well of their limited possibilities and know that they are victims of forces that are superior to them if abused by them, with fault or with reason. In their spirit, nonetheless, the difference between what is just and false do not exist, because it has not been taught in a thorough manner and its degree of consciousness and its power of judging are not yet sufficiently developed. In their very inner self they fill and believe that they have being abused because of their inferiority status.

Psychologically speaking, a mistreated child feels persecuted and cornered, impotent and condemned. It is, rather, a bad beginning for the great enterprise that is life itself. As a matter of fact they are hurt mainly mentally and morally than physically, and psychologically are confused and maladjusted. Why abuse of this little world when it is easier to educate them?

It is not enough to tell them what to do or not to do. It is important to guide them morally and mentally making them realize why it is right to behave in some way and why it is false and bad to do certain things. It is important to assist them physically and mentally, so they realize at all moments which is the good way to follow in life, and how they should think and feel.

Children easily let their heads be filled with all sorts of fantastic tales and conventions and allow their upbringing, at young age, in order to be regimented, as was the case of the Ballilas, the Nazi youths and the communist army of children. Children accept any type of formation, as animals, effectively, but should not be treated as domestic animals or curious creatures. They are not pupils, nor slaves, whatever their racial trait, education or social environment, because we mold them to our own image. They are victims of a false educational system and need a truthful rehabilitation.

Children should not be brought up with a primary idea of reward or punishment. A good behavior, a good thought or a noble act should not be rewarded, because the reward is inherent in them. If we reward the students for a conduct, it represents that a good conduct constitute in itself certain kind of sacrifice. In reality, it is an obligation, and there is no place for reward when we fulfill our duties or for being what one must be. However, when we punish, it is because we acted against certain concepts and conventions. Children should know why they must behave in such a way than other, and why it is good to be just and straight. Not any set of punishment can mark a print in the mind of the child, rather, brings up terrible disillusionments, repulse, fear, and the desire to run away from responsibilities, without taking in consideration the ideas of revenge and attitudes of violence or the tendency for injustice and war.

Grownups must have their own problems, their way and customs very well rooted. Nevertheless, this is not a reason to impose them on children. It would be cruel to force children into living as adults. Hence more, their world is brand new, free of conventions and social prejudices or doctrinal complexities.

We must realize that children of young age, from two to five years old are truly recently arrivals to the world, and their world is that of adaptation. Even at age four they are subject to disorientation, because the world is not exactly as they would want it to be, above all when they are lacking a good doses of love and continuous understanding. At this age they already ask questions of importance; they need to find themselves. Their internal voice is conscious, rather active, but their mind is undoubtedly somehow shortsighted. They reach and search to understand and feel a part of the great mechanism of life. If they fail to guide themselves, their parents or instructors are to be blamed. They are not responsible if they were not adequately guided and disciplined.

Around five to six years old, children have evolved enough in order to realize that life is not only playful, but also a responsibility. It is a responsibility if they fault to respect others or if they fail making bad use of their freedom of action and their right of living. The feeling and thought of the child are pronounced in a way as to establish a balance and the child understand that he “must” conduce himself and ascertain a respectable aspect to his personality. He knows he has his own responsibility, even though the adults that surround him do not.

It is at this age that children have supposed to have received a certain sets of orientations and intimate feelings. His consciousness is set, thus to say, it is already determined and formed, in a way of representing a truthful person of character. Due to this there is no reason to establish a system of reward or punishment on them, inasmuch as it is already harmful among adults, taking in account the lack of good education that they have received.

The complex of culpability is deeply disturbing, because in youngsters feelings have profound roots; nonetheless, very fragile and uncertain. To threaten or scold this tender creatures has the effect of inducing them great doubts about protection, Love and due understanding that they expect from their parents and elders. If some loose trust or give cause to distrust, it becomes very difficult to handle these children and it also becomes harder to get them back in their psycho-emotional system because they consider themselves as victims of the abuse of force and feel weak and impotent in such difficult circumstances. For that reason some children are so undisciplined (dissolute) even though they seem to have forgotten the threat and the corporal punishments. They become in time gross (indiscreet) and hide the intention of expressing their feelings, taking revenge on someone or showing themselves that they are not so weak and impotent as their interior struggle tends to demonstrate.

Such children are, for certain, victims of their environment. They grow up with a rebellious character just to demonstrate that they too have the right to be strong and dictatorial. They look to incarnate in themselves, by transposition, the right to defend self of what they suffer and if they are further subjected the greater their reaction is. Their rebelliousness can, as a matter of fact, turn more than a simple sublimation or an attitude of reaction, because sometimes the injustice and cruelty can destroy in them all moral concept and sense of justice, fashioning their consciousness in a dangerous form of paralysis. Then their neuro-endocrine system is deeply affected and can become whimsical psychosomatics, followed by all sorts of physical calamities and an easy disposition for terrible illnesses.

This state of rebelliousness of childhood usually disappears when they grow up. Nonetheless, it invariably leaves marks in human personality. Worries and new life interest created by the different positions of the social human mechanism provoke, naturally, new mental conditions as well as new life perspectives and possibilities entirely new of confronting life.

Rebellious children of today become delinquent adolescents and the socially inadaptable of tomorrow. Later on in life you will find them among dwellers of jails, hospitals or pupils of mentally alienated asylums.

Nevertheless, it is absurd to hope that children be docile, peaceful, just and healthy, when they see their elders behaving with hate, brutality, roguishness or injustice or giving themselves to vices and violence. Children may, certainly, resist the shock of civilization, but this does not mean that they are ideals children or that they find pleasure in being children being as they are, victims of their environment that surrounds them and of their elders, unable to insure them peace, friendship, Love and understanding. Effectively, when these children grow up, they could even be intelligent, but will be voided of an original thought or of an expression of themselves, and their interior disenchantment untold and its affliction will be reflected in their limitations and mental atrophy as well as their special behavior and their state of feeble and disappointed health.

Our solution to all these problems of children can be summarized as an Integral Education. If children were subjected daily to sessions of analysis of conscience, of auto-realization and auto-capacitation, such problems would never flourish because there would not be elements for them to develop. Once all doubts are dissipated, all fears eliminated, all bad feelings removed, children will not have any reason for confusions or motives for mistrust.

Injustice, violence, cruelty and a brutal domination do not solve problems, ever, they don’t show to be nobly inspired and can never be good advisors.

Pr. OM Lind Schernrezig


Pr. OM Lind Schernrezig