THE SACRED TRUST

The choice between traditional and child-friendly education equates a choice between bathing children’s organs with frequent doses of either the poison cortisol or the elixir oxytocin. Science and the heart concur about the urgent need for a re-education campaign–not for children, but for the adults who care about them.

“Heart Wings: An Account of Children Learning Through Heart-Centered Education” – Vicki Johnston

Children are feeling beings! Emotive connectors energize their heart/brain intelligence. They are naturally exploratory, curious, eager to learn, and love challenges. When did our civilization forget our most natural intelligence-enhancing relationships with them? When did distrust replace the Sacred Trust?

NATURE’S LEARNING LAB

Nature is a brilliant teacher of teachers. Her learning lab is evocative, sensorially enriched, and challenging to feeling beings. She invites them to explore open spaces through vigorous whole body exercise. The Mother embraces them in verdant spaces for cultivating the imagination. She stimulates the senses and brain with her scents, sounds and living geometries. Nature harbors all manner of interesting life forms for scientific investigation and tender protection. People of renowned genius often recall the power of her ministrations.

SOCIETAL AMNESIA

When civilization isolated itself from nature in cities, it shunted aside the nurturance and evocative power of the feminine aspect. Societal amnesia has hidden our powerful inborn ability to stimulate a child’s whole brain/body response to our own interesting labors and talents. We have replaced these powerful natural motivators with dull curricula imposed through judgement, pressure, coercion and tests in rule-bound institutions. Subjective grades and reports further partition the elders from the souls of their children. Proliferating labels, specialists and drugs promote institutional compliance. Yet, the unnatural traces of rule and minutia-bound intellects pale in contrast to the accomplishments of  heart/brain intelligence. The welcome return of the Mother restores the communal embrace and multihued brilliance.

IGNITING THE SPARK

Like Nature, the Community harbors brilliant, evocative teachers. Children love the work of grown ups. We, the elders, become magnets for optimal growth and development, when we share our curiosity, our sense of wonder and our talents. Our high interest, focused intent and sense of purpose evoke enthusiasm from feeling beings. Children want to enter this industrious, creative, innovative realm. When we retrieve atrophied roles as models and mentors, we discover our power to attract, encourage, stimulate and inspire. Who needs subjective scores when, in intimate camaraderie, we and our children share joy in exploration, discovery, self-challenges, self-expression and learning. Who cares about artificially derived measurements and tests when we share the warmth of the heart’s ignited spark?

HEART MEASURES

The Heart is the only valid instrument of measurement for success. Its powerful electromagnetic field taps multidimensional resonances inaccessible to the closed loops of mere intellect. Academics, far from an end in themselves, ride on the expansive currents of heart to heart relationships. The virtues of the heart include APPRECIATION for the potentials of natural childhood development; COMPASSION for stumbling attempts at mastery; HUMILITY as we forgo the role of autocratic teacher for  that of fellow adventurers; FORGIVENESS for our mistakes arising from distrust in natural processes; UNDERSTANDING of the interior, dynamic processes that compel children and ourselves toward high potentials; VALOR that spurs us to the self-discipline to renew long-forgotten sacred contracts.

When the multidimensional resonances of the open Heart evoke a response from the pulse of companion hearts, ethical genius is birthed.