On Tending

Tend (v):

1. to attend to by work 

or services, care, etc: 

to tend a fire.

2. to look after; watch over and care for; 

minister to or wait on with service: 

to tend the sick.

3. to lead or be directed 

in a particularly direction

4. to be disposed or inclined in action, 

operation, or effect to do something: 

The particles tend to unite.

Having worked with young people on and off for the better part of my life, there is one verb I feel best describes the work of a caregiver, parent, or teacher: to tend.

It is a gentle but profound word.

We tend fires, we tend the sick and dying, we tend our gardens.

And we tend our children.

The fire. The dying. The garden. The child.

All these are potent signs of a Reality that requires tenderness, watchfulness, oxygen - a delicate blend of vigilance and space.

I have seen children who are carefully tended - who are trained and pruned with the greatest love and kindness. These children have a gentleness of spirit fostered by a deep sense of security and protection.

Of course, all parents lose their tempers sometimes. And all children test boundaries. We are learning as we go - and making plenty of mistakes along the way. Fortunately, children are supremely forgiving of mistakes made in a spirit of service and nurturance. And almost all wounds can be healed - as long as children know they walk on solid ground.

This ground is the love, respect and trust they have for their parents, caregivers, and teachers.

I feel the best way to establish this sense of security and confidence is for a child to know he or she is being tended. This includes, but is not limited to, being attentive to a child's needs. Being firm and sometimes unyielding, but also caring and receptive.

Beyond this, tending is a posture or stance we must adopt in every aspect of our lives - not only teaching and child-rearing, but self-reflection and mindfulness. It is an attitude of leadership, directed toward unity and integration. And it begins with ourselves.

We must learn to nurture and nourish both the fire of our spirit and the sick and dying elements of our bodies and souls. These wounded or dead parts of ourselves are not to be feared and shunned, but welcomed and healed. Or honoured and let go.

We must tend our interior garden with constancy and affection. For this is the only garden we can enter without fear of being cast out.

And once we are assured the ground will not give way - that we too walk on the bedrock of our soul's own love, respect, and trust - we will glimpse something hidden in the tall grasses and shy, blooming things.

A child.

This is the child we have so long neglected. The one who can bear too much. We must signal our friendship from a distance. Then, approach.

A Dark Privilege

A few weeks ago, I submitted an essay to America Public Media's On Being blog. It was published yesterday. It contains some personal reminiscences of handling the files of roughly 200 Baha'i who were executed for their beliefs following the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

You can read the full essay and watch a related video here:

A DARK PRIVILEGE: BEARING WITNESS TO VICTIMS AND PRISONERS OF CONSCIENCE IN IRAN

5 Years Too Many

This month marks the 5th anniversary of the imprisonment of 7 Baha'i leaders in Iran, for no crime other than their belief in a faith deemed "heretical" by the Shiite clerics. This is a faith that teachers the oneness of God, the oneness of religion, universal education, the equality of men and women, and the unity of humankind. You can learn more about the persecution of the Iranian Baha'is here: http://www.bic.org/fiveyears/

In addition to the 7 imprisoned leaders, the Iranian government has also arrested and imprisoned numerous Baha'i professors, educational leaders, and students in a systematic attempt to bar Baha'is from access to higher education. In response, the Baha'is established a correspondence course which over time became one of the world's most successful underground online institutions - the Baha'i Institute of Higher Education - which is now supported by professors from around the world. Yet another example of how suffering burnishes the human spirit into action for the common good.

Daily Byte: "The Benefits of Character Education"

"Character education is not old-fashioned, and it's not about bringing religion in to the classroom. Character education teaches children how to make wise decisions and act on them. Character is the "X factor" that experts in parenting and education have deemed integral to success, both in school and in life."

 - Jessica Lahey

Read Jessica Lahey's article in The Atlantic for an insightful and balanced argument in favour of character education in schools:

THE BENEFITS OF CHARACTER EDUCATION

Lahey argues that character education and religious education are not synonymous. Instead, teaching character is something that is compatible with secular curricula. Moreover, how else can children truly be taught anything without the character traits of empathy, focus, self-discipline, and curiosity that are the foundation of any academic program?

Daily Byte: Frontiers of Learning

Let's not talk religion, but spirit. Let's not talk dogma, but soul.

FRONTIERS OF LEARNING

The young people in this film address the great spiritual deficit found in so much of education (and society) today, and through new processes of facilitated learning, are reaching a deeper understanding about the meaning of human existence and community service. Even if you take away the religious component, the teaching methodologies are valid in almost any context: dialogue, accompaniment, mentorship, service, family involvement.

We need a new philosophy, not continental or analytic, but perennial. A renewal of the perennial philosophy that teaches young people about the unity of truth underlying culture and context.

If anything, we need to start speaking to young people about more than just academics, careers, computers, and sex. We need to start a conversation about the loneliness, confusion, and anxiety facing so many teens and adults. And we need to do it in a context of love and mutual respect. No prejudgment or proselytizing. But more than just "assembly-line" education.

Reflections: Wisdom and Service

"One who has merely heard of fire has ajnana (ignorance). One who has seen fire has jnana (wisdom). But one who has actually built a fire and cooked on it has vijnana (practical spiritual insight)."

~ Ramakrishna

I've always felt pretty comfortable in academic settings. Schools and universities are places where ideas get discussed, deconstructed, and hopefully rebuilt. But the phrase "ivory tower" is used for a reason. There is a divide between theory and practice that most schools have trouble crossing. No wonder many students emerge with their diploma into the "real world" with little preparation, dumped unceremoniously out of the glittering tower into the muddy streets below.

Those who are able to survive the dethroning, who can dust themselves off like Adam and Eve and walk bravely into a world of fragility and confusion, these students will be initiated into a new and more powerful magic: the combined power of independent thought and creative action.

Building and then crossing the bridge between thought and action is a theme tackled in Hermann Hesse's book The Glass Bead Game. His words hammer home the realness of the world, as well as the need for thinking people to be a part of - not apart from - it. After all, "abstractions are fine, but I think people also have to breathe air and eat bread." At the same time, learning (wisdom) imbues action with meaning and spirit, so life becomes more than mere survival. It becomes service.

There is a saying that the longest journey is from head to heart, but I think a parallel journey leads from idea to actuality. The mind is a place of ideas and ideals. Yet both can become idols if they are not broken on the sharp edge of the heart. Because the heart of man is not a smooth, untroubled paradise. It is a jagged wilderness that is the only door to the "real world" we can ever know. For it is not the brain or the senses that grasps reality. It is the heart.

Once a person becomes aware of this interior doorway and takes the trouble to pry it open even a crack, it does not matter whether they remain perched in their ivory tower, or trawl the back-alleys of slums. Because Life will find them. And once Life enters through the heart's rusty door, a bridge appears. It may take a lifetime to cross it, but the wilderness will no longer be completely pathless.

You will find that all the thought and work and theory crafted in school will have formed a very narrow, very treacherous bit of trampled ground. It's not much, I know. Believe me, I've stared at my own meagre beginnings of a path and wondered if all the years of learning and thinking was worth it. Not to mention spending! Over $100,000 and all I get is a few muddy footprints in the forest?

But the farther I've gone, past my first wobbly steps into a terrain where the only guideposts are Trust and Faith and a bit of Chutzpah, I've found a strange truth. It takes years of education to beat down a few feet of bracken, but Life has a wonderful way of clearing whole empires for us - IF we only learn to read the signs we've secretly been scratching to ourselves during all those years of study.

Because no one - no teacher, mentor, parent, or friend - can give you a better start than the one you've given yourself, despite (and because of) any failures, mistakes, or misdirections. This is the only difference between people who've heard of fire, people who've seen it, and people who've learned to make it for themselves. The latter are those who see in their own beginnings the bridge between thought and action. They have broken themselves on the raw edges of their heart, and found that these ruins are really runes - an ancient language of wisdom and service that the world is waiting to hear.

Reflections: Love and Education

"Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."

~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

My mother used to tell me stories of her time as a teacher in Australia. Once, at a teachers' conference, in a room full of white Australians, a single Aboriginal woman stood up. She had been listening to the day-long discussions about how to teach indigenous children. She faced the audience and said, very simply: 

"If you don't love us, you can't teach us."

This, in essence, is what is missing from so much education today. We don't discuss love because it seems out of place in academic settings. The pressures of economics, immigration, and international competition are examined in great detail, but matters of human connection, respect, and affection are not. And in the climate of fear and legalism brought on by sexual abuse scandals, we are in danger of losing sight of this basic truth:

If you do not love, you cannot teach.

Educating Prometheus

Over the Christmas holidays, I read a remarkable book by Thomas Merton, The New Man. In it, he revisits the myth of Prometheus, who, in Greek mythology, was accused of stealing fire from the gods.

Merton challenges the foundations of this myth, and the metaphors at its heart. The fire, he claims, is no ordinary kindling. It is man's

"uncommunicable reality, his own spirit. It is the affirmation and vindication of his own being. Yet this being is a gift of God, and it does not have to be stolen. It can only be had by a free gift - the very hope of gaining it by theft is pure illusion."

For me, this idea of the gift of fire has strong parallels to education and independent thought. Like the spirit of man, education cannot be stolen or bought second-hand. One of the hallmarks of this era of mass knowledge creation and dissemination, which began with Gutenberg's printing press, is the principle that we should all "see with our own eyes and not through the eyes of others."

Yet, while there is now a surfeit of information, there remains a deeply unequal distribution of schools, technology, and human resources to make this ideal a reality for all. This means that in many parts of the world, people are not actively engaged in the quest for truth.

Even more concerning, the data deluge means that even those of us with the skills and resources to be discerning rely on the voices of media, clergy, politicians, and other thought leaders to make up our minds for us.

Unlike Prometheus, who at least had the courage to steal his spirit back from the "powers that be", many of us are too comfortable trusting the tending of our spirit to the gods of finance, industry, and government.

For example, we have just witnessed a devastating global financial crisis that led so-called developed countries to question the era of no-limit credit and a hands-off approach to regulation.

And yet, when I graduated from university in 2011, the majority of well-paid jobs on offer were in the fields of finance, economics, and marketing.

So despite shoddy ethics and poor oversight, we continue to funnel our graduates into the same industries which helped trigger this mess in the first place.

The purpose of education, at least according to policymakers, swings back and forth between educating for citizenship and educating for productivity. Sometimes these goals are combined, but at the moment, there seems to be a clear preference for students as economic units:

In a 2012 article in The Guardian, Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, emphasised that the future of higher education includes "heightened international economic competition," the need to create "efficiencies and reforms" in models of teaching and learning, greater involvement of the for-profit sector, and a policy focus on "higher productivity, better consumer protection and increased evidence of learning outcomes."

The push for economic advantage starts at the top. In his 2012 State of the Union Address US President Obama highlighted the importance of the STEM fields, or Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths:

"Think about the America within our reach: A country that leads the world in educating its people. An America that attracts a new generation of high-tech manufacturing and high-paying jobs...I also hear from many business leaders who want to hire in the United States but can't find workers with the right skills. Growing industries in science and technology have twice as many openings as we have workers who can do the job. Think about that - openings at a time when millions of Americans are looking for work. That's inexcusable. And we know how to fix it."

Yes, we know how to fix it: by designing curricula that focus on shoehorning students into the marketplace when they graduate. By creating students that can compete globally, and standardised tests that track how they are measuring up. By valuing teachers according to their statistics - number of students graduated, number of passing grades - and continuing to perfect our assembly-line education system which churns our functioning if not original thinkers.

As someone who graduated at the peak of the financial crisis - and has subsequently felt the pinch of finding paid employment - I am not in the least belittling the importance of work as a cornerstone of education.

At the same time, there is the old saying that "work is worship," and here is where this essay comes full circle. Because if work is intended to be worship, then educating good workers or good citizens is not enough.

It is not enough because citizenship and economics do not provide students with the tools to "see with their own eyes" - which includes seeing through many of the arguments offered by politicians and economists as truth.

For without the ability to see with their own eyes, the next generation will become increasingly vulnerable to misinformation - leading to distortions ranging from poor body image and cyber bullying, to racial stereotypes and religious fanaticism.

Human life is a gift, and whether it is magazines Photoshopping women into impossible ideals, or extremists detonating themselves on buses, educating the spirit that is the flame of human life is the only real pathway toward social, political, and economic progress.

Because being educated as a mere citizen or economic unit leaves unkindled the fire that each of us must claim for ourselves.