911 and 77 (21)
One of the daily routines in the infants class I attended every day, Monday to Friday, every week except for recovery-time holidays, was the moment when the teacher would say something along the lines of "Make your way to the toy cupboard." It doesn't matter what her actual words were, they were always drowned out anyway by the childrens noise, the moment she began the sentence the class scraped and banged the wooden chairs as they all jumped up and made a mad dash for the toy cupboard.
The cupboard housed in it's lower compartment a range of toys. I don't think I ever played with any of them. It wasn't that I didn't want to, I did, but it was always a competitive race and rush and those who were at the head of the mob that gathered around the cupboard got first pick, always. They, naturally, chose the most desirable toys, interesting looking wooden toys with moving parts. I cannot recall any memory of playing with one at any time, no, what I was left to choose from, always, was plastercine.
It never occured to me to rush madly to be among the first and, in any case, my starting position did not give me the necessary advantage - in a fair race I could probably have beaten any one of these
creeps infants but those sitting closer to the cupboard than I was were bound to get their more quickly.
You might think that the teacher might have chosen a fairer method of handing out the toys but she never did. It's a great shame when those who supervise children do not bother, or cannot see, that this is a real opportunity to teach something important. Other Europeans, the french especially, it always seems to me, have in their culture a little extra something that the british distinctly lack.
There are old people's home where elderly infants school teachers lie, infirm, in beds and are cared or sometimes just 'cared' for and sometimes you see in the 'news' about some scandal in one or other of them, and you hear about incidents where food and drinks are left for the 'patient' at the end of the bed where the patient can see it but is not able enough to reach for it or to even ask for help. Hmmm. 'What goes round...' and 'payback time' are a couple of evil thoughts that momentarily cross my mind - but not in any serious way just to be clear.
Seriously, I mean, it is hardly a very life-threatening situation if you don't ever get to play with the best toys but the other little horrors always get to play with them because they are more aggressive and the teacher is, metaphorically, as blind as a bat to the behaviour of the children in her charge.
On the one hand this little memory tells you about the other children - in this respect, at least, pretty much how children are and were, at least in the culture I know best, the UK culture. There was no real consideration for the others but always a selfish grab and rush mentality. I am sure there were others who also held back - it was just a few, always more aggressive anyway, who rushed and grabbed. Then there is the opportunity it gives to observe how often teachers are, rather than how they would speak of themselves to be. She was okay as teachers go; unfortunately she didn't go when she should have gone: about after three to five witnessings of such behaviour and doing NOTHING, nothing to change the winners and losers. I was always a loser. The teacher didn't see or didn't care that some of us lost out simply because we were not behaving in that appalling way.
That's the third thing it illustrates, my reluctance to join in this frenzied behaviour. I never did try it, there again at some time I probably did but right now I can't recall any time, maybe a long while later. If I had chosen to I could have dished out the behaviour they doled out and I suffered from, but I never did, although, over the years I have given it some thought.
This sounds like just kids, right? But think about it. Ever been on the road in your car? Ever taken notice of how people are when they are in their cars? Ever notice the death and destruction that, mostly, is a result of stupid driving? So it is a mentality, an approach to life and to other people that is often the real cause. And when do we learn these attitudes if it isn't when we are just starting out. If toddlers and infants are in the care of people who do not even grasp very simple principles - how to teach simple manners and basic consideration for others - then the stuff that they are teaching all rests upon a foundation which is rotten.
The teacher never said to the group, "Now for a little change why don't we let those children who are at the back have first choice, just to be nice... for a little change." It doesn't take a period in teaching courses to learn this, adults either have it built-in, as right-minded, right-thinking grown-ups, so if they can't see this then they are probably just oblivious to it.
While simple things that we could have been taught from such behaviour, were never taught at all, other, poisonous stuff, was pumped into us. This was a Catholic school and so we had to recite 'answers' like this, "Who made you" "God made me" and so on. I call it poison for a number of reasons, not because there is no god, there is, not because there is no spritual reality, there is, but for good reasons beyond the scope of this article and in any case I have mentioned in other articles already. So the teacher had plenty of time to teach us important and life-relevant stuff, like demonstrating how to be considerate to other people but she like lots of others in charge of children was blind to that and instead stuck to the robot-making poison stuff instead.
Plastercine is what I had during those play sessions and I got into the habit of attempting the same, impossible, task each time. I built two upright poles, so far so good, then a thin tight-rope strung between them, and that too I could do quite well, but the final part, to make a little man and to perch him on the tight-rope, no, I never could manage it.
Now, more than half a century later, I like to think about the astonishing 'wholeness' of everything, for want of a better way of putting it, and this is just one example. I was focussed always on a task which was really impossible or near enough impossible. I tried and tried repeatedly. I got closer and closer to the goal but in the end I realized that I couldn't do it and then I gave up trying.
Also, the man on the tightrope, that was me in some ways too. It has been a balancing act all along, trying to fit into this culture, an agressive and hostile culture, in the UK whilst at the same time trying to live my own life the way I want to live it. In the end I left the UK and, really, that is what it is still all about, this man on a tight-rope balancing as he tries to make his way through life, along this rope. Now I am almost at the other pole. I've never fallen off but it's been close at times. Looking back, especially now that I have seen through the 9/11 and 7/7 scam and realized that so much progress has just been thrown away and what it must now almost certainly be bound to lead to: utter devastation, it makes me sad and with a feeling of disappointment that is quite, at times, profound. In any culture, alongside the usual bunch of high-profile people, for whatever reason or non-reason, there should be the means to seek out the wise and to nurture them, and, even to protect them. I don't thing a culture can survive beyond a certain level of progress unless it does that.
Information and knowledge on their own are not enough. You have to have something like insight too. The first two are fairly easy to progress but the third requires a different way of looking at life which seems to be rare but without it's application devastation seems always to be the ultimate outcome.
In a lot of ways that describes my life. I have tried impossible things which it is actually possible to do but are so difficult that they can't really be done without active and loyal support. That has always been what has been needed to complete many of the ideas I have had, it is not that any of them are not valid but that they are just too difficult, in the total actual circumstances, to be turned into reality.
Even with a very simple thing; not trying to actually DO something but just trying to explain something important, I have always hit a brick wall. Even saying it simply and clearly doesn't do it. It is all about invisible barriers which despite being invisible nonetheless are real barriers. Invisible barriers largely in placce due to an aggressive stance in life, a disregard for others, these barriers are erected out of a kind of blind mindlessness, a kind of automated thinking state.
On the plus side. One day we had some new toys. Yes, I never got to play with any of them. But normally the plastercine that I played with was uniform brown because that is the colour it turns after all the different coloured plastercines are mixed together after multiple reuse. So I actually go to play with some new plastercine that wasn't just all brown! Party time!
By Paul E. Coughlin
SaneThinking.com
29 April 2007
![[Valid RSS]](valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed")
