Protecting Children from the School System and Allowing Their Natural Emotional and Spiritual Development

by Maja Zilih

It ’s been more than two decades since Pink Floyd protested: “Hey teachers! Leave them kids alone!” From the album, The Wall, this song describes the school system as “another brick in the wall,” i.e., another trauma that forces children to build walls as a defense from overwhelming feelings of fear, shame and despair. Since then, admittedly, the system has changed, as indicated, by an ever-smaller number of schools that exercise corporal punishment. The general care for children’s emotional and spiritual health in schools worldwide, however, has not yet reached significant dimensions.

The difficulty of defining spirituality lies in the term’s dependence on individual perceptions and beliefs. Since I do not identify fully with any of the existing religions but rather accept some and reject other parts of each, I must clarify what I mean by spirituality— or better yet, how I personally experience it.

During the first year of healing by regression and deep feeling emotional release, four different stages had opened up to me through direct personal experiences, although this process is continuously evolving. The first stage is the feeling of knowing myself, of acceptance and peace with the way I am, and with the life I am living, which I call the feeling of life from within. The second stage is at times experienced in nature, surrounded by trees, the sea or the blue sky—the admiration of that marvellous circle of life—the feeling of life from without. The third stage is when, combining the two, I become attuned to the inner silence and some kind of divinity—by enjoying the moments of supreme awareness that I belong to nature, and furthermore, am protected by it. The final stage is the feeling that all human and other beings around me, all the life within me, and all the unchained-by-time-and-space universe merge into a very luminous phenomenon of continuity, connectedness and therefore infinity.

It is quite common for people who go through primal—or other healing processes that involve exploring one’s depths—to experience spiritual openings. Furthermore, releasing heavy loads of repressed feelings and recovering from traumatic imprints of the past brings a person closer to the natural self. Hence, the more “spiritually open” person is also a more “natural” person. This suggests that children—assuming the absence of major traumas—have a tendency to experience spirituality more easily and spontaneously. Evidence of this can be found in the way children explore every element of nature. They explore with great interest— leaves, rocks, bugs, sand, colours, shapes, weight, the way things feel in the hand, the way they feel in the mouth, and so forth. Children are not just observing, they are feeling the surroundings, they are literally living it.

Moreover, children detect, absorb, and react to energy flows and changes much more intensely than adults do. So, if these extra-sensory experiences are an in-born capacity, when and why does it wear off? More importantly, what can we, as aware adults, do to guard this talent that children have, and help it evolve in a natural way?

One of the essential components is, of course, the loving, non-violent upbringing that fulfills the child’s needs and allows the expression of feelings. Violence of each and every kind will inevitably interfere with the child’s natural cognitive, emotional and spiritual development. But since parents are not the only ones who exert influence upon a child, the approach they will adopt towards a child’s other surroundings, such as school, is also crucial for their present and future life.

At a very young age children are expected to leave their toys and start writing and calculating in order to become serious, competitive and successful as early as possible. An overdose of the element of “rationality”—often met in the devoid-of-feelings education machine—suppresses creativity that would otherwise be expressed through play and free imagination and creates potential for these little people to be “too much in their heads.” A habituation to the ongoing race in the hemisphere of the left-brain is often what makes people, years later, spend hours in therapy, meditation, yoga or chanting, in an effort to re-establish the long lost connection with feelings and to be able to come back into touch with their genuine self.

This exaggerated thinking without reference to other aspects of the self contributes to the development of a pattern of constantly struggling to comprehend everything in a logical way, to “make sense.” This often comes at the expense of the once-possessed “sixth sense”—intuition and connectedness to the universe. “Stop gazing,” stop daydreaming,” “get serious,” “use your brain,” “be reasonable,” and other phrases that many teachers recurrently frustrate children with, produce such tensions that children may start feeling stressed and on alert every time they “wander off.” This infinitely weakens their natural capacity to function on a lower brain-wave level, which adults use in prayers, rituals, meditations and other spiritual behaviour.

The contemporary education system, almost exclusively focused on the brain, hardly ever teaches youth how to stay attuned to their feelings and to cultivate the emotional and
spiritual along with the intellectual. Were the three allowed to develop hand-in-hand, the conflicting relationship between different parts of the self could be avoided or undone, and a child could remain, or even become, an integrated human being.

Regrettably, in our civilized societies, lessons on moral requirements (“necessary” codes of behaviour and other disciplinary burdens) weigh heavily on young shoulders. This false morality seems to be taking precedence over something as vital for the child as learning how to be open and true to his or her own feelings, and from there, to cultivate empathy towards others. The system seems oblivious to the fact that these natural feelings of empathy—which much of the rhetoric of the false morality claims to be centred on— can arise in childhood and continue their genuine, pure form in adulthood only when allowed to grow, not when being imposed.

Therefore, the fact that expanding one’s heart along with the mind receives insufficient attention suggests that our educational system is in need of revision. But until some major changes occur, what are parents to do?

Parents can make the child’s school time less painful. Instead of insisting on good grades, best performance, and letting go of the “dream-realm,” they can remind their child that it is alright to have fantasies, not to be in the “real world” at all times, and not to be too serious, rational, or in control. Parents can enjoy listening and actively participate in stories that the child shares about imaginary friends and all other imagery that may come forth. But most of all, the parents need to be on their child’s side when a teacher complains that he or she is “too lively,” or too disassociated. They can help the child catch up with educational material to reduce the child’s frustration or potential feelings of inferiority in school, but they need to understand that most commonly, it is the schooling system that suffers from a whole range of defects, not their child.

If trusted, and allowed to trust their parents, it will be easier for children to think of all their experiences as normal, as opposed to forcing themselves to resist the inclination towards the non-tangible, fantasy world. This in turn may make them perceive school as less stressful and more fun, and acquire education on more relaxed terms.

Intellectual knowledge alone is not sufficient for a healthy development. Parents have a responsibility to help children maintain and strengthen their link to feelings, to knowing themselves and to the spiritual realm. Many parents who practice non-punitive upbringing do exactly that, and enjoy witnessing the healthy growth of their child. Some schools do as well. Hopefully some day this responsibility will take wider dimensions, and the natural drive to honour the spiritual capacities of children will turn from the exception to the norm. Hopefully the children’s need to gather bricks and build walls will give way to building open, feeling, and healthy relationships with themselves and others.

This article appeared in the Summer 2005 IPA Newsletter.