Learning

Learning rather than educating is the most important aspect for the development of our children! Whereas, we tend to focus only on educating our children and many times force them to participate in studies and other activities that we feel will be good for their development! The better process is to provide our children the opportunities to learn at their own pace and time! Such timely and appropriate learning will be firmly part of our children’s Intellect and Memory and will help them to manage the future with comfort and ease. We do have to make sure that the learning process is a fun process from the child’s point of view!

Best learning is done when the child’s Intellect is calm, peaceful, uncluttered, unburdened and free of stress! Parent’s objective should be to maintain this calm and peaceful situation as long as possible! This is easily achieved, if the Parents maintain their awareness of the present moment and allow the Child to also function and remain in the present moment as much as possible!

It is impossible to force a child to learn. He/she has to be left free to do it as when he/she is willing to do it!

The worldly success of our children has a direct correlation to the number of skills he/she learns as per Scott Adams, the famous Dilbert Comic Strip Cartoonist! Few of the skills identified are Development of a Socially Acceptable Personality, Public Speaking, Human Psychology, Writing, Languages, Sports, Music, Dance, Art, Design, Business, Accounting, Investment, Computer, Technology and others. Parents should provide the opportunity to the child to acquire these skills but not drive or push them to achieve perfection in any of them. Even mediocre skills are adequate as per Scott Adams to achieve impressive worldly success!

Our present education system leaves a lot to be desired. Education is preprogrammed and forced on to the child and is mainly focused on becoming suitable for employment and earning a livelihood.

Education now means passing on knowledge of one’s family, society, nation and the world! We are teaching our children what to think instead of how to think! We are telling them what to know and what we want them to understand as true! Truly, we should focus on the development of their Intellect and resultant wisdom which will follow if we were not to tell them what to know or what is true, but to teach them to get to their own truths! Children are being taught to remember facts and fiction- the fiction each society has built about itself – rather than given the ability to discover their own truths!

Regretfully, the present Education system measures learning by the end of the semester/year exam results and not what the child has learnt every day, every moment while he/she has been at the school. Children with good memory do well in such examinations but they may not be creatively intelligent and their Intellect may be inadequately developed to handle unusual life situations well on their own!

Learning and Education should include  development of many skills, analysing, diagnosing, problem solving, critical thinking etc which are necessary for creative, wholesome and independent development of our children, even though most parents will be threatened by the independence and strength that such learning will build into the child!

Learning and Education also needs to cover the internal world of thoughts, emotions (including love and sex) and actions for balanced understanding, appreciation and celebration of the miracle of life!

Sex, which is an integral part of life is under denial and suppression in most families due to the conditioning we have received from our parents, religions and society. It is very important to have open discussions with our teenage children so that they understand Sex correctly and manage their sexual activities in safety, comfort and in pleasure!

Choice of School and the teachers has to be done with great care that they are willing to support the child in its learning process rather than imposing their methods on the child! Teachers, who are sensitive to each individual child’s needs, contribute massively to the child’s development. Good Teachers are guides and facilitators to help the child develop its skills and abilities as well as showing them the methods to keep abreast with the latest knowledge and technology which are changing rather rapidly these days!

Any changes in behaviour patterns of the child can be a good indication for parents to review the child’s learning environment and make suitable changes so that the child enjoys what he is doing most of the time!

Child’s passion and interest should be the criteria for sustaining any activity in the child’s life. Bear in mind that passions and interest do change with time. Sensitive parents will notice this and quickly expose the child to different activities to ensure that the new activities are a pleasure for the child to indulge in!

There is a lot of learning that we all including children can do from the Nature and our Universe. So, it is very desirable that children are taken to parks regularly, spending some time daily in awareness of our beautiful natural surroundings, go for holidays to the beach side, river banks, hills and mountains, etc! Connection with Nature, which should include familiarity with trees,  plants, flowers, butterflies, birds, insects, animals, stones, hills, mountains, streams, rivers, solar system etc., brings balance to our lives!

Parental and Social programming are generally directed towards avoiding failures! Children are taught to succeed in everything they do and never fail. This is truly unfortunate, as this limits the child to do only what it is good at. The child will not take risks and try out new activities. In fact, there is more learning the child can do from failures than from successes! So, encourage the child to do new activities without driving them to succeed and be the first or best in everything the child does. * 110218

There is really no activity that is so important that every child has to do it! So, even in a family, what suits one child may not suit his/her sibling. Activities have to be matched to every child individually!

Excerpts from the book ‘The Biology of Belief’ by Bruce H. Lipton Ph.D.

• Dr. Rima Laibow, has been quoted in this book on progression of these developmental stages in brain activity (of children).  Between birth and two years of age, the human brain predominantly operates at the lowest EEG (electroencephalograms) frequency, 0.5 to 4 cycles per second(Hz), known as delta waves. Though delta is their predominant wave activity, babies can exhibit periodic short bursts of higher EEG activity. A child begins to spend more time at a higher level of EEG activity characterised as theta (4-8 Hz) between two and six years of age. Hypnotherapists drop their patients’ brain activity into delta and theta because these low frequency brain waves put them into a more suggestible, programmable state. * 030817
• This gives us an important clue as to how children, whose brains are mostly operating at these same frequencies between birth abd six years of age, can download the incredible volume of information they need to thrive in their environment.* 030817
• Young children carefully observe their environment and download the wordly wisdom offered by parents directly into their subconscious memory. As a result, their parents’ behaviour and beliefs become their own.* 030817
• Infants can pick up complex skills solely by observation and don’t have to be actively coached by their parents.* 030817
• The fundamental behaviours, beliefs, and attitudes, we observe in our parents become ‘hard-wired’ as synaptic pathways in our subconscious minds. Once programmed into the subconscious mind, they control our biology for the rest of our lives…unless we can figure out a way to reprogram them.* 030817
• Given the precision of this behaviour-recording system, imagine the consequences of hearing your parents say you are a “stupid child”, you “do not deserve things”, will “never amount to anything’,”never should have been born’, or  are a “sickly, weak person”. When unthinking or uncaring parents pass on those messages to their young children, they are no doubt oblivious to the fact that such comments are downloaded into the subconscious memory as absolute “facts” just as surely as bits and bytes are downloaded to the hard drive of your desktop computer. Once programmed into the subconscious mind, however, these verbal abuses become defined as “truths” that unconsciously shape the behaviour and potential of the child through life.* 030817
• As we get older, we become less susceptible to outside programming with the increasing appearance of higher frequency alpha waves (8-12 Hz). Alpha activity is equated with states of calm consciousness. While most of our senses, such as eyes, ears, and nose, observe the outside world, consciousness resembles a “sense organ” that behaves like a mirror reflecting back the inner workings of the body’s own cellular community; it is an awareness of “self”.* 030817
• At around twelve years of age, the child’s EEG spectrum begins to show sustained periods of even higher frequency defined as beta waves (12-35 Hz). Beta brain states are characterisede as “active or focussed consciousness”, the kind of brain activityin reading this book.* 030817
• Recently, a fifth, higher state of EEG activity has been defined. Referred to as gamma waves (>35 Hz), this EEG frequency range kicks in during states of “peak performance”, such as when pilots are in the process of landing a plane or a professional tennis player is engaged in a rapid-fire volley.* 030817
• By the time children reach adolescence, their subconscious minds are chock-full of information that ranges from the knowledge of how to walk to the “knowledge” they will never amount to anything or the knowledge , fostered by loving parents, that they can do anything they set out to do. The sum of our genetically programmed instincts and the beliefs we learned from our parents collectively form the subconscious mind, which can undo both our ability to keep our arm raised in a chiropractor’s office and our best New Year’s resolutions to stop sabotaging ourselves with drugs or food.* 030817

The best Teachers are those who show you where to look, but don’t tell you what to see-Alexandra K. Trenfor

(Real) Education is not the learning (and memorising) of facts, but the training of the mind (intellect) to think -Albert Einstein

All children are born to learn. If you give them something that appeals to their five senses, they will never say no. But how a child responds to a particular environment is up to it….The biggest challenge for the parents then is to understand that learning for the child cannot be stereotypical and monotonous. – Dr. Atul Abhyankar

Michael Mendizza and Joseph Chilton Pearce’s inspiring book Magical Parent-Magical Child makes it clear that play not programming is the key to optimising the learning and performance of infants and children. Children need parents who can playfully foster the curiosity, creativity, and wonder that accompanies their children into the world. – from the book ‘The Biology of Belief’ of Bruce H. Lipton Ph.D. 160817

We grow and evolve only by responding and not reacting to the present situation. So, the best learning for a child is to learn from it’s parents how to respond and not react to the present situation. Good and complete living is an automatic result of such invaluable learning. – The Totality 010818

Evolved and inspired parents learn along with their child rather than teach the child. This will inspire the child to keep on learning most of the time and keep on learning and growing beautifully even in old age. –The Totality 050818

True Education is when the child learns to accept everything in this Universe as important. A blade of grass is as important as a Pipal Tree, a toilet is just as important as the kitchen, an office boy is just as important as the CEO. – as understood from a post of Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, Isha Foundation 280819

Parents, who make learning fun for the children and allow them to drop those activities that the child is not enjoying after trying it out for a few times, bring up happy and smart kids who develop a craving for learning. Activities, that have been dropped, can be re-introduced later at a more suitable date when the parents feel that there are greater chances of the child wholeheartedly accepting them.- The Totality 131219