Welcome to the Fall 2022 issue.
The term “natural education” expresses trust in the human being’s inherent ability to learn, evolve, and grow. From infancy onwards, children absorb information from their environments and miraculously learn how to integrate within their culture; they easily learn the basics of an entire language without any conscious “training” on our part. They learn how to physically move, act, and play equally so.
Education, like wellness, is a balancing act. On the one hand, children have an innate capacity to learn. On the other hand, we have the prerogative to “facilitate” learning. Education is about “drawing forth” a child’s unique gifts, just as chiropractic is about “drawing forth” a child’s innate wellness. We don’t try to “instill” anything into the child, but rather recognize that there is an intelligence within him that supersedes our human culture. There is a natural blueprint and sophisticated curriculum already at play that can be trusted.
“Natural education” occurs when we ease-up trying to educate knowledge, morality, or culture into the child, and allow him to patiently observe for himself our knowledge, morality, and culture, trusting that he will learn what is “good” or what needs to change, for the betterment of his generation and world. The child is always observing and imitating all that we are. We know this because children “mirror” us constantly. The child’s educational growth at every level depends on their mirroring of behaviors. We often try to stomp out their reflections of us whenever these reflections trigger our sense of self-deficiency. What children really want is the freedom to pretend to be us, even including what we believe to be our inadequacies—because only then can they learn how to organically evolve beyond us to become their own beautiful, unique, “updated” human selves. Nature has the inherent wisdom to harmoniously adapt each generation to an ever-changing world, when we learn not to leash or suppress it.
Authentic self-love for parents is essential for this process to unfold. We can emulate confidence, responsibility, and knowledge, and we will always inevitably emulate opposing qualities as well: fear, immaturity, and ignorance—that is okay! A child must be free to imitate the whole of us, to become us, so that he or she may evolve beyond us into a newly adapted form of human expression. When children mirror our cries, moods, insecurities, cultural fears, or any behaviors that we dislike, it is simply detrimental to punish them, because this diminishes the child’s entire mirroring intelligence—or wisdom—through our own projection of the idea that “we” are wrong. To prevent this, we should remind ourselves that we are exactly perfect, for the unique life we have been given. Our children believe this. Not because they are naïve, but because it is part of a natural design. Their belief in us safeguards this design, but they need us to trust in it, through self-love. This frees up their innate intelligence so that they may confidently express the self-correcting, self-evolving wisdom of life.
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