Reclaiming Childhood

What aspects of childhood need reclaiming?

Richard Eckersley, a Canberra social analyst conducted a survey of 120 eleven year old Sydney school children. His findings are chilling - 'we expected a little economic pessimism, some gloom, but nothing prepared us for the depth of their despair.' We are infecting our kids with our own despair about life and the problems on the planet.

But isn't it important our kids know the world they are to inherit?

Realism is a big thing today. But what is real? We have embarked on a major feeding frenzy for information - the endless collection, digestion and regurgitation of facts and figures. We're virtually drowning in information, and now we're seeking to drown our kids along with us. Why is it that we have come to place so much importance on knowledge, yet value the imparting of wisdom so little? As we continue to burden our young with the ills of a world we have helped to create, why are we surprised that they keep asking is this all there is'?

So what can we do about our kids?

First we need to be truly committed to the magic, the wonder, the sheer preciousness of life and to communicating this to our young. For too long we have failed to take responsibility for the fact that most of our children have been condemned to grow up in the bleakest of spiritual and emotional environments. And yet we wonder why our young do not thrive. How can they when faced with world that places little or no value on childhood?

How can we reverse the current trend?

We must fight for the right of all young kids to reclaim their childhood - to balance the teaching of knowledge with that of wisdom, investing all our children with hope.

How can we invest children with a belief in themselves, with an ability to dream, with the courage to hope?

Einstein understood well what he was saying when he commented that imagination is greater than knowledge'. Why? Because imagination enables us all to project beyond the way things are to the way things might be - to dare to dream, to create a better, more positive future.

We still need to have children understand the realities of life.

I'm suggesting we introduce children more gently to the world in which they must live. Of course they must know that life can be cruel and inhospitable, that parents and siblings are just as capable of betrayal as are complete strangers, that earthly existence may at times seem lonely and alienating. But alongside this we can ensure they know that there is also great hope and the opportunity for rebirth, the reward at the end of the quest, and that there will always be true friends and guides along the way.

You lay great store by mythologies ancient and modern.

Myths have not enjoyed great currency in recent years. The very word is used as a synonym for falsehood. Yet cultural myths served several vital purposes  - they helped explain life. They assisted people's transitions through life's developmental stages. They helped members of a society to find meaning in their social position, economic status and ethical constraints. They enabled human beings to participate in the mysteries of the cosmos and to worship an entity or process deemed worthy of supreme importance. However, cultural myths became fragmented when science and technology produced dependable ways to understand and control nature. And yet the deep need for underlying symbols and metaphors remained; personal existence without myth was unsatisfying and stultifying. As a result myth became personalised albeit on an unconscious level.

You seem to be deeply suspicious of science

Not at all. But we have to recognise that what many of the concepts we cling to as truths may well be disproved in fifty or a hundred years. As Joseph Campbell reminds us- 'Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centres of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion. Nowadays, it seems, this exhilaration is missing from our lives, as many of us try to find a meaningful path through life in a universe rendered secular, stark, and inhuman somehow by the revelations of science.'

Roderick Macleish also puts it well when he observes, 'Our Fortunes and Lives seem Chaotic when they are looked at as facts. There is order and meaning only in the great truths beleived by everybody in that older wiser time of the world when things were less well known but better understood.'