Question: A teacher, who has always considered teaching as her vocation, loves her work very much, and loves children, writes to you:
“I have been teaching for 20 years. I watched your clip where you say that school destroys the individuality of the child and that wrong things are being taught. I was trained to teach mathematics and I am teaching it. You say: ‘The problem is with teachers.’ Is there no problem with children?”
Answer: The matter, of course, is not in mathematics but in the general attitude of a person to person, a child to a teacher.
It is natural that children have complaints against their elders. They believe that everyone owes them and that they, as children, deserve special attention and treatment. And in fact it is so on one hand. On the other hand, we do not educate children.
Comment: But this teacher educates. She writes that she invests in them.
My Response: She put mathematics into them but not an attitude to people.
That is the problem. And this has nothing to do with mathematics or any other subject. This is the most important subject schools should teach. And it is not there. There are no such subjects in school, such lessons, such exams, nothing. There is discipline.
School does not transform a child into a person. It makes him a physicist, a mathematician, someone who knows how to tighten the screws, and so on.
Question: Is this why such an answer is so essential for her? It is humiliating the teacher in front of the whole class!
Answer: A student does not even feel this, or he feels like a hero, an open, straight forward person. It seems to him that he did absolutely right.
Comment: But she sat with him in the evenings preparing him for the Olympics.
My Response: It does not matter. She did all this because she is a teacher. She still did not bring up a person in him, and that is what she gets in return.
This is not her problem. It is the problem of all education and upbringing. We give children some kind of education, but we do not give upbringing. They leave school—every day after school and generally at the end of school—and they are beasts.
Comment: You said a terrible thing: “They are beasts.” And we are to blame for this?
My Response: Of course. If parents are always busy at work and children are at school or somewhere with each other doing who knows what and how, what do you expect?
Comment: They are mostly on their Smartphones.
My Response: And that is what they get from there.
This will continue until humanity comes to its senses and takes the whole matter into its own hands under the strictest control. Because a person cannot see and hear everything that is given to him. He must be brought up! And upbringing involves a very serious attitude to life. If this does not happen, then we see where everything is going. Even scientists now measure the existence of humanity in decades.
Question: What would you do in her place? Now she is faced with such a question: should she enter the completely silent class? The whole class was silent!
Answer: It is necessary to explain to everyone, to work on her mistakes and mistakes of all teachers, all students, in order to understand where this terrible flaw in education is.
Question: Do you think that teachers, the principal, and the students can sit down and talk about this? Can such a conversation happen?
Answer: I think it can. It depends on the class, of course.
Comment: In high school, for example.
My Response: It can.
Question: So the children are ready to have such a conversation with them?
Answer: If you do not speak, nothing will come of it. Then it will all be in vain. And, of course, it will be a pity for all her tears and efforts. I sympathize with her, I understand her, but she cannot relate to it the way she got used to during those decades of her work.
Question: You mean when she was respected as a teacher? When they would say “Thank you”?
Answer: Yes. She respected herself.
Question: Now a generation has grown up that says terrible things to your face. And we raised it?
Answer: Of course. We did.
Question: So we need to sit down together and talk. What would you say to children if you were a teacher?
Answer: Let’s understand our life, our relationships. Well, okay, we are already old people, but you are the next generation. What should you be like to make life kind, good, safe, reliable, and so on? And what should we do? How can we raise such people?
We need to talk about it, we need to think about it. Because our main goal is to raise a person, not a mathematician, a physicist, or anything else.
Comment: It will not be easy to soften them up.
Answer: No, there is no need to soften them up. They should realize at least somewhat that the world to which everything is heading is inhuman, cruel, and mechanical, a very unpleasant world, unsuitable for existence.
Question: And they will understand this if we talk to them?
Answer: I think so.
Question: Can these children change?
Answer: Yes, but not with one conversation.
Question: So the change will happen through a series of conversations?
Answer: Even if it is several years. What is the difference? We have to push it all the time.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 10/5/20
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